How a Google Product Manager Manages Time

I used to think time management was about doing more. The led to frustrating periods of feeling busy, but with few results. As many people would help me realize, the value of time management is actually about doing more of the right things. I’d now gladly trade hours of work on the wrong things for 30 minutes of progress on the right thing.

Using time effectively also makes your work more satisfying. Working on the right stuff is like Archimedes’ lever. You can move much larger things with less effort.

Below I’ll share the four practices I use to manage my time as Product Manager at Google.

1. Keep a weekly top priorities doc

I keep a running document to write out my 3 to 5 highest priorities for the upcoming week. I revisit this every Monday morning.

Why it’s useful

• The act of physically writing priorities gives your subconscious sense of where you should head this week. Even though I won’t look at my priority doc again for the week, I’m often surprised to find they are either done, or big progress has been made by the end of the week.
• You can send these to your manager and teammates so they know what you are focusing on this week. They’ll see ways to help and appreciate the transparency.
• Revisit this doc when you need to talk about your accomplishments, for example when going up for promotion.

How I do it

• I use a Google Doc called “Chris’ Weekly Priorities”.
• There is a block of time on my calendar first thing Monday morning to do these.
• I update the last week’s items with a status before adding the current week’s items.
• For each project, I ask myself, “If I could only do one thing on this project this week what would it be?” Sometimes two or three things come up, that’s fine.

2. Have one place to organize to-do items by projects

I have a structured to-do list to capture everything that I may want to consider doing for each of my projects.

Why it’s useful

Tasks pop into my head at all times. Dumping all of the todos in your brain out into a list feels relieving. It’s like your brain gets more RAM to focus on the things at hand. Not to mention, you’ll stop forgetting to do things you agreed to do.

How I do it

• I use Todoist because it’s simple to use. It has nice tagging and filtering and it works across every platform.
• Each project I am working on gets its own project in Todoist. I make sure every task gets bucketed into a project so I can easily find them later when scheduling my day in part #4.
• Give items an exact date you plan to work on them when possible. They’ll automatically pop-up when you schedule your day in part #4.
• Remember, you don’t just make items for busy work. Make items for deeper thoughtful work like “Design a sales metric dashboard”.

3. Prioritize every to-do item

Every item on your to-do list needs a priority. This may sound obvious, but deliberately setting priorities is like a compass that keeps you on track from point to point.

Why it’s useful

• Everything you end up doing is a tradeoff. If you do this now what are you not doing instead? By choosing to work on a non-essential thing you are in fact choosing to overlook an essential thing. Priorities put that fact in your face.
• As you schedule your entire day in step #4 it will be clearer which tasks to start with.
• Prioritization reminds you that you have a choice. Although it’s called a “to-do” list I think of it more as a “to-consider” list.

How I do it

I use the Priority flags in Todoist. To me, each flag roughly means the following:

• P1: Important and needs to be done soon.
• P2: Important but not time sensitive.
• P3: Interesting things that I should look at when my P1s & P2s allows.
• No priority: Interesting things to get to one day.

• There are many ways to define these priority flags. I think it’s up to you to use your intuition. I personally like the Eisenhower Matrix.

4. Schedule every part of you day, first thing that day

My first-thing morning ritual is to get my calendar 100% filled for the work day ahead. I slot dedicated time to work on the highest priority items from each project in my to-do list.

Why it matters

• Scheduling your day 100% ahead of time is a relief. You have made a conscious intention what you will do today. You just go with the flow as each item pops up on your calendar. No higher level strategic thought is needed to plan your day as it wears on.
• You will likely have less willpower later in the day to do something harder. If there are blank spots on your calendar it’ll likely just devolve into doing something mindless like email. Setting the intention that I will work on a project I’m dreading from 10:30 am to 11:00 am will get me to at least give it a good shot.
• You need to say no to things. In fact, this whole system forces you to say no to things that aren’t higher priority because your calendar only has so much time.

How I do it

• I first visit each project in Todoist and sort the tasks by priority. The ones I want to take on today get assigned a due date of today. Some may have already been scheduled for today.

• Next, in Todoist I visit a filter called “Today — Work”. This filter is setup to give me a list that only shows the items across all my projects that I decided to do today.
• I open my calendar and start doing Tetris to slot in time to work on the items on my “Today — Work” list. I use 30 minute chunks and sometime 1 hour depending on the task. The title of the calendar item is the to-do item. If a task won’t take 30 minutes you can put multiple in the calendar description.

• I schedule time for email. Avoid doing email outside of the scheduled email time. Email is a monster, it will consume your time and happiness if you let it. If an email takes more than 2 minutes to resolve you can handle it later by making it a to-do item with an appropriate priority. Todoist has an awesome gmail plugin that let you do this easily. Don’t get sidetracked from your goal of filtering your inbox during the email time.
• At the end of the day, I check off all the items I did. If you did not get to something, remove the due date of today from the item so it goes back into the project list for re-prioritization tomorrow. Don’t push it to tomorrow by default.
• A side bonus of this is that you get a great picture of where your time has been going over weeks or months.

To wrap-up, these are my four practices to get a hold on my time.

1. Keep a weekly top priorities doc
2. Have one place to organize to-do items by projects
3. Prioritize every to-do item
4. Schedule every part of you day, first thing that day

What do you do for time management? I’d be curious to hear.

-Chris