To add new posts, simply add a file in the _posts directory that follows the convention YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-post.ext and includes the necessary front matter. Take a look at the source for this post to get an idea about how it works.

Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

def print_hi(name)
  puts "Hi, #{name}"
end
print_hi('Tom')
#=> prints 'Hi, Tom' to STDOUT.

Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll Talk.

Good companies will offer new employees a well structured onboarding process. This means there is some kind of checklist for you to follow, with tasks that ensure plenty of interaction within and across teams. You know what to do on your first days and who to talk to. Onboarding is considered an important process that is not rushed and everyone in the company happily contributes to making new arrivals feel welcome and valued. This process is reviewed frequently, those who have just been through it are asked to offer feedback and this feedback is actually fed back into the process. So far so good.

So by now you’re on your way to knowing the teams and the people, familiarising yourself with process, learning the tools. That’s all quite generic stuff that is also quite common sense. Your biggest differentiator as a product leader at your new role will be whether you can successfully relate to and empathise with the people who use your product. It is them you are working for – you are their champion within your organisation. The best way to do that is by becoming an active user of your product.

In a B2C product, or on the B2C side of a marketplace product, this might be relatively simple depending on the industry you’re in. Simply go out and use your product. Take rides, buy products, use services. In some industries this might be a little harder to do authentically, but there is often a way to achieve this.

In B2B this can get more complex, but at the core it’s the same – get your new team members to go out and actually use the product in the same kind of environment where you will find your real users. This might require drawing on your relationship with key clients, so that your team members can actually go to them and see what it feels like to use the product in real life.

At Quandoo, for instance, we make products for restaurants. When a new team member arrives, they have to go to a restaurant and work a shift as a host. This is, I assure you , terrifying. It is also a complete game-changer on how you view the product and how you relate to your users. No amount of reading user research or looking at analytics will replace the nervousness that you get as service starts and people start showing up at the door of the restaurant. The hesitation to decide whether you can take a large group that just walked up to the door without a reservation cannot be simulated in focus groups. The experience completely changes how one views the product and the users.

So the takeaway here is – onboarding a Product Manager is, for the most part, just like onboarding any new employee and we benefit from following overall best practices. However, there is a special component which is how to genuinely build empathy for your users. Here you should not spare any efforts. Products built with real empathy stand out. Make it real, and in the long run this will make a difference in your product. It will show.

Mixed co-located and remote teams are probably the most difficult to get right. If your team is entirely co-located or entirely remote, you can optimize for whatever your situation is. However, when you have people in both circumstances you have to identify which situations put people in one group at a disadvantage versus the other and find ways to mitigate those. The biggest challenge is ensuring that everyone has a level playing field. When you succeed, you end up being able to get the best of both worlds – reaping the benefits that a particular geography might provide to your business and the global reach that distributed teams can provide all at the same time. If you fail, you might end up alienating part of your team or, at the very least, not letting them contribute to their full potential.

I should add that a balanced, effective workplace is always a challenge, regardless of location. So even though I am listing issues that might be bigger in remote, and particularly in mixed remote environments, it does not mean that they magically disappear in other settings.

Contracts shouldn’t matter

Let us start with the basics – your contract. For various legal reasons which I am unequipped to discuss in detail, the way people are hired can be different in remote and co-located teams. For instance, companies who hire remote people internationally typically hire them as businesses, not as individuals. This naturally creates different requirements and obligations around things like taxes and benefits (holidays, vacations, health and pensions, equipment allowances and so forth). However, all of that should not matter one inch in how the teams operate. The way the company is set up should provide an “abstraction layer” over any contractual issues so that the end result is having all of this be completely transparent in everyday life. Everyone needs to access the same tools the same way, take part in the same ceremonies, have access to the same information. Anything else is segregating your people into separate groups.

New work method, old work practices

There are old patterns ingrained in the way “traditional” companies operate that can be hard to break, or even to identify. The most common, and most insidious, is the heavy reliance on synchronous meetings and discussions. Co-located teams favor synchronous because that’s just the way we naturally operate. This can be a challenge for distributed folks particularly because of time zones. It will either mean that you’re only available to participate in those important conversations during the limited time window in which your time zone overlaps, or that you’ll have to sacrifice some aspect of your personal life to be able to “be there” some more.

Thing is, you don’t have to. The vast majority of synchronous meetings held at your typical organization can be easily removed from the calendar and reorganized. There are plenty of tools and techniques that can help eliminate a lot of synchronous communication. Go asynchronous as much as possible.

