 Hey everyone, thanks for tuning into this webinar hosted by Product School. My name is Anurag and I was most recently working in product at Google. Today's session is going to focus on the topic of productivity. I'm low-key obsessed with this topic. To me, it's a lifelong journey to improve one's personal productivity and the effectiveness that results from it. This topic underpins every product manager's day-to-day activities. It's true regardless of the sector of space you operate in, the size of your organization or the seniority with which you operate within the organization. It's a foundational philosophy, so to speak, and I hope to share some of my learnings from over the years. Here's a quick preview of what we are going to be covering today. We'll start with taking a look at how productivity can be defined and the key challenges faced by a PM. We'll then move on to looking at some key productivity principles and the underlying psychological factors at play. The last aspect we'll cover is to look at a few examples of productivity systems and techniques that you can use in your current role. I'll then wrap up with some resources for those of you who might be interested to take further into this topic. Before we proceed, a couple of things to call out here. One, we will not be looking at specific tools and their usage in the context of productivity. And two, we will try to focus this session on personal productivity and not team productivity, which is a standalone topic in itself, and we might not have the time to go over that aspect. A couple of other caveats. One is your context is different from mine, right? Everything I talk about are strategies and approaches that have worked for me that I've experimented with over the years and that I've found to be effective. However, these aren't meant to be prescriptive. They serve as primers and I hope that you use them as thought starters when considering your own personal productivity system. Second, the content that I plan to cover in the next couple of slides is relevant for all functions, not necessarily just for product managers. Well, the challenges that I highlighted in the next slide are specific to PMs. The techniques that we look at can be applied by all functions at any level. So just an important thing to note here. Now with that out of the way, let's dig in. So what is productivity and why does it matter? So we often operate in a time-pressed culture where there never seems to be enough time, right? We see and feel it around us every day. The world rewards accomplishments and business. And there's real value in that. We are pushed and driven towards achievement, towards creation, towards action. And there's this common assumption that productivity means purely getting more things done each day, but that's not entirely accurate, right? So here's my perspective, right? And I've tried to put it in a formula to try and capture the essence of what I'm trying to call out here is that productivity is a measure of consistently getting the important things done, regardless of what you're working on. Only a few things are truly significant, right, when you think about it. And there are two aspects to this. There's efficiency and then there's effectiveness. And simple efficiency is one's ability to achieve an intended result, but with the least waste of time, energy, attention, resources, right? Well, effectiveness, on the other hand, is the capacity to yield a superior result that delivers more value or achieves a better outcome towards a goal that you're working on, right? So this is good, sure. But then there's also potential downside to this and that's burnout. And so I appreciate the concept of using awareness, observation, and experimentation to boost productivity. But then over time I've realized that it's okay to not be as efficient as a machine, right? And we can still find our own ways to get things done. So why is this important for PMs? And what are the top challenges that PMs face? And here's how I like to describe it and this is something that captures this pretty well. Is that a product manager's day can be described as being a productivity quicksand, right? The choice of what you choose to do next becomes extremely important. Think about it. On any given day, you have to choose between a broad spectrum of responsibilities, depending on the projects you're working on and depending on the stage of the product lifecycle that they are going through, right? You could be working on tasks that are strategic in nature. You could be looking at customer discovery related tasks. You could be handling a lot of XFN, engagement in any given day. You might be doing some data heavy work or you might just be advocating for your products, your team within the organization trying to get more headcount, buy in from leadership, so on and so forth, right? And then there's the height task volume, right? Where on any given day, you have a bunch of meetings showing up on your calendar. And there might be times where you're double booked or triple booked. You're being bombarded with emails, with notifications, with questions. And then you also have a bunch of decisions that you have to make on a day-to-day basis, right? You might be figuring out which features to prioritize, evaluating trade-offs between different solution options, trying to balance stakeholders' needs. And then you have all this information that's sort of coming your way. And then you have to keep context switching. And the moment you think that you have a grip over things is when a crisis hits, right? Maybe a service goes down. Maybe there is a PR issue that comes up, or maybe your product feature just isn't working as intended, right? There's like P3 escalation, high priority escalation that comes in from leadership. And then you have to move everything off your calendar and just sort of go into crisis management mode. So the point that I'm trying to make here is that you've got to be adaptable to a dynamic work environment to drive impact and to be able to make progress consistently, right? And given the multitude of activities and decisions that a PM has to undertake, right, a personal productivity system becomes extremely crucial for managing this workload and reducing stress at the end of the day, right? And so let's take