Product management & marketing is a fun and challenging field for many reasons. In my experience, the greatest challenge for many PM&M people (other than understanding your customers, staying ahead of your competitors, and trying to take an occasional vacation day) is time management. There are so many facets to the job, and so many individuals or groups who need "just a little" of your time. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the sheer number of tasks even when the individual tasks are small; and many of the tasks aren't small.
This problem isn't unique to product managers & marketers - the same could probably be said about any "knowledge worker" profession but seems to be especially prevalent for PM&M. I would go so far as to say time management is one of the absolute key success factors for anyone in PM&M - no matter how good you are at other aspects of the job, if you can't master time management, you stand a very real chance of drowning in the demands of the job.
After trying every time management scheme known to mankind (Franklin planners, paper to-do lists, electronic to-do lists, emails organized in folders etc.), three years ago I discovered what has turned out to be a silver bullet for me - a book and methodology called Getting Things Done (subtitle: "The art of stress-free productivity"). Stated briefly, "GTD" defines a simple but remarkably effective way to collect, process, organize, review and do all your work. The process is very practical - doesn't require you to change the fundamentals of how you work, any doesn't take a lot of time to operate.
I'm not the type of person who gushes about the average business book, but GTD isn't average -- I have found it to be nothing short of remarkable for my own productivity and especially in eliminating the "oops I forgot" factor for small but important tasks that might otherwise have been dropped on the floor. I buy a copy of this book for everyone on my PM&M team. Several team members have reported results similar to my own. If you are a PM&M person or a knowledge worker of any kind, I strongly recommend the GTD book and more importantly the discipline / philosophy it defines.
There is also an interesting story behind the book itself and its author, David Allen - see the article in Wired.
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3 comments:
I wholeheartedly agree. GTD is very well suited to the blend of strategic projects (Kiler App 2.0) and ad hoc fires (grumpy customer, last minute speaking gig) that make up the lion's share of a product guy's days.
The key issue that makes this critical for product mgmt/mkting is time leverage. Forgetting something can means am expensive dev team of 30 is idle for two days or a million dollar deal is lost. Conversely, any efficiency gain that a product person can find has a multiplier on it.
You should also consider zrequest.com that will help you when you need others to get things done for you, without all the unnecessary time wasted staying on top of them. It can track all interactions in a central location as well. Priceless tool, and it is free!
I finally picked up a copy of GTD a month or so ago and it is a great system, isn't it? I just installed GTDInbox on my Gmail accounts (www.gtdgmail.com) and it's helping to "train" me beyond the book. Erik's point about how well it works for PM is great, I'd also add it works great for WP - working parents! :)
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