How to Organize Yourself Better

Welcome everyone to another episode of the Product Bakery Podcast. I am here today with Christian. Hey Christian. Hello Alex, hello world. Another day is over as usual. We tend to meet in the evenings when the stress is slowly off our backs. How was your day Christian? Well my day is not over because I have a couple of follow-up meetings, but I'm not complaining. How about you? I would say my day is pretty much over. It was long enough today. It was so lazy. I don't know, I feel like, unfortunately I always have a little bit like this thing. I have days like today that are productive from a conversational point of view. But then if I look back, I was literally in meetings from 9am until now. So I got off the call right before we met now. And then it feels like I haven't actually done anything. I was just talking. Sounds like my job. I'm just talking as well all the time. But I agree with you. So you have this meeting marathon where you jump from meeting to meeting and at the end of the day you ask yourself, when am I able actually to do the work? That's the thing, right? Because obviously your job is much more about talking. Mine is also very much about talking, but especially as we're growing at the moment, as we're really trying to put some basics in place, I also need to actually sit down, write things down, document things. And it's sometimes pretty hard to do that when you're just talking. But yeah, some of the conversations today have been really interesting. And I think especially when you do things like customer interviews or when you sit down with people to better understand the problems, as we're always discussing in our episodes, it's fine. And you have to do that. But I also see the flip side where you just have to get your shit done or not allowed to say shit, your thing's done. And you can beep it when you have to get your peep. Yeah, you have to get your peep here. But I think this is also like a little bit this project management side of things where you just have to be structured in a way that you make sure in the short amount of time that I have in between meetings, I need to get my stuff together. Yeah. But I think especially you're saying something that I usually find quite painful, which is like the in-between meetings. I have to say that I tend to struggle with these 15, 20 minutes between one and the other chat in terms of should I try and get productive, even if I know I won't be able to finish something. And I'm a big procrastinator. Alex, you're always making breaks, you're making breaks, you're grabbing an espresso and a cigarette. So yeah, I know you're struggling. No, but you see, why do I do that? I simply do that because I'm like, that's the most productive that I can get out of the time. I won't be able to start and finish a task in between. So yes, I do some emails. I have a ciggy. Damn it. I'm thinking that I actually quit last year. Didn't manage to follow it through for more than six months. Damn it. But yeah, I mean... A special episode talking about quitting smoking. But yeah, going back to the topic, I think still, even though it's not easy, I'm very strict about my time in between. First of all, it's important to make sure that you are not sitting all the time meeting, obviously. But I think that's something that you need to manage by yourself. But I think it's important to understand what you are doing. And to me, it starts already in the morning when I look at my calendar and see what kind of focus I have. And something that helps me always to better understand how my day and my week looks like is color coding my calendar. If I have my daily standup with my engineering teams or everything which is related to my engineering team is blue. Everything which is related to meetings with my product team is red. Everything which is related to a specific project I'm planning right now is eventually, I don't know, yellow. And I see already at the beginning of the week, okay, there's a lot of yellow in my calendar. I will be very much focused on preparing the project. Or the week after I have everything green because, or whatever I said just before, because I have so many team meetings all the time. And based on that, I'm also better able to plan the time in between when I have to get my stuff together. But do you actually only have meetings in the calendar? Or do you also set some blockers for like things that you work on? I do that. And I also do this short 15 minute meetings where I just put in a couple of small tasks that I want to get done. I've heard about it years ago and it works. No, but I have to say, that's really something that sometimes helps my life. To some extent, because I'm actually blocking some time of my calendar. So I know nobody can book something on top of it. And at the same time also for me myself to know, okay, this is like the slot where I get this done. And I think having it in the calendar, at least for me, helps me also to be more pragmatic about it. Because, and I mean, in design, it's a massive problem. Probably it's also in other functions. That's something you need to tell me. But generally speaking, I think it's very hard for a designer to say, okay, this is done. I'm happy. I'm satisfied with the way it is. You're usually never satisfied with the way it is. And I think like this, I know, okay, this is the slots that I have. I don't have more time than that. I need to switch context afterwards. So whatever I can get done and it helps me not losing time on some minor details and focusing more on starting pragmatically like 80-20 rule. Exactly. If there's still time, I can still tune it, fine tune it, improve it. Otherwise, I try to really stick to my own deadlines at the end of each focus block, let's say. Yeah, totally agree. And what people also love doing is if you have working blocks in your calendar, people just try to book over your working blocks. So something I taught myself is I give my working blocks crazy names like project preparation, X, Y, Z. And they're like, oh damn, he has a meeting. And you're not even checking that I'm the only attendee. I do the same. I make them look like meetings. And if I really can't make them look like meetings, I set them to private. Nobody's booking anything over your private stuff. And I also love this out of office function in Google calendar. So which means auto decline when someone tries it. That's also very cool. But sometimes you have to do those things. But I'm sure if I would put auto decline out of office in some blocks, I would soon get a message asking, Alex, why are you out of office all the time? The thing is you can function it as out of office, but you can give it a name. So a specific name, a different name than out of office. But yeah, as crazy as it sounds, sometimes we have to put our hands deeper in the pocket and think about ways how to make up time for sure. It's not