Managing your time, creativity, and energy as a Product Manager
I love talking about this because in my early days as a Product Manager, I often found myself trapped in the misery of unbearable calendars . But ever since I changed my approach, I've been able to get more done in less time while also genuinely enjoyed my time!
When I joined Razorpay as a first-time product manager, our head of Product, Khilan Haria , used to take a session almost every quarter or two on Work-life balance. At Razorpay, Khilan's sessions were among the most anticipated and revered, yet this session always felt like a farce. The message from the session was simple— 'Whatever you're doing, can be easily done in less than 30 hours". In one of these sessions, I remember foolishly speaking up, "Are you serious? You know you can just be honest and say that it's hard work and we're supposed to write docs at night or in the weekends as we slog through daily meetings. We don't have to pretend that work-life balance exists." In hindsight, I completely missed the point: managing your time isn't so much about the amount of work we have as it is about prioritization, operating style and our craft as PMs.
By my second PM stint (and several burnouts later), I finally found a way—Adopting Paul Graham's Maker- Manager schedule. As a PM you have 2 types of jobs -
1. Individual Contributor Jobs(IC) Work (Maker Mode):
2. Collaborative Work (Manager):
The Biggest Productivity Buzzkill:
Context switching between the two kinds of jobs is the death of productivity, energy, and creativity! Writing a product doc is not the same as a filing a report - it's a creative endeavor that involves curating ideas, insights and customer problems. You can't meaningfully make progress on a doc in that one hour free slot between back to back meetings. Sure maybe you could jot down that idea that emerged in the cab ride/shower, but seldom will a new idea emerge in that one hour.
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The solution:
Organize your calendar so that you do only one type of job in one half-day (or full day if you have that luxury!). Now, half your day has zero notifications, zero meetings, only focus time, and no distractions.
But how do you meet so many people in the remaining time?
Avoid recurring 1<>1's and taking meetings at random slots; instead, carve out large chunks of 'office hour' slots. Having half a day just to meet people and do other people stuff is so much better than having a bunch of recurring meetings spread across the week eating into your critical work time. And it turns out that candid discussions build stronger relationships than scheduled meetings!
This obviously doesn’t mean that in your 40-hour work week, you can only have 20 meeting hours and 20 IC/focus hours. If you need to do more meetings, you can just have more ‘meeting half days’; works similarly the other way as well.
But how do you exercise so much calendar control?
It comes with a fair bit of practice, but it’s doable!
Well, that’s my secret to enjoying my time as a product manager while I building great products with amazing people! What's interesting is that most professions today demand both creativity and collaboration and this schedule is the perfect answer.
To my fellow creative wizards, I'm curious: how do you approach balancing creativity, energy, and time? I’d love to hear what works for you!