a look at some of the principles and the psychological factors that play here. So we have a lot of ground to cover here. And I put together an architecture diagram, as you can see on the slide, where we have, on the lowest level, the psychological factors at play. A level higher are the productivity principles and concepts. And then at the very top are the productivity systems and techniques that are shaped by these principles and underlying psychological factors, right? And before we delve into the specific productivity systems and techniques, I believe it's going to be extremely helpful to view productivity through the lens of these psychological factors and the principles that stem from them. So we'll follow this flow, right? From bottom to top, we'll start with looking at the foundational psychological factors, we'll then move to the principles, and then finally we'll discuss the systems and tactics that derive from these, right? So let's start with the foundational layer that underpins everything else, the psychological factors. Now these relate to the mental and emotional state of a person. Come to think of it. And I'll quickly voice over what's shown on the slide, the blue boxes from left to right, right? And then I'll also, on a high level, call out strategies that you can use to mitigate these. The idea here is to understand that these can be used to your advantage, right? So as to enhance your productivity and not let them hinder your productivity, right? So first up, we have mental overload. So judging too much information can lead to cognitive overload, which in turn hinders productivity, right? To mitigate this, you can prioritize tasks, delegate when possible, and use tools to manage and organize information, thereby preventing cognitive overload. Next, we have perfectionism. And this is a challenge that many of us face from time to time, I'm sure. And striving for excellence is beneficial, sure, but excessive perfectionism also sometimes referred to as premature optimization can lead to an excessive amount of time spent on tasks and a fear of failure. So to mitigate this, it's important to understand that not everything has to be perfect, right? Focus on doing your best, and it's perfectly fine to aim for good enough to start with. And you can always come back and refine it further, right? But it's okay to start with good enough. Next, we have procrastination. And quite simply put, procrastination is the act of delaying tasks or actions. Now, the reasons for this could range from a fear of failure to perfectionism or simply a lack of motivation or energy, right? It often hampers task completion. It leads to rushed work, and it increases stress. Now, some solutions include using time management techniques, which we'll talk about in a moment, and then breaking tasks into manageable chunks so as to eliminate distractions. The next psychological factor is willpower. Also, in a sense, your mindset, right? Willpower is the ability to resist short-term distractions in order to meet long-term goals. It is like a muscle that when overused can become exhausted. And what this leads to is, again, reduced productivity, poor decision-making, and a lack of impulse control. So, one can prioritize important tasks for early in the day, ideally take regular breaks, and develop habits to reduce the need for willpower, right? So, it all boils down to good habits. Next up is stress and anxiety. Now, these terms generally refer to the mental and emotional strain that a person feels resulting from demanding circumstances. They can often impact focus and can lead to burnout in the long term, right? Techniques for managing stress and anxiety include mindfulness practices and just ensuring a good work-life balance. And there are a variety of ways to do that. And last up is sleep deprivation. And this is a very critical factor, right, when you think about it. This condition occurs when a person doesn't get enough sleep, obviously. And it can lead to cognitive effects like reduced focus, slower reaction times, and more changes. A simple solution, no surprises, is to establish a regular sleep schedule and ensure a suitable sleep environment. And we'll look at a few factors that we can implement in the slides that follow. Now, moving up the diagram a level higher are the productivity principles in the yellow sticky notes. Let's take a look at those in the next few slides. All right, so the next few slides, we'll take a look at the different principles at play in the context of productivity. And they are mostly visual, so I'll just voice over the concept that you see here and give you a high level sense of what they mean and how they impact productivity. So first up, we have some principles in the context of decision-making. The first one is decision fatigue, right? As the name suggests, this refers to the declining quality of decisions that a person is able to make, either after a long session of decision-making or after having made multiple decisions through a day. To apply this principle, one could ensure that the most critical decision-making tasks are scheduled for when they are fresh and alert. Minimalism, the concept of focusing on what's truly important and eliminating the rest can be applied to productivity as well. And you can do this by reducing unnecessary tasks and distractions. This approach to decision-making emphasizes clarity and it also helps with prioritization. Next up is opportunity cost and this is one of my favorites. Though it's originally an economic principle, opportunity cost is definitely relevant in the context of productivity as well. It states that there is a cost that is potential benefits lost associated with choosing to do one task over the other. And so recognizing that the time spent on one task is time taken away from another can help you make more informed decisions as to how to allocate your time. Next, we have the parental principle and this is a very popular principle. Every person out there and the grandma knows this, right? And what this principle proposes is that 80% of your results for a particular endeavor come from 20% of efforts. It helps identify high-impact activities to focus on for higher productivity, right? And then lastly, we have the 40s principle. Again, a very common principle in that it's known