Calendar Audits as a Product Manager
A guide to understanding your time better
Time flies, especially if you are a Product Manager. Considering how multifaceted and cross-functional Product roles are, it is incredibly easy for Product Managers to get lost in the flurry of inbound requests. A client meeting that sales requested to address their queries, a clarification needed by an engineer who is working on your latest feature, a fire fighting meeting with operations as something broke on production, the list is endless. And while you are reacting to everything that is happening around you, weeks and months go by.
An important and often overlooked meta-skill that a Product Manager needs to succeed in their role is being deliberate with their time.
There are two parts to being proactive at managing your time. The first step is budgeting your time on the right priorities. You can use techniques such as Timeblocking or Day theming to ensure that you are in control of your schedule.
Timeblocking or time blocking is a productivity technique for personal time management where a period of time, typically a day or week is divided into smaller segments or blocks for specific tasks or to-dos. It integrates the function of a calendar with that of a to-do list. — Wikipedia
But as you get into the mode of taking control of your time in the future, it is equally important to zoom out and look back. Things rarely go as per plans. This is where Calendar Audits are helpful to understand the gap between your plan, your perception of how the plan went, and the reality. Startup veteran and investor, Keith Rabois touched upon this in his lecture How to operate¹
Actually, what I would recommend is doing what I call a calendar audit. And track what you spend your time on in a month. How much is editing, how much is writing, etc. And optimize it over time.
I ask them to write them out on paper and specify whatever they are. Then I ask them to pull out their calendar and see if it matches. And it never matches. Never. Recruiting is the one that is usually the most often awry. Half the CEOs will say recruiting is their number one priority. It’s almost never the biggest block of time on anyone’s calendar. So that is what you are trying to do is match resources to priorities in the calendar audit. And there is no software that does this really well for you. It would be great, right now we pull up someone’s Google calendar and hand count up the hours. Which is insane. But that is the best way, just ask about their priorities. Priorities are raising money, you don’t want to allocate most of your time recruiting. — Keith Rabois
Before diving into this activity, it is essential to have clarity of your priorities and goals. There are multiple ways you can do the audit and look at different slices of data. What I have found helpful is looking at my time with the following lenses.
- Goals and Key Initiatives
- People and Teams
- Activities
Goals and Key Initiatives
As a Product Manager, you will invariantly find yourself juggling multiple initiatives in a quarter. There are ones that are in the engineering bucket and currently being developed, ones that are shipped and you are trying to drive adoption for, and then there are the ones in your backlog for which you are doing the groundwork now. Not all projects are equal and you would like to see that you are budgeting your time as per their respective priorities. Moreover, if you are a Senior Product Manager, you would have the additional responsibility of reviewing their work.
The chart above shows the break up of my time across different initiatives. There were two key things that I learned from this split
- I was significantly stretching myself thin and spent about 20% of my time on projects that I should have just delegated and managed with lightweight reviews.
- Secondly, I was underinvesting in three key initiatives (Project A, Project G, and Project I) that required more attention from my end. Two of them were critical initiatives led by Product Managers who had recently joined the organization and the other one was an initiative led by a junior member of the team and an opportunity for me to grow and coach them into a strong Product Manager.
People and Teams
This is an important slice of data to look at especially if you are a People Manager.
As I reviewed my own time, in lines with what I had discovered in the previous slice, I realized I was heavily over-indexing my time on one team and overlooking a team that had come together recently.
How much time you should spend with whom is a function of the criticality of the initiatives the team is working on, their tenure in the organization, and their experience level.
If you have a new member in your team, ideally you should be touching base with them at least once a week, working hands-on with them and closely reviewing their progress. The early days play a critical role in shaping their success in the organization. For someone who is more experienced and has been in the organization for a while, you can take a more hands-off approach and manage with biweekly or monthly reviews.
Activities
Now, how much time you should be spending on which projects or team is something that will change with the time and maturity of the team you are working with. One aspect that will though universally remain true is the ideal break up of your time on Planning & Strategy, Execution & Research, Reviews & Stakeholder Management, and Hiring & People Management for your role.
As I audited my time, I had to confront an uncomfortable reality that while my organization's ambition and my team size had grown with time, I had not budgeted sufficient time for thinking about what should change in the people, process, and product for us to deliver value at a higher velocity.
While it can be tempting to spend time working hands-on with your team on execution and problem solving, underinvesting in more strategic aspects can lead you to a place where you are struggling to keep up with the growth of the organization as you have not chalked out a proper plan for the midterm to long term future and staffed and grown your team to match that of your organization.
How we actually think we spend our time viz-a-viz how we actually end up spending our time is significantly different. A Calendar Audit is a reality check and helps you course correct. If you are a Product Manager or a Senior Leader at a Tech Co, a Calendar Audit can shed light on your blind spots and surface valuable and actionable insights.
Footnotes
[1] — How to Operate by Keith Rabois https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fQHLK1aIBs
Running a Calendar Audit while valuable can be tedious. As part of simplifying it, I’m working on a side project called Mornin. Mornin is a Chrome Extension that shows you where you are spending your time and helps you plan your day and week better.
