Unless you live in some alternate reality (and maybe you do), every Product Manager I know always has a lot going on each day. We go to meetings, we take calls from Sales, we answer emails from Sales, we give presentations, we work on strategic analysis, we go to meetings. You know the drill. At the end of each day, you look back and wonder,
- “What the Hell did I accomplish today?”
- “Did I even make a dent in my task list?”
- “Where did the time go?”
- “I’m never gonna get to take a vacation.”
On the off-chance that you do actually get to sit at your desk (or at least with your laptop in the airport terminal waiting to board your delayed flight out of LGA), you might want to start logging how you use your time.
I work remotely, so to help my manager understand how I spend my time (and to highlight my accomplishments), I send him a weekly update on what I did during the week and what I’ve got on deck for next week. It’s not a minute-by-minute accounting, but it since we don’t see each other on a regular basis and we work in different timezones, we both find it beneficial have the summaries.
I used to just look at my calendar and the my completed items on my To-Do list to find the items for my summary, but I found that I was missing a lot of tasks that were spur-of-the-moment or -in-my-free-time. They weren’t items the typically made it on to my To-Do list and unless they were big blocks of time, I didn’t put them on the calendar, either.
What I found that helps me is a great little app called Task Blaze by Brad Isaac (who also blogs about Goals, Motivation, and Software @ Persistance Unlimited).
It works like a task timer, but it updates your MS Outlook or Google calendar (and even Twitter) automatically. It creates a marker in the calendar so you can see exactly how long you worked on a task and you have a record for when you have to document your time for a client or manager.
It’s worked much better than other methods for me. If you are already used to using some other timer mechansim, then this should be a breeze for you. It took me a while to get into the habit, but now it works great for me.