by various names like the Eisenhower matrix or some other two-by-two decision matrices where the labels used for the quadrants might differ but the underlying concept is the same, right? And the basic idea is that for each task that you're evaluating, you should decide to either do it, either defer it, delegate it to someone who's better equipped to handle it or just drop it, right? And then obviously there are factors that you might consider it based off of in terms of either urgency or importance or the combination of these two, right? All right, moving on to principles related to time. The first one out here is high leverage or standardization. This, as the name suggests, is a principle that involves focusing on tasks that produce outsized results with relatively minimal inputs. And we'll talk about this a little more in a slide that follows, but it's a really useful concept. The next one is the law of diminishing returns. Now, this is another economic concept, but it's applicable in the realm of productivity. And what it states is that there is a point beyond which spending more time or effort on a task doesn't lead to proportional increases in output. So for example, you could be writing a draft for a PRD and make significant progress in the first few hours, right? But eventually you might notice that additional hours of work don't result in substantial improvements, either possibly due to fatigue or loss of focus, which is fine. Understanding this principle can help you optimize your time and effort in a way where you recognize when to stop working and maybe take a break or switch over to a different task, right? But it's important to know when to stop. Next up, we have batching. And this is simply the grouping of similar tasks together in order to reduce the transition time switching between these and to improve focus, right? And the last one is Parkinson's law, another common principle out there. And it's based on the idea that your work expands to fill out the time available for its completion. What this means is if you give yourself less time to do something, right? If you create an artificial deadline, you would execute that task with a little more urgency, which is great, right? So try doing that the next time you have a lot of time to get something done, but ideally you want to get done quicker so that you can refine it over the next, you know, the remaining set of days. Now let's take a look at executive functions which are basic cognitive processes that include attention control, working memory and cognitive flexibility. The first one is goal setting pretty straightforward. And this is just the process of identifying what you want to achieve and how do you establish measurable objectives for those goals. Next is the task goal alignment, right? It's important that what you choose to do aligns with your overall set of goals, right? You want to be steering in the right direction and not just steering. Next up we have GED, which stands for getting things done. Now this is a method that was popularized by David Allen and it involves capturing, clarifying, organizing and engaging with tasks with the use of a trusted note-taking system. And we'll take a look at this a little more in a slide that follows, but it's a super popular principle. So it's good to know how to use this. And the last one is the single handling principle. With this principle, the goal is to handle each piece of work that comes your way, especially correspondence like email, only once. What that means is you decide what action to take and it could be either choosing to reply, archive or make a task out of it and do it immediately rather than revisiting the same task multiple times. And finally, let's examine the principles related to cognition. And these include your processes like thinking, reasoning and remembering. Note that a lot of these concepts are interrelated, but it's good to know them individually so that you know how they relate to each other. The first one is the Zegarnik effect. I'm not sure if I'm saying that right, but what this principle effectively means is, and this is backed by science, is that people have the tendency to remember uncompleted tasks better than completed ones. And this can lead to mental suffering and stress and reduce cognitive ability for a given task. So what this means is that it serves as a reminder to always finish what you start or at least make a plan for finishing it so that it's not in this weird limbo state lingering in your head, right? The next one is attention residue. Now attention residue reflects the persistence of cognitive activity about let's say a task A, even when you're working on task B and have stopped working on task A. So in other words, multitasking and context switching, which a lot of us do, right? It impairs focus and productivity. So it's best to avoid task switching as much as possible because it's not efficient. And the last one is deep work. Deep work is basically a state of peak concentration when you're working on a difficult task that allows you to produce high quality work. And you can foster this by blocking time on your calendar to carry out tasks that require a deep work state, that require your best work. Now the last set of principles, we have convergent and divergent thinking, which is another one of my favorites where it talks about how there are like two different ways we can approach a problem, right? So divergent thinking involves more creativity and it relates to generating multiple potential solutions for a problem statement that you're working on. On the other hand, convergent thinking focuses on finding one well-defined solution to a problem. Now understanding these two approaches can help you determine the best method for a particular task, right? And sometimes it also matters as to which environment you are problem solving in. So what I mean by that is if you're brainstorming design solutions for a particular product specification, you know, use case, that's divergent thinking, right? And you might want to be in a different environment for that versus say, prioritizing a solution from a list of available options, right? Converging on to something that you would want the team to move ahead with, right? The next one is flow state or focus. Now the flow state is a mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus and involvement. And a lot of us refer to this as being in this zone, right? It's the same thing. And what's important here is you want to identify the conditions that get you into the state to maximize productivity, right? And why is that important? Because if you know what conditions lead to that state, you might be able to replicate those conditions when you want to slip into the state faster, right? So it's awareness and then being able to implement that day in and day out. For example, for me, it involves wearing noise-canceling headphones and being in a space with minimal distractions. It could vary for you, right? The last concept here is the principle of neuroplasticity. And this basically refers to the brain's ability to continue growing and rewiring in response to new experiences. So it affects productivity by shaping our ability to learn and adapt. And it improves efficiency and effectiveness over time. And the way this plays out is in the concept of habit formation, right? Habits play a significant role in how they shape our actions, our behaviors, and ultimately the level of productivity that stem from those behaviors, right? So this is a really important principle to be aware of. So we have covered the key psychological factors at play and the principles relevant to personal productivity. Now let's explore some examples of actual productivity systems and techniques that can be derived from these concepts. Let's delve into these in the next few slides. But before that, a quick recap of the architecture diagram that we saw earlier, right? So going from the bottom to the top, we had, we took a look at these psychological factors, right? Which could either enhance or hinder your productivity system. And then you have a set of productivity principles that also help shape your system. So it's good to keep this in the back of your mind as we talk about actual systems, techniques in the next few slides. All right, so here's a mind map of the different productivity systems and techniques that I've experimented with over the years. And I've tried to bucket these in a few subcategories, right? These are not meant to be exhausted. And most of you are likely familiar with a lot of these concepts in some shape or form. And so it's hopefully a good summarization of those key concepts in the context of personal productivity. A quick call out for the terms used here before we dig into this. We use the term productivity system and then the productivity technique, right? And they're often used interchangeably, but they differ in terms of the scope and application, right? And this is an important distinction to make no doubt. A productivity system is a holistic approach to managing your work and life, right? And it typically encapsulates a set of principles, habits and routines that guide how you organize your time and your tasks. It's more of a strategy or philosophy that you adopt and it helps give you structure as you process and work through your set of tasks and all the information that's coming your way, right? And the specific tools here don't matter, like I mentioned earlier, right? The tools that you choose to use are completely subjective, but it's useful to understand the underlying concepts here that make up the system, right? And then you could use whatever tool fits into that system. For example, in the GTD system, the Getting Things Done system, you could use something like Google Tasks for your task management, right? Or someone else could choose to use an app like To Do Wish, right? Which is another popular app out in the market or some other app, right? It doesn't really matter. What matters is that you understand what concepts are at play and how you can best leverage them to be more productive. Now, a productivity technique, on the other hand, is more specific, right? It's more tactical. And they're obviously smaller in scope than systems, and they can be used within the framework of different systems, right? And what I mean by this is, you could have a technique called batching, which is relevant both in the execution sense, right? Under the GTD system, where you could choose to do a similar set of tasks together, right? In the same time block. And it's also relevant in the context of time management, right? Where you might want to batch and time block for a certain set of tasks that are similar in nature. So they're pretty flexible in that sense. Now you might ask, how are they related, right? So just to sort of cap it off, the productivity systems and techniques are related in that techniques can be used as components of a system that you choose to implement, right? So that's the distinction that I hope you take away from this slide. Now, before we move on, there's another call out here around chat GPT, right? It's an intentionally not depicted chat GPT or like generative AI tools here. Do I think it'll make life easier for PMs? Sure, 100%. It can definitely help with, you know, reducing the net task completion time for a given task based on what you're trying to do, right? You could be looking at doing some initial research, getting started with the participants, getting some proofreading done, et cetera. But at the end of the day, it's just a tool, right? And my intent here is to focus more on the underlying principles and the systems that can be derived from these principles and concept. So the focus is less on the tools, the specific tools, and that's why you don't see chat GPT here. Now let's move on to looking at some techniques in the subcategories mentioned in red here. And I won't be talking about everything that's mentioned here in the interest of time, but I would like to give a high level sense of a few of these, you know, within each subcategory and how you can implement these in your specific use cases and contexts. All right, first up, we have techniques related to time management. And I want to start with talking about the process of time auditing, right? Which is almost like a prerequisite. And the reason this is important is because we usually tend to underestimate the time we would take that we think we would take to complete a task, right? And so it's important to be able to benchmark how much time previous similar tasks took to be able to project better