Same experience across the board

Meetings in mixed teams are very unfair for remote people. Ensuring adequate, even participation for the remote participants is very hard. Some companies adopt the “if one person is remote, everybody is remote” practice. But there is a reason why this is so hard to achieve. Meeting in-person is just better. The huge difference in communication bandwidth means that no matter how good your setup, people who are physically together will just communicate better. It’s also more natural.

“Out of band” communications

When you share an office with people, you will quite frequently bump into each other. Conversations happen serendipitously. Information flows informally quite spontaneously. Decisions are made that are not recorded or communicated. This sort of communication that happens outside of any channel that was designed for the purpose is sometimes referred to as “out of band” communication, a reference to the telecommunications concept. Out of band communication will severely hamper your mixed remote/onsite team. And

Impromptu communications and how remote teams require you to be very explicit about opportunities to foster serendipity. This includes both serious work and socialising.

Team building

It is extremely hard to build a strong team when everyone is remote, and even harder to do so when only a part of it is remote. Teams rely on personal bonding – if not friendship. Personal bonding, and friendship, arise when people discover other dimensions that they agree on. I like dogs – but I also like cats. I have three children. I have a certain taste in music. I like my coffee in a certain way. I once went to a baseball game, and actually really enjoyed it. So many little things, that only come up in broad conversations about fairly random topics.

Remote communication, however, is always very specific. When you reach out to someone on Slack it is to discuss about a specific work-related topic. It leaves very little room for the serendipitous discovery that is the basis of bonding and friendship. So you end up having to be very deliberate about making this sort of conversation possible. It might work, but it can also feel very forced. And either way, it adds up to the “cognitive burden” of remote work. How you end up always having to think about how to do things that would otherwise come naturally to you.

If you have mixed on-site and remote teams, of course this gets worse. You have a part of your team that is open to the bonding made possible by random discovery, and another part that is not. No amount of “meet ups” can cover for the fact that half of your team can see the look on my face when I come in to work while the other half cannot.

Sure, people are different and everyone slides back and forth on the scale between “I need isolation” and “I need to talk to people”. Some people are “intimidated” by all the sometimes forced interaction in modern open-plan offices. A good office will provide a setting in which someone can retreat into “quiet mode” when needed. But a physical office offers the possibility of having both things, which is a lot harder to do when remote.

Cognitive burden

We have spent our entire lives working and collaborating with people that are physically next to us. It’s how families work. It’s how schooling works.  Being together with other people and talking to them in person is just how we’re wired to operate. When you’re not operating like this, everything adds overhead. You start having to think how to do things that are natural otherwise. Want to share some abstract idea? Grab a marker and get your team to look at the whiteboard in the corner. Except if you’re remote, you have to log in to some app (which you’ve previously had to evaluate, select, purchase, and set up for your team), figure out how to convey your idea in that app, share a link to said app, and hope everybody can access it and knows how to use it.

Doing things remotely requires that you think about the right way to do it at all times. This adds a big cognitive burden. Sure, even when co-located you still have to think about proper meeting etiquette and practices, how to be respectful of other people’s time and how to set proper context for discussions (going back to the “grab a marker and head to the whiteboard” idea). However when remote you’re constantly thinking about things that in other settings would come to you naturally. In the long run, this is just tiring. You want to be spending your brain power on the object of your work, not on the work itself. The “what”, not the “how”. Remote working forces the “how” to take up a huge share of your mind. Sure, you also have to think about “how” in any setting, but the proportions are not the same.

And maybe that is the gist of it. Remote work is one of the great advancements of the last decades, made possible by our wonderful new technology and work practices. It solves a lot of problems, both on a macro scale as well as for individuals. For me personally, remote work was hugely important in building my career and I would not have come this far without it. However, it is still far from perfect and it is important that the challenges around it are discussed. I won’t say I’ll never work remotely again, but after doing it for six years I am certainly grateful to be able to walk into an office and be able to see how my colleagues are feeling without having to make use of emojis.

Now everything has a price tag attached. How much does an hour with your kids cost? What about an early morning walk? Going to the gym costs your monthly membership, plus the hours that you will spend there.

“Work-life separation” ceases to exist.

This is not only bad for your personal life, if such a thing exists. It’s bad for your work. When you drag on through a day where you’re clearly not getting anything done, you’re setting yourself up for an even worse day tomorrow. How much more productive could you be if you could take a thirty minute break? To put things in perspective, an office worker can get up and go have coffee. Perhaps meet some people in the cafeteria or go down to the local coffee shop. This won’t cost you anything other than the price of the coffee you buy. You will not be adding up in your mind the money you’re losing by not working.

