On my work calendar, I have the first 30 minutes of each morning blocked off so that I can review the tasks for the day and read any email and listen to voicemails that came in overnight. I do this because I know that it will help me stay focused on what needs my attention most. Unfortunately, this level of organization doesn’t fit well with what my job requires.
Most mornings, I get into the office 20-30 minutes before my scheduled review block. I regularly do the one or more of the following things:
- Get a beverage from the kitchen (usually water or tea)
- Grab some breakfast food (cereal, Pop-Tarts or if I am lucky, a bagel that sometimes magically appears)
- Open up Outlook and start reading my email
And number 3 is where my process gets derailed.
I work at a company where some of our development team is abroad, so inevitably, there are always emails about what they were working on while I was sleeping (or at least trying to sleep). Most of them are just notifications…things like what’s in the latest build, clarifications on bugs or enhancements and the like. But they all need to be reviewed and absorbed. A determination has to be made about what the next action is.
As a Product Manager, I spend a considerable amount of time doing just that…reading email or sitting in a meeting or being on a conference call, figuring out what the next step is. It is both the best and worst part of being a Product Manager. There is a thrill in tackling both the monumental and minutiae.
But it takes time.
A lot of time.
Tags: balance, bug, email, enhancement, meetings, schedule, Time, Time Management
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Tags: balance, bug, email, enhancement, meetings, schedule, Time, Time Management
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