How do you create time?

How do product people find the time to do the work they're hired to do and not only on firefighting and project + stakeholder managing? You can't create time. But there is a way to steal it.

In early to mid stage companies (especially), product managers and product leaders often play the role of the primary product contact, the project manager and the preferred customer contact - but this leaves little to no time to do the work these people are hired to do.

Primary Product Contact

• “When is this feature shipping?”
• “Where is the roadmap and can I show it to my customers and prospects?”
• “I need you to join me on a call to talk about our product”

Project Manager

• Writes stories in Linear / Jira
• Updates status reports
• Creates shipping report
• Firefighting with stakeholders and customers for an estimate that was way off mark

Preferred Customer Contact

• When something goes wrong at a customer, they want to speak to the “head of product”. Typically because they want to blame the person responsible for the problem they just encountered in the product, lobby for a new feature to the person who they believe can grant their request or in many cases, the person who knows the product and the industry extremely deeply.

If you’re spending most of your week doing these types of tasks, you’re not spending it doing what you need to be doing - thinking about what next for your product.

As a product leader or product manager, you should always strive to have your head in the next phase. Not in the weeds of the project or feature that is currently in execution. Your job is to constantly be thinking, refining and testing what problems should we solve next, why, and what will we get if we do solve it.        

If you’re familiar with the Now Next Later roadmap, a good way to think about it is that you should always push to spend most of your time in the Next and Later. If you’re not familiar with this roadmap approach, comment below and I’ll let you in on the most effective secret in product roadmapping.

Ever end the day feeling exhausted from all the things you did, but yet your to do list hasn’t budged? Yeah, you’ve spent the day unblocking other people and reacting to things and getting sucked into Slack every 2 minutes.

There is a difference between doing things and getting things done.        

But I bet you’re solving this in your own way - by working more hours and weekends.

Spend the day going from meeting to meeting, slack message to slack message and then stop for dinner, kids, family and then come back to your desk to do your work? That’s not how it should be and that doesn’t scale. You’ll hit your maximum capacity to work and then you can’t squeeze anymore hours out of your day. And then what?

I had this problem for a large part of my career. I had tried different things and to some degree they worked, but never well enough and it never gave me more time. And then I learned something great from Shreyas - he shared the missing piece to my jigsaw (it’s point #1 below).

The trick lies in understanding three simple realities:

1. All tasks are not created equal
2. If its not on your calendar, its not getting done.
3. You can’t create time, but you can steal it from other things.

All tasks are not created equal

I get it, you’re great at what you do. But the reality is you can’t do it all. Heck, you’re not supposed to do it all. Also, there are others who are hungry to do some of the things you’re trying to do, but they don’t have the opportunity to. So seek the double-win - DELEGATE.

This sometimes sounds like a bad word. As if its equivalent to relinquishing your responsibility to do the thing and passing it off to someone else. That’s true, if you delegate incorrectly. Let me explain.

You have to be extremely selective with what you delegate and what you’re expectations are of the delegated work. It’s how you master this point in particular that will create the time you need AND give the opportunity to other people to take tasks off your plate (and gladly!)

If its not on your calendar, its not getting done.

To do lists suck. It’s a never ending list that in almost all cases makes depressing reading at the end of your day / week. That’s because there’s alot to get done and that conveyor belt of more things to do never ends.

But there’s a masterstroke you can apply to a todo list that solves this and extremely effectively. You need to consistently schedule the things on your to do list. If its not on your calendar, you’re not making time for it and its not getting done.

? FREE 20-minute “How to create time and get things done” Masterclass ?

I’ll be sharing a really powerful and practical approach and supporting tooling to make these tips a reality in a low overhead and highly effective manner - in my upcoming FREE 20-minute “How to create time and get things done” Masterclass where I’ll also go into this topic in greater detail. I’ll show you real examples of how I use this approach to create and steal time to do the work that I need to do.