Thinking like this is trap.

She would turn fourteen next July. When I got her, my wife and I had been dating for one year. I have turned from a careless young man into a father of three, with quite a few adventures along the way. She was always there.

My daughters will come home from school shortly, and we’re going to tell them. They will get to say goodbye to their friend.

I cannot imagine a strongest, purest kind of friendship and loyalty. I will always remember my truest friend. Rest in peace.

Please give your dog a hug for me today.

Direct Yourself

Being able to carry out tasks without direct oversight is a critical skill when you are not working collocated to your peers and managers. As a remote worker, you need to be able to understand the business goal of the task you are working on so that you are able to make autonomous decisions when questions come up. You also need to ensure you have all the information you need when the task is handed to you.

While not the case for every remote company, it is often true that teams will be spread out across many time zones. This would put your company on levels four or five of the “Scale of Remote Working” proposed by Buffer’s Joel Gascoigne. This makes self-direction even more important. If you failed to understand your task’s goals or failed to ask for what you needed beforehand, imagine the delays introduced in your work if you have stop and wait several hours for a response from the other side of the world. This also means that when planning your work you need to take time zones into account. If you know you need answers from someone who is some hours ahead of you, make sure you get to that in your morning.

There are limitations in the information that can be obtained beforehand for any task. There will be times when not all information is available at first. Hence, you should also…

Be Curious

In times of increasingly faster change in all aspects of life, curiosity is quickly becoming the most important trait for individual success. People who are curious can foresee trends. They can link apparently disparate pieces of information to inform decisions – or questions, which are often just as useful as answers.

Curious people tend to try to look for answers themselves before turning to others for help. This enables two things. First, it leads to more original solutions. Curiosity is often directly linked to creativity, which is not only about work typically perceived as “creative” such as the arts but is also about coming up with unique and innovative solutions to everyday issues.

If curiosity makes you want to look for answers yourself, it also means that you’ll be interrupting others less often. And when working remotely, interruptions are worse than they are in an office. When you can’t look over someone’s shoulders to see what they’re up to you’re missing a lot of signals that we use to tell whether that person can be interrupted or not. Are they distracted, or do they look focused? Do they have their headphones on? So when you can’t rely on those signals, your chances of interrupting someone at a bad time are much greater. Therefore, people who are driven to finding answers on their own through their own curiosity have an advantage here.

Even though not interrupting people is important, there is a balance to achieve between that and deciding to call for help when it is no longer productive to work on your own. This is, of course, always a judgment call that is not easy to get right.

Communicate

Being a good “communicator” has more than one dimension when applied to remote work. The first aspect to this is how well people can convey ideas. Whatever medium a message uses, how it is sent across is always a good indication of the sender’s way of thinking. If the message is conveyed in a very roundabout, complex way, that is a strong indication that the thinking that went on behind that message is also maybe not so straightforward.

The second aspect to consider is the ability to adequately use the appropriate communication for the different sorts of messages that need to be sent across. When should you use email or instant messaging? Who should you CC: on that email? These all depend on a variety of factors which include the content of the message, whether a response is required and the urgency of that response. Also, all of these factors vary a lot between different organizations.

Note that none of this means you should hire only “extroverts”. In fact, there are plenty of people who are quite introverted, or just shy, and yet communicate really well online. Online communication, particularly written communication, can actually make it easier for introverts to communicate, leveling the playing field a little bit – another benefit of being distributed.

Dunja Lazic, Content & Partnerships Manager at remote company Toggl, shares this view:

They don’t necessarily need to be extroverts, fabulous speakers, or writers, but only good communicators who are effective in transmitting the message they want to send.

Write Well

Even though writing well is an important skill under any circumstances, it is even more so for remote work. Plenty of studies prove the correlation between writing skill and higher salaries. For instance, Grammarly published a study where they evaluated the profile of several freelancers on an online work marketplace across different industries and found that those who were better written received better ratings from their clients and commanded higher rates.

Remote companies tend to rely more on written communication. Process is written in a wiki. Status updates are often emailed out or entered into some application. The water cooler chat happens through instant messaging. Often, a large percentage of conversation about work happens through (written) chat tools. That’s why being able to effectively convey your ideas in written is such a huge skill for remote work.

This does not even mean that people have to be good writers in the traditional sense, that is, people who have perfect grammar and are able to write quality prose. While that is, of course, important, there is a lot of more informal writing that goes in during remote work that is also important to master. Think of your team’s Slack channels. There is a lot going on in there that is not formal writing at all (emojis!) and yet some people communicate much better than others.

