Product Manage Your Life: Tracking Your Opportunities and Prioritizing Them — Stephanie Muxfeld
This is the second article in a series about applying product management principles to your life. My goal with this series is to help you incorporate principles that product managers use to reduce the amount of chaos you experience in your day to day while increasing your peace, joy, and satisfaction along the way!
The first article gave you an introduction to the concept of using product management principles in your life. This second article will focus on how to avoid overwhelm when you realize how many opportunities you have in your problem space, along with quick tips for tracking and prioritizing those opportunities. As I mentioned in the first article, I’ll craft all the articles in this series to take only about five minutes to read. I know you’re busy! I hope you’ll read a few, take away what you need, and leave the rest.
As always, reach out to me over social media or email if you’d like to chat or have topic suggestions!
How to Minimize Overwhelm
I have the benefit of talking to many different people over a month. I talk to people at my company, at different clients, sometimes I speak at colleges or industry groups. Occasionally I even get the opportunity to socialize with friends. One thing that is consistent among all these groups is a feeling of overwhelm. It’s so easy to get overwhelmed with life, no matter what stage of life we’re at. It’s natural, and there’s nothing to be ashamed or embarrassed about there. But one consequence of overwhelm is that it can sometimes cause people to become stuck. The overwhelm becomes so strong and scary that sometimes we become scared to make any change at all.
If you feel stuck, or you just feel plain overwhelmed, know that you can work your way through it. I’ve felt that way more times than I can even recall. The first step I suggest is a brain dump. Make a list of all the things on your mind. In this article, we’re assuming you’ve already worked through your problem space (if not, please see the first article in this series). For this exercise focus on your opportunities to address that problem. Don’t worry about how many opportunities you have, because we’ll prioritize them later.
Ways to Track Your Opportunities
There are many ways you can track your list once you’ve made it. Are you a pen and paper person, or do you like to keep your lists digitally? I’m a fan of Trello, because it syncs across all my devices and I get satisfaction from moving my opportunity cards to a new column when I’m done with them. It’s a lot like crossing them off a paper list. The important thing is to find a way to track them that works for you and stick with it.
You want a tracking system that you’ll use consistently. As you uncover new opportunities, add them to the list in real-time. Don’t keep them in your brain! That takes up mental space and part of what we’re trying to do by writing them down is to free up your mental space for more important work. The more threads you keep open in your brain, even if you’re not actively thinking about them, the less power your brain has available for all the other important work it needs to do for you.
One (Very) Quick Way to Prioritize Your Opportunities
Once you have a list of your opportunities, you should prioritize it so you can start with the highest priority items. Since you’re going to be adding to the list regularly, that means that you’ll have to re-prioritize regularly too. I like to prioritize my list weekly. I like to do that as part of my Sunday evening prep work for the coming week. It’s part of the routine that helps me feel prepared to start the week strong. You should figure out the cadence that makes sense for you based on how often you’re adding items to your list.
Because I like to keep this entire Product Manage Your Life process as simple as possible, my favorite prioritization tool is a simple 2x2 matrix. I put effort into the x-axis and value on the y-axis and I plot my opportunities into the four quadrants. I’ve included an example below. You can see in red my priority order based on plotting my sample opportunities on the effort/value matrix. This is a very quick way to enable value-based decision making. If you spend more than about thirty seconds thinking about each opportunity, you’re overthinking it. This is meant to be quick and lightweight! If you did it wrong, adjust it later. The most important thing is to get started.
Originally published at https://stephaniemuxfeld.com on January 27, 2020.