Learnings from Shreyas Doshi's Time Management Seminar
Maximizing Productivity: Advanced Time Management Principles for Product Managers
Shreyas Doshi recently hosted an online seminar on advanced time management principles for product managers (PM) which I found really useful. Here are three tactics that caught my attention and my thoughts on them.
1. Leverage-Neutral-Overhead (LNO) task categorisation framework for perfectionists
How to put "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good" into practice:
Wanting to do a great job at everything will get in the way of being effective at managing your time and energy.
Doshi’s experience as an extremely ambitious perfectionist coping with burnout really resonated with me. He was worried about his quality of work despite getting promoted quickly. As a result, he came up with the LNO framework to feel less stressed out from giving his 100% all the time.
Leverage tasks are those that 10x your impact. These are the types of tasks, once you identify, you should focus on. On the other hand, Neutral tasks are the kind that offer regular impact in exchange for time. Finally, overhead tasks are the type that have very little impact for the time they take.
You have to discern what tasks are high leverage to you. For example, a bug report can be classified as an L, N, or O task depending on the impact and severity of the bug. Most of the time, you can get away with adding a couple of screenshots and a paragraph to reproduce the bug. When it’s a live bug affecting thousands/millions of users, you might want to add some screen recordings and follow up with your developers closely.
LNO framework for perfectionists: Double down on L tasks, be content with doing a good job for N tasks and actively try to do a bad job for O tasks.
My main challenge in using the LNO framework is ensuring that I am spending the right amount of effort for each bucket. As a perfectionist, I want to do my best in all the tasks I do and would treat everything as L tasks. One solution for this could be to reframe my mindset from “I need to do my best in everything I do” to “In order for me to do my best in the things that matter, I need to reduce my effort on tasks that are less important”.
Another problem could be understanding how to bucket the tasks. I might think a task is an L task but it might just be a N task as I’m not familiar with estimating the ROI from that task. One way to get better at this could be to reflect on your estimation at the end of the week to see if the tasks were indeed L, N, or O tasks.
2. Proactive time blocking in your calendar
Proactively scheduling clearly defined LNO tasks in your calendar forces you to work with the limitations of your time.
I have been doing “retrospective” time blocking for a couple of months:
Blocking out time with a general idea on what I want to do (”Work on project X”)
Thinking of what to do during that time
Updating the time block with what I actually did and how much time I took after I’m done (”Wrote objective and metrics in PRD”).
I realised there are two problems with my current approach:
Thinking about what to do during the task itself takes time and is distracting.
I would usually underestimate the time I needed to do that task.
I often exceeded my planned time to complete tasks, leading me to feel less productive than desired.
Plan your work in advance to reduce time spent on thinking about what to do.
Doshi recommends investing some time beforehand to proactively block out your calendar:
Planning beforehand on what to do using LNO framework.
Creating a time block with clear goals of what you want to achieve (”Brainstorm metrics for X”).
Trying your best to work within the time box you’ve set for yourself. If it exceeds, you know that you need to plan for more time for this task in the future.
I will try this for a couple of months and report back on the impact, stay tuned!
3. You don’t always have to eat the frog first thing in the morning
Placebo productivity: Do all the Neutral and Overhead tasks first in order to exhaust all the possible distractions you may have before getting started with your Leverage tasks.
Placebo productivity has been effective for me because it builds momentum by allowing me to complete my less important tasks first, which then propels me to tackle my more difficult tasks. This technique differs from the “Eat the frog” concept of starting with the most challenging tasks. I have struggled with this approach, finding it tough to initiate work on the hardest tasks. Placebo productivity, on the other hand, is complementary to the LNO framework. By spending less time on Neutral and Overhead tasks, you can devote more time to Leverage tasks, which typically require more effort.
In closing
Three actionable insights from Shreyas Doshi:
The LNO task categorization framework helps perfectionists focus on high-impact tasks by doubling down on L tasks, reducing effort on N tasks and doing the bare minimum for O tasks.
Proactive time blocking involves planning ahead using the LNO framework and scheduling defined tasks in your calendar to increase productivity.
Placebo productivity involves tackling less important tasks first to build momentum. It complements the LNO framework by allowing more time for high-impact tasks.
To conclude, these tactics can help product managers build focus and elevate their productivity, ultimately enabling them to produce more insightful and creative work. Let me know if you have any questions!
Bonus nugget: The importance of doing insightful & creative work for PMs
PMs who just do mundane work have a real risk in becoming obsolete in 5-7 years. Good product management is primarily about insight and creativity, and then influence and execution. With AI, everybody will have that same level of insight, including your competitors.
Shreyas is really bullish about AI spring. He thinks it could be bigger than the mobile trend and potentially even bigger than the world wide web boom in the 90s. Generative AI will level the playing field where everyone can get better insights but ultimately the discernment on what is actionable needs to come from you, the human PM.
In order to continuously produce insightful, creative work, one needs to be in a “state of distraction-free concentration that pushes one’s cognitive capabilities to their limit” (aka deep work).
Bonus quote: Jony Ives on focus
Focus is not about saying no to things you were not going to do anyway. Focus is saying no to something that you believe is a phenomenal idea, but you decide not to do it because you want to do something else.