Care About Your Work

I’ll use a personal anecdote to illustrate this one. A long time ago, I was tasked with doing the non-technical interviews for software developers and testers at the (remote) company I then worked for. The goal for these interviews was largely to identify attitude and culture fit – do these people really like what they do, are they passionate enough that they’ll want to make a difference? So I went in to interview a candidate whose resumé seemed pretty good. The guy had a good amount of experience at relevant places working on problems quite similar to the ones we were faced with. He seemed like a keeper. And yet, during the interview, there was a certain sparkle missing. When talking to someone who is passionate about what they do, it is not difficult to “prod” them in the right direction that will get them talking excitedly about some aspect of their work. When you can’t make that happen, that’s a yellow light.

This guy just could not be phased by anything – he appeared to like every unpleasant situation I threw at him. At some point, the candidate exclaimed: “I’m not allergic to anything”. Well, here’s the thing – you should be allergic. You should be allergic to things you believe prevent you from doing a good job. If you don’t care enough then I don’t want to work with you.

People who are good at their jobs are usually quite opinionated about what works and what does not, and about how they prefer to do their work. You know which tools work for you, and you’d like to use them. You know how much process you like and how you like to structure your work. Mind you, this does not mean you are inflexible and unable to work any other way or to follow existing process. But when asked, you certainly know what you like and what you’re allergic to.

And here’s a bonus – know why you work remotely (or want to).

There are plenty of good reasons to want to work remotely. Being able to travel, live in a more remote area, being able to stay close to family, or perhaps you work best at unusual hours… Perhaps your significant other has to move around a lot because of their job and you want something that you can keep through those changes. Maybe you’re just allergic to offices.

Whatever your reasons for wanting to work remotely, you should know what they are. Being unhappy at your current office job is not a good reason to switch to being remote. There are good remote jobs and bad remote jobs, just as there are good office jobs and bad office jobs. Yes, people tend to be happier about their jobs when they work remotely. But just as there are people who thrive in remote jobs, there are those who fail.

Remote jobs are more lonely. They require more discipline in terms of setting your hours and goals, at the risk of becoming either unproductive or of completely erasing any boundary between work and personal life. The dynamics with colleagues tend to be very different across remote companies. Also, as being distributed is a more recent way to organize a company, you need to be aware that there is a greater variety in how companies set themselves up to work. Be prepared to find some quirks along the way, and maybe work to improve them.

Just as the rewards are great and finding your stride in remote work is a life-changing experience, you need to do some soul searching to figure out if it’s right for you. If you find it is, then you can hone in on the skills and traits you need to be successful.

My own situation is not helped by the fact that I work remotely. This means I get to sit by myself in my home office talking to people from strange locations in a foreign language, and then I get paid. Very fishy. I have tried explaining this to people over the age of 70 multiple times, and I have always failed. All I get is a puzzled look and some snarky remark. Come on, I know you’re really playing poker. You can tell me.

There is plenty of very smart discussion about what “Product Management”, and therefore a Product Manager, is. I will not go down that rabbit hole. I will say that if it’s true that we’re CEOs of anything, somebody forgot to adjust my rate.

What might be useful is to share very specific examples of what I do. How do I spend my day? What are the actual tasks I perform? That is not seen so often, and occasionally people ask me about it.

A typical day around here starts at 7 AM, still in bed, when I wake up and start clearing “human” emails. These are things someone actually wrote to me that require reading or action. Then at around 7:30ish, the baby wakes up. I stop what I’m doing, change Theo’s diapers, play with him a little bit and get breakfast ready. After breakfast, usually by around 8:30, I hand Theo off to someone and head to my home office.

Why am I boring you with these details? Because it took me a while to be OK with this routine. It bothered me that I had to stop to take care of the baby for a while when I wanted to just keep plowing through my stuff. I kept trying to figure out ways to not have to stop. Then it hit me – isn’t that one of the great benefits of remote work? And why did you have kids anyway, to hand them off at the first opportunity? So now I handle this differently. I am very much “in the moment” when I’m with the kids, and I actually cherish those moments. I’ve also started waking up a little earlier so I can compensate, but that’s easy to do.

Alright, so now I’m back to work and to doing “Product Management” things. When I get back to my home office, I start working on the JIRA tickets for my team. Read comments, provide feedback, ask questions and unblock people so that work can keep flowing. Since we’re a distributed team, there’s always a nice queue of tickets to handle by my morning, and people waiting to get their work flowing. It’s a nice way to warm up the brain for the rest of the morning.

Then comes the really beautiful moment of remote work. Since I am a few hours ahead of my company’