for future tasks, right? And here's what you can do periodically to be able to do that. So you start with logging all your calendar events and activities for a month. Or you can start for two weeks, right? The look back window doesn't matter. The idea is to be able to log these events over a decent amount of time. And there are a bunch of apps out there that can help you do that. Like Toggle, Google Calendar has this nifty feature called time insights. Use whatever, it doesn't matter. And then you bucketize these events and activities into categories or labels that make sense to you, right? And then you analyze those buckets and assess which ones can be pruned or dropped, right? And you might want to ask yourself questions like, are there certain meetings that you can skip? Are there certain tasks that perhaps might be better delegated to someone who's better positioned to handle those, so on and so forth, right? You get the gist. And the idea here is to be able to use those findings then to better estimate the time you would take to complete a similar task whenever they feature on your to-do list, right? So this is a periodic activity, but I think it's super valuable to do this from time to time. Next up is meeting hygiene. And here's how I think about meeting, right? So it has three elements. Any given meeting has three elements. So you have your agenda. You have the people participating in the meeting and then you have the time spent in that meeting. And the first thing that I assess wherever a meeting shows up on my calendar is whether that meeting can be an email instead, right? But then there is a framework that I fall back on and it's called the POP framework where the idea is to ask a bunch of questions with respect to the purpose, the outcome that we want to drive and the plan that might stem from the meeting discussion, right? And that helps drive clarity as to whether it's a good use of time and on. Another thing that you could do to have better meeting hygiene is, if your company culture allows for it, is to have a dedicated no meetings day, right? And it's usually Fridays from what I've seen in some of the big tech companies. And you can use that no meeting day to just focus on deep work and get to tasks that you haven't been able to over the week, right? All right, so next up we have calendar hygiene, right? So there's techniques like time blocking, time boxing and ad hoc buffers. And they're pretty straightforward, but the idea is to be able to block time on your calendar. DS stands for do not share you for deep work. And then you also want to be boxing or like time boxing for specific tasks on your calendar. And the way you do this is being able to estimate how much time you would take for a particular task. And that's where the time audit process comes into play. And you would stop when the timer is done. And that helps provide a certain sense of urgency to the task at hand. And then the ad hoc buffer is basically a concept where the idea is to recognize that ad hoc requests could show up and it's an inevitable part of your role, right? So you account for these every day and have some buffer in your calendar to be able to squeeze in in case something comes up last minute and you have to move things around, right? So don't just keep your calendar jump back. The next technique is time batching. Again, straightforward, you just group similar tasks together, right? One thing that I used to try and do was to have all my one-on-one meetings with my cross-functional partners in the second half of any given day, right? So that's one way to ensure that you minimize your tasks switching costs from a mental bandwidth standpoint. Then there's the Pomodoro technique, which is again, one of my favorites. And the concept is pretty simple, right? It's basically you allocate two R blocks on your calendar for deep work, right? And the way you utilize this two R block is you have four individual sessions that are each 25 minutes long, right? So you have a 25-minute session to start with, then you take a break for five minutes, then you have the second session, so on and so forth. And after four sessions, you would take a longer break, right? And then maybe have another two R block to get done with four more sessions if your calendar allows for it. But this is a super useful technique and I've been using it for almost a decade now. So do give it a shot if you haven't. The last two techniques that might be useful here are what I simply think of as the calendar is the source of truth, right? Sure, you have your ever-growing task list and it's a good way to capture everything that you need to get done, right? But the idea here is to make sure that it features on your calendar at some point, right? So whatever shows up in the calendar is more likely to get done. And so you want to make sure that you have the practice of moving things from your task management app or like your task management system to the calendar and just have a better chance of completing it faster. And the last one is what I refer to as comms hub handling, right? So I think of a PN as a comms hub, right? Because you have all this information coming your way, all these questions coming your way, and then you have like any other profession, right? You have all this emails and things and whatnot. So the best way that I've found to deal with these, and again, this is not full proof, but the way that it has worked for the most part is you allocate specific time slots in your calendar to process these comms type tasks, right? Be it emails, things, drafting a comms document, whatever the case might be, right? The way I used to do it was I would have a 30 to 35 minute or like a 45 minute slot depending on the volumes that I've seen come in, but I would have a slot at the start of the day, right? And then a slot at the end of the day. And this sort of helps sandwich anything that I might have missed throughout the day while working on some other stuff or while standing between meetings. All right, next up we have energy and mind management, right? And this is an interesting set of techniques as well. The first one is what I refer to as energy peaks. Now you want to identify the times of the day when your energy peaks occur, right? And you want to guard them fiercely. For example, I