the ideal world, but it's also the real world. Yeah. Make up time. And also I think one thing that I learned, especially we started talking about having tons of meetings, declining meetings, right? You always need to be careful that they actually make sense, that they're actually valuable, that it's valuable to the meeting that you're there. Maybe there's someone else who can do it, who can fix it. So I generally look for agendas. If they're not there, I ask for them. And if there's nothing coming back, then I'm usually not attending. It's so good that you said that. Because today I had a meeting and it was a very fun meeting because it was a new product team that got set up. The PM invited some stakeholders and I attended also to just have a look and also give some feedback on the way we are structuring the processes. And it was fun because that meeting had no agenda. So I came in and the product manager just said, hi, everybody. Nice to have you. And then one stakeholder just started, oh, let's introduce each other. We just had 30 minutes. And then he said, oh, I have also a lot of questions here and there. And look, we have written down our principles that I want to show you. So that meeting went totally out of hand. And I was like, okay, wait, the purpose of the meeting was completely different, but it wasn't written down on the agenda. And it wasn't also kicked off actually based on the agenda. So you can quickly lose a whole meeting with people and discussing things where everyone is happy that we introduced each other, but we didn't discuss any processes or have we had any outcomes that we wanted to have. Therefore, the agenda is crucial. Yeah, absolutely. And I hate to be invited without agenda. And with the agenda, also a good facilitator, because what you mentioned, you can have the best agenda on earth, but if you have a facilitator who can stick to it, he will always get off the track. Oh, did I mention that I have my email course about meeting facilitation? I think I should link that. Put some emotion in. Kidding aside. Promotion jingle. Yeah. Let's say an advertisement jingle. Like similar to our debrief. Here are your paid ads. Yeah. And just one more thought on that whole topic is, because you mentioned it's sometimes very important to say no. I think that's anyway, more or less the routine of a product manager anyway. But when it comes to self-organization and also structuring yourself for a certain project, it's important that you make sure that you have everything in place you need. And that is first of all time, but then also thinking about, okay, who are the relevant people that I need to talk to? Who are my stakeholders? And sitting down and defining it, because many times I just ask people and product managers, who are your stakeholders? Yeah, there is data department, there is sales and okay, but who are the people? Yeah, there is a person B, person C, and then they start struggling. And it's sometimes very good to know exactly to whom you talk to and which type of person it is, because you have stakeholders, a high interest, but low impact. Some of them have high impact, but low interest. So also understanding how you should communicate to them and in which intervals can sometimes be really helpful. So just on the project management side of things, I'm just telling people all the time, make sure that you understand what you need to better execute afterwards. Because if you have all these answers in place, you will be able to much faster kicking things off. Yeah. And then in general, with being aware of these things, another good thing to do, or something that I try to force myself to do is starting off with the documentation, because like this, I put this already in a documentation, and I have to document and luckily tools like Confluence also helped me that if I link a stakeholder, they also get all the annoying updates when I change. So I know the people that I actually need there. So first of all, I write them down and make sure I don't forget anyone. And whenever there is something new, they're also informed and I can really directly drag them into the conversation. And also the conversation stays to some extent there. And I can see what we discussed and what we changed. So I think documentation is also a really helpful thing there. Yeah. And it also goes hand in hand with the agenda. So make sure that everything you need to communicate is linked in the agenda, which includes the documentation. How do you actually document features? I'm pretty sure someone working in product has a slightly different approach than me. Going back to the advertisement, I'm using Confluence mainly, but I'm also a big fan of Notion. Do you use it like personally, privately? No, not anymore. I used to, but I just stopped at some point. I had this hybrid, I was like doing this hybrid way of using Avanote, Notion and Confluence. And at some point I just switched to Avanote and now it's just Apple Notes, never-ending discussion. Damn, I also had Avanote at one point. I forgot about it. I think even in a podcast, I talked about it. My go-to tool is Workflow. I have literally my whole life there. And now we can jump into the section of product reviews. But now they actually really worked on extending their features. And so they have a lot of possibilities to mirror and duplicate and link different points, different bullets that you put in your notes. So it allows you to use it in the, I think it's called the Zettelkasten method. And I think it's actually also called Zettelkasten in English. It is called Zettelkasten slip box, if you literally translate it. For everyone who's interested, we can link it. I won't go there. I also didn't understand it fully, but simply it helps you like recreate a little bit, like also your thinking between to-dos, between notes, between meetings. Beautiful tool. And talking about tools, in my Avanote to-do list, I have this to-do to take a look at Workflowy. Just saying, people over processes and tools. Talking about that. You see, the reason why I like the tool is that it doesn't force you on a process. It's such a free tool. It's so diverse that I think everyone uses it differently. And that makes it also flexible solution to everyone's needs. But I will stop there. It's the last time I mentioned Workflowy on this podcast. I was just about to say, we leave it up to the audience to figure out how they prefer using their self-organization tools and let us know. We're happy to hear your feedback. And as always, if you liked this episode and found it useful, feel free to share it with your colleagues and friends on social media eventually. And we're always here for questions and remarks. Go to product-bakery.com episodes. You can comment directly on the episodes or drop us a message. And with that, Christian, I see you soon. Have a great day, Alex. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.