Productivity: Learning vs Execution
When I started as a PM back in 2014, there were few sources on how to upgrade your product management skills. Today with the explosion in newsletters, courses, articles, webinars, books etc, we have moved from scarcity to abundance.
It is really important to make time for learning and upgrading your skills — In a recent video, Shreyas Doshi mentions that you should ideally keep about 20% of your time for learning and I think sounds about right.
However there is a danger that the endless stream of must reads distracts you from your work and pending deliverables and gives you a false sense of achievement. It’s also a form of procrastination that interrupts your flow. A lot of folks are starting to take note of this.
Note: This does not apply to material that actually helps you tackle an ongoing work task. For e.g if you are setting up a PM hiring process, learning best practices from others is very much part of your work.
What works for me
This used to be an issue for me as well, but I have learned to manage the endless flow of information without sacrificing work productivity or learning. TLDR — accept that these two are separate entities and the time for them needs to be separate as well.
I discover interesting articles through a few different sources. Some of it (newsletters and Substack subscriptions) is sent to my email inbox. Some of it comes from my Feedly feed. Some of it is recommended on Twitter.
As I read the news, check email etc while having my morning coffee, I gather interesting articles/podcasts and save them into a Chrome bookmark folder that I’ve named “Weekend”. Once work is done, I look at the articles in the “Weekend” folder and send some of them to my Kindle via the “Send to Kindle” extension on Chrome. These typically get read as I am winding down before bedtime. The really deep ones that require more focus will get read during the weekend.
Every Sunday, I remove the bookmarks to the articles that I have read — the ones that I really want to keep for later, go into a “Wall of Fame” page on Notion that I use to arrange my favourite articles by category. Articles that have been on my folder for a long time but still not read get deleted as well. This keeps the links in the Weekend Folder to a manageable level. I also find that a lot of the articles were really only saved to avoid FOMO.
This is what works for me, not perfect by any means by definitely an improvement from before. Do let me know you deal with this as well.