would try to not have any meetings in the mornings between eight to 10 a.m. and would use that time instead for tasks requiring deep work, a deep work state of mind, right? And there's some science-backed reasons that play here, the body, every human body has something called the circadian rhythm, which you might be familiar with, which is pertinent to your sleep cycle. And then you have something called the ultradian rhythms, which is more of a 90-minute cycle that keeps repeating. So you have these 90-minute cycles where your energy peaks and then it dips, right? So you want to make sure and you want to try and recognize what those, like when those peaks occur for you personally and you want to make sure that you align that with the task that is the most important for a given day, right? Next up, you have morning routines and rituals. This again is pretty straightforward, right? The idea is to have a morning routine that gets you into a peak state of productivity. To give you an example, for me, that means getting a good dose of natural light, the first thing in the morning, right? I don't look at my phone. I try to get as much sunlight as possible, the first 10 to 15 minutes after waking up. And then I also take some cold showers and there's a lot of science-backed reasons there which you can find on the internet. And then have an exercise and breakfast schedule, maybe do some meditation, et cetera. Again, I'm not saying you have to do all of these, but figure out something that you can sort of incorporate into your morning schedule and that signals to the brain that, hey, it's time to get productive, right? It's time to get working. The next one is task energy alignment. And we spoke about this when we looked at energy peaks. I'm not going to go into it again. And after that, we have attention management, right? And this, again, borrows from the concept of attention residue that we looked at in the principles slides. And the idea is just to not try and multitask. You want to avoid constant context switching if you can help it. And I know it's not easy in a PM's day-to-day, but you want to be conscious about it and try to do it as much as possible. And then you also want to schedule time for deep work so that your attention is purely on a particular task at hand. One explicit way that I have found useful sometimes is to use anti-distraction apps, right? On the device that you're using, be it your phone or your laptop. And these basically bring up a prompt if you try to access certain apps or if you go away from a certain tab that you're working on, it just helps you sort of stay focused, right? Somewhat like blinders on a horse, right? And the next technique that is useful here are effectively taking mini breaks, right? And I call it the 3M concept where the mini break could range from five to 10 minutes. It's not prescriptive. You can take as long as a break as you can and that your schedule allows for. The idea is to either listen to some music, get some movement, you can walk around if you're working from home, you could do some stretches at your desk, or you could maybe get in a quick meditation session, right? Figure out what works best for you, but these are some of the options. And the last piece here are mental models. Now, mental models are thinking tools that help with problem solving and decision making and all that good stuff. And they let you do that in a way where it doesn't lead to decision fatigue, right? And I've spoken about this extensively in a previous session. So feel free to look that up on YouTube. But the idea here is to have a toolbox of your own set of mental models that you can continue going back to and sort of execute faster on your decisions whilst maintaining that decision quality that you care about. All right, let's look at a set of techniques for prioritization now. First up, we have the 4Ds technique. We touched upon this earlier, so I'll not dig deeper into this. But the idea is to be able to classify any given task depending on the urgency and importance. The next concept is this high leverage, right? It's a simple question. It's something that I keep coming back to and it's something that I use every time I'm trying to figure out what task I want to do next, right? The idea here is to identify and work on only those tasks that yield the highest return, right? On the time and energy that you spend. So strategic work, for instance, is usually high leverage, right? Versus say something that's more execution focused, which, while it's important, right? It's not necessarily high leverage, it's more of an optimization and it's something that you do day in and day out. So be able to recognize and distinguish between what is high leverage versus not, because that's where you want to be spending most of your time on. The related concept here is the concept of standardization, right, which basically is the idea that you can make life easier and create shared understanding with templates or documentation. And a simple heuristic that I've used over the years is, you know, if I or my team gets asked the same question multiple times, and I usually have a threshold of three, right? I would just create a document and capture the answer to those questions or to that question. It just makes life easier for when those questions might come up in the future, right? So try doing that if you haven't done that. Next up, we have acceptance criteria, which is a simple technique to avoid perfectionism. Now the idea here is simple, right? You just, before you start working on a task, you just define an acceptable state of task completion and then you don't go overboard, right? The idea is to not have everything be perfect from the get go, but just to get to a state where you can then come back to it and define it over time. Maybe get feedback from your stakeholders, get their inputs back to that end, so on and so forth. So it's really useful in that context. And then we have task goal alignment where it's just a simple question, right? If you choose to do a task, ask yourself, is this the right thing to do right now? And if the answer is yes, you also want to be able to answer why, right? And ideally it maps to a set of priorities that you and your team are working on. And the last one on here is something that's really