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Leitura de 12 min

Treat Your Time as A Product You Own

Summary

The episode begins by asking listeners to identify what’s holding them back from having their best work week. The host suggests that people often have a list of “if only” statements—external factors they believe are preventing better outcomes—but these are rarely vetted or actionable. These wishes typically involve changes outside one’s control, making them ineffective for improving the current week.

The host introduces a mental framework borrowed from the Basecamp book It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work: to put on the “hat” of a product manager or product owner for your own life, schedule, or experience. This shift in perspective encourages treating your time and circumstances as a product you can manage and improve, rather than passively wishing for external changes. The exercise involves taking your “if only” statements and examining them through the lens of a product manager who owns the product (your life).

By adopting this product mindset, you can analyze your “if only” statements to uncover the underlying problems you actually have agency over. This helps transform vague wishes into specific, manageable requests of yourself, identifying what you can change. The goal is to move from feeling stuck by external factors to taking ownership of your time and experience, leading to more effective and satisfying work weeks.

Recommendations

Books

  • It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work — A book from Basecamp that recommends thinking about your company as a product. The host borrows the idea to apply the product manager mindset to your own life and schedule.

Topic Timeline

  • 00:00:00 — Identifying external barriers to a great work week — The host asks what is holding you back from having the best work week of your life. He suggests that most people have a quick answer that involves something outside themselves, like a project, person, time, money, or equipment. These “if only” statements are often unvetted and rarely lead to actual change because they focus on outcomes without a clear path to achieve them.
  • 00:01:39 — Introducing the product manager mindset for your life — The host borrows an idea from the Basecamp book It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work. He introduces the concept of putting on the “hat” of a product manager or product owner for your own life, schedule, or experience. This is a thinking style to give yourself agency and examine your wishes from a managerial perspective.
  • 00:04:10 — Applying the product manager hat to your “if only” statements — After a sponsor break, the host returns to the listener’s list of “if only” or “I wish” statements. He frames these as requests you are making of yourself or your life. The exercise is to put on the product manager hat for your life and analyze these wishes as a product owner would analyze feature requests for a product.
  • 00:04:45 — Treating your life or schedule as a product to manage — The host explains the borrowed concept: think about your life or schedule as a product you own. This means looking at your “if only” statements not as external problems, but as areas where you, as the product manager, can identify and solve problems within the product (your life). The goal is to shift from passive wishing to active ownership of your time and experience.

Episode Info

  • Podcast: Developer Tea
  • Author: Jonathan Cutrell
  • Category: Technology Business Careers Society & Culture
  • Published: 2024-02-28T08:00:00Z
  • Duration: 00:11:12

References

Podcast Info

Transcript

[00:00:00] What is holding you back from having the best work week of your life?

[00:00:18] It’s very likely that if you’re like most people, you have a pretty quick answer and

[00:00:23] usually involves something outside of yourself.

[00:00:27] If only that project was done, if only that person was different, or if only that person

[00:00:34] was gone, if only we had more time, if only we had more money, if only I had a new computer,

[00:00:42] if only we could sell more, if only we could increase our prices, if only I had a raise.

[00:00:52] The list goes on and on and very rarely do our if onlys turn into something that changes.

[00:01:01] This is often because we can imagine some kind of outcome that we care about, some kind

[00:01:06] of effect that we wish was true in the world, but we often have trouble imagining any specific

[00:01:15] route to get there.

[00:01:18] Additionally, that list of if onlys is rarely vetted, and while it may be true that one

[00:01:24] of those if onlys may improve your experience this week, it’s not necessarily the case.

[00:01:30] I’m going to borrow an idea from a book that came from Basecamp a few years ago called

[00:01:39] It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, and we’ve talked about something similar recently, the

[00:01:44] idea that we’re explicitly adopting a thinking style or a hat to wear, if you will, and we’re

[00:01:54] going to put this hat on and we’re going to give ourselves some kind of advice or agency

[00:02:00] that we otherwise wouldn’t have had.

[00:02:04] Before we go much further, I want you to write down three or four of your if onlys, and we’re

[00:02:10] going to use those in the second half of this episode.

[00:02:13] You can write these down in the form of if only or I wish statements, whatever it is

[00:02:18] that resonates with you.

[00:02:19] We’re going to take a quick sponsor break, and then we’re going to come back and finish

[00:02:22] this exercise with a new hat to wear.

[00:02:37] Today’s episode is sponsored by Unblocked.

[00:02:41] When was the last time you had a question about your code base and you spent hours digging

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[00:02:59] Maintaining a shared understanding of your code base gets harder as an engineering team

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[00:03:47] with interruptions.

[00:03:49] Check out Unblocked at getunblocked.com.

[00:03:52] That’s getunblocked.com.

[00:03:55] Thanks again to Unblocked for sponsoring today’s episode of Developer Team.

[00:04:10] So you have your if onlys or your I wish statements.

[00:04:14] And I want you to think about another pattern that follows a similar structure.

[00:04:20] These are requests that you’re making of yourself.

[00:04:26] These are requests that maybe you would make of another person, but if you were to make

[00:04:30] them to something, it would be of your own life.

[00:04:34] You wish your life was different in some particular way.

[00:04:38] Now, the kind of hat I want you to pick up and wear is the hat of a product manager or

[00:04:45] a product owner, whatever your chosen vernacular is, for your life.

[00:04:51] And we’re borrowing this from the book from Basecamp specifically with relation to their

[00:04:57] recommendation of thinking about your company as a product.

[00:05:02] But I want you to think about your life or your schedule, whatever layer you want to

[00:05:06] kind of apply this to, your experience, I want you to think about that just for this

[00:05:12] exercise as a product.

[00:05:15] And the idea here is to look at your requests, your I wishes or your if onlys.

[00:05:20] Look at those through the lens of a product manager.

[00:05:24] Now, what this will really mean is that you’re trying to unlock, you’re trying to decode

[00:05:30] or figure out what is it that’s really the problem here?

[00:05:34] Why is it that you need a new computer, for example?

[00:05:39] What is it exactly about that particular thing that represents a problem to be solved?

[00:05:46] Making this very practical, what makes the user interface, so to speak, of your Monday

[00:05:52] morning so difficult?

[00:05:54] Is it that you have a recurring meeting that kind of feels like a kludgy interface to your

[00:06:00] life?

[00:06:02] Maybe you can move that recurring meeting.

[00:06:04] Now, the idea here of changing your perspective a little bit is to try to understand a little

[00:06:11] bit more about how to solve the core problems, but also from a position of agency.

[00:06:19] You’re shepherding the experience itself, you’re shepherding your schedule as if you

[00:06:26] are owning the schedule.

[00:06:28] And this is a little bit of a shift in thinking rather than you being the user of the thing.

[00:06:34] In other words, you’re kind of affected by or you’re having to live with whatever your

[00:06:38] schedule has become.

[00:06:41] You now are the creator of the thing.

[00:06:44] This is the shift in mindset.

[00:06:47] And you can think about those two sides of yourself.

[00:06:50] You are both the user and the creator in this frame of mind.

[00:06:54] And so you can write down your I-wishes or whatever your kind of retrospective understanding

[00:07:00] of your experience is, but then you can shift into that ownership mindset and it will do

[00:07:08] two things.

[00:07:09] One, it will change the conversation that you have in your own brain away from I wish

[00:07:15] this thing was this particular way and then kind of dead-ending at that, to what is the

[00:07:21] real problem that I can solve or what are the many ways that I could solve that underlying

[00:07:26] problem so that whatever that I wish is goes away either directly or indirectly.

[00:07:32] But it also changes your mindset by helping you clarify where you have agency and where

[00:07:38] you don’t.

[00:07:40] Every good product manager understands that there is some realm of control, some sphere

[00:07:45] of influence that they have that they can actually impact versus things that are outside

[00:07:52] of their control.

[00:07:54] If you operate a web application, a product that is loaded in browsers, something that

[00:08:01] you can’t control is the browser spec.

[00:08:04] You can’t necessarily control your user’s bandwidth.

[00:08:08] You can’t control which browser they choose.

[00:08:11] And so these are all constraints that by owning the product, you can explicitly understand.

[00:08:18] And the same is true for your own schedules, for your own kind of life, for your career.

[00:08:25] If you start thinking through the lens of an ownership perspective, one, you will recognize

[00:08:31] that you do indeed have agency over parts and pieces, perhaps more than you expected

[00:08:36] to and two, you will more clearly define the boundaries where you actually don’t have

[00:08:42] as much agency.

[00:08:44] This can be freeing because it tells you what things you can affect and it gives you the

[00:08:49] domain that you can operate in.

[00:08:52] Sometimes the outcomes of this particular exercise is that there’s an uncomfortable

[00:08:57] reality that you have to square with, but having the knowledge of where you can make

[00:09:02] an impact is necessary for you to be able to make the most impactful decisions you can.

[00:09:10] So next time you have a frustrating day at work or a stressful week, you can pull this

[00:09:16] tool out, identify what is actually the problem here?

[00:09:21] What are the areas that I have control, that I have some influence over?

[00:09:25] How might I affect this as if it were a product that I own?

[00:09:32] Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode of Developer Tea.

[00:09:35] Hopefully this is a new lens, a new framing on an age-old problem of being dissatisfied

[00:09:43] in some aspect of your life or hoping that something changes, not really knowing what

[00:09:48] to do about it.

[00:09:50] This might give you some traction that you previously didn’t have and I’d be curious

[00:09:54] if you do go through with this exercise, what does it yield for you?

[00:09:58] I’d love to know.

[00:10:00] You can tell me in the Developer Tea Discord community, head over to developertea.com slash

[00:10:05] discord to get started totally free.

[00:10:07] Actually it is always free, not just getting started for free.

[00:10:11] That’s developertea.com slash discord.

[00:10:13] Thank you again to today’s sponsor, Unblocked.

[00:10:16] If you would rather spend your time coding instead of digging for answers or dealing

[00:10:20] with questions from colleagues, give Unblocked a try.

[00:10:24] Unblocked provides helpful and accurate answers to questions about your code base and you

[00:10:28] can get started with Unblocked at getunblocked.com.

[00:10:32] If you’re enjoying this discussion, if you enjoy this podcast more generally, I would

[00:10:37] love to have your review in iTunes.

[00:10:39] This is the best way to help other engineers like you find and decide to listen to Developer

[00:10:44] Tea.

[00:10:45] I haven’t checked this fact or figure, but I’m pretty sure there’s more podcasts than

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[00:11:01] leaving a review.

[00:11:02] Thanks so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea.

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