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Treat Your Time as a Product (Template Included)
Change your approach to change your outcomes.
How you spend your time is how you spend your life.
As product managers, it can be so easy to fall into the Time Suck Trap — the endless abyss of external requests that turn into hours on end of Slack messages, putting out fires, being sucked into last minute meetings and asked to add your opinion to conversations happening left and right.
The Time Suck Trap often happens subconsciously, where our need to please most people actually shoots us in the foot. We become more driven by externalities than internalities — we lack an internal locus of control to captain the ship and keep us headed in the right trajectory, even in choppy waters.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
If we treat our time like a product, we can regain our focus and increase our chances of getting the desired outcomes we want vs. only the outputs others are asking for from us.
Product management is a profession that is often ill-bound and involves a hell of lot of grey area, and as such, is a lot more prone than other professions are to us needing to identify our own boundaries. I know — product management is my third career.