important, right? Is the art of saying no and doing that often? Now I would encourage that you practice the art of saying no out loud for different situations, right? Because knowing what to say and being able to say it in an actual situation that requires it are two completely different things. And I've seen this firsthand where, you know, I knew what exactly I wanted to say, right? But then it didn't flow as smoothly as I would have liked it to, right? So it all boils down to practicing it like any other skill. And I've put a few scripts that you could use as examples on the slide, but the idea is to practice that skill deliberately, right? Now let's take a look at principles related to execution, right, or getting things done. The first one is, and I think I alluded to this in the principle slide, but the first one is just to have a note-taking system which you trust, right? And you'll use it to manage your commitments, your projects, your tasks effectively. And the key underlying idea here, and it doesn't matter how you have your note-taking system laid out, right? But the key idea here is to use your brain to think and only think and not to store things, right? So as long as you can incorporate that idea, you're golden. And another important thing to note here is that while this is mostly in the context of having a digital note-taking system, I've seen folks, myself included, where we also have note-taking systems offline, right? And one example is something that I put on the slide where, I have a waterproof notebook and a pencil in the shower because sometimes you just get these ideas, right? For a problem that you might be deliberating on and you want to capture those ideas, let's just forget them, right? So that's another thing that you could potentially try. Eat the frog. This is a common concept out there as well, right? And what it states is basically you identify one to two challenging, high-impact tasks, right? A previous day. And these are your frogs. And then you complete those tasks, the first thing in the morning, right? You eat them before you do anything else. And ideally, you want to align it with your energy piece like we saw earlier. You know, this concept has other names out there. There's this concept called the concept of MIT, the most important task, but it's all at the end of the day, the same thing, right? Just identify what's the most important one or two things you have to get done and get that out of your way first thing in the morning. The next concept is something that I love, right? It's called the shitty first draft. I read about this in a book related to writing a couple of years ago, and then I also heard about this from Shreyas Doshi, who is very well-known in the PM world, so I'm not going to dig deeper into that. But the idea here is to mainly approach work with a focus on the process of creation rather than the end result and how perfect that end result might be, right? So just get started with that draft PRD that you have to make or something else that you need to do, just get started. And then you can obviously allocate separate, delegated time to edit it, right? But it's always helpful to A, get started, and B, decouple the writing task from the editing task, right? Because they sometimes employ different parts of the brain. Next up, you have triaging or the one-touch rule, right? And the goal of the rule is simple. You basically want to handle each task or piece of work coming your way only once. And ideally, you would do it in a way where it gets funneled into your note-taking system, or you deal with it right then and there, right? But you don't want to be looking at it again and again because then you're just wasting cognitive bandwidth there. The two-minute rule is, as the name suggests, right? If a task takes less than two minutes, just do it. And it applies to emails, it applies to pings. It's just easy to get it done with if it's a small task. The next technique that I've used sometimes is the four-criteria action model. And the way to think about this is, you know, whenever you're deciding what you want to do in any given moment, you want to factor in a couple of things, right? You want to think about the context that you're operating in. You want to think about how much time you have left, right? Maybe it's end of day. You want to think about your energy levels, right? Is it your energy peak period or is it low energy period? And you want to think about the priority of the task, right? So just another, it's like a good way of figuring out which task to work on and why. The last one on here is the personal user manual and I found this to be super effective. And it's a tool that you can use to improve your productivity and also help foster better collaboration with your colleagues, right? And it's, again, it's not static. You keep changing what's in there depending on, you know, how your preferences evolve and how your habits evolve. And just to give an example, here's an actual screenshot from the user manual that I had back at Google. And I think it's good for two reasons, right? It gives your colleagues a peak into your working style and the preferences that you operate with to help collaborate better. And it also forces you to stay disciplined and if required, access from time to time if a specific preference needs to be changed, right? So if you aren't doing this already, consider doing this and it's going to be super helpful. Next up, we have planning. Pretty straightforward, but I do want to call out that when I say planning, I'm not talking about the tasks pertaining to planning, right? For example, okay, our planning or road mapping exercises or whatnot, right? That's a type of task. What I'm referring to here is figuring out what you want to do and incorporating that as part of your upcoming schedules, right? So two things that you can do. One end of day planning where you plan your day the night before and you identify what are your top priorities. Using the techniques we looked at, then your time block as necessary and then you execute on those the next day. And then next you have end of week planning, which is both forward-looking and backward-looking, right? So forward-looking is when it's similar to daily planning, but you're doing it for the upcoming week at large, right? And ideally you want to do this on Fridays so that you don't go into the weekend with attention residue. And then retrospective is where you might want to reflect on the week's work, the tasks that you accomplished and if there are any learnings, capture those learnings. And also maybe look at any course corrections that may have been made and the impact to your priorities as a result of those. All right, and this brings us to the last slide of the techniques section, right? And these are what I think as a set of overlooked aspects for a lot of people, right? These are simple optimizations and they can greatly boost your productivity and are oftentimes backed by science, right? But a lot of people don't do these. So now that you know of these, please don't not do these, right? So I'll quickly go over these. You have workspace optimizations that you can make and then you have self-optimization techniques that you can leverage. In the workspace section, you have light regulation where the idea is to have the right kind of light depending on the time of the day, right? Because it helps regulate your circadian rhythm. It gets you into a peak state of productivity and all the good stuff that comes with it. Another thing that you could consider doing is using blue light blocking glasses after 5 or 6 p.m. in the evening, right? Because that then helps regulate your sleep schedule for the upcoming night. You could consider switching up locations for different types of work, right? Deep versus shallow work where, for instance, if you're working from home, you could have, you know, you could do some deep work from your home office desk, but you might want to respond to your emails from your colleagues. Next up, you have distraction dumping where the idea is to do whatever it takes, whatever works for you, and not get distracted, right? So noise-canceling headphones and distraction apps may be locking yourself in a cubicle sort of a setup. Whatever works for you. And then alertness levels, right? And this is an interesting concept and it's backed by science, where the finding is that, you know, where we look or where the island looks is directly related to the level of alertness that comes from it. So what this means is if you look above your island, your neutral island, you're likely to be more alert, versus say if you're lying down on your couch, you're likely to feel more sleepy or groggy, right? So the way to implement this concept is to consider using standing desks, right? It's good for your legs, it's good for your back. And at the same time, it helps you stay more alert. And at the same time, you could also consider having monitors that are elevated, right? So not necessarily at the same level as you or like your island, but slightly over your island, right? Where it would increase your level of alertness. And then in terms of self-optimization, you could look at consistent sleep schedules and then reducing blue light exposure in bed, right? Again, science-backed reasons for this, you can read up about these, but it does help in the long run. Now, in terms of techniques that you can use to enhance cognitive functioning, these simple hacks that you can maybe try out, right? So one that I use every day is to listen to binaural music or being, right? And it just helps me slip into a state of flow quicker. The other thing that I have started doing, you know, since remote work became a thing is taking power naps, right? If my schedule allows for it. And again, science-backed benefits, but the idea here is to take a nap for 10 to 20 minutes. And what that does is it resets your mind, you know, makes you fresh and effectively recharges your mental capacity, right? And then you can start working on your tasks for the remainder of your afternoon. And last up is the concept of dopamine detox, right? Dopamine, as some of you might know, is the chemical that the brain releases and makes you feel good, right? And it's usually triggered with activities like online shopping, scrolling through social media, watching TV, et cetera. So you want to recognize this, recognize these triggers, right? And make sure that you aren't spending a lot of time on these low leverage tasks, right? And this includes responding to pings or, you know, just scrolling through emails and trying to sort of close out your inbox, right? Those have their place in your calendar. And like I mentioned, you want to have dedicated slots for those, but you don't want to be working on those, you know, just jumping between tasks because that's going to give you the illusion of productivity. It's not ideal, right? And it's not efficient. So recognize those triggers and make sure that you're not giving it to those. All right. So with that, let's recap and take a look at everything that we've seen so far, right? So here's what I want you to take away from this slide. The best productivity system is the one that works for you, right? It's worth experimenting with different systems and combining elements from each to create a system that works for you specifically, but to spend time experimenting and figure out what works best for you based on your working style and your lifestyle. Again, like I said earlier, the specific tools do not matter as much as the underlying concepts that feed into those systems, right? So choose whatever tool you want, but that helps accomplish those, you know, those concepts there. Now, I encourage you to reflect on these ideas and I hope they might resonate with you. And I hope that, you know, it's helpful as you continue to evolve your productivity systems. As promised, here are a few resources for further reading if you're interested. And these are staples in the productivity world and super insightful. So if you have the time to take a look at these. And that's it for today. I realize we covered a lot of ground pretty fast. So please feel free to reach out if you would like more clarifications or if you want to discuss productivity in general. I would also love to learn about your key takeaways from today's session. So drop them in the comments section below and I'm happy to respond if there are any questions. And lastly, if you want to connect on LinkedIn, happy to and please feel free to reach out. Thank you. And I hope you found the session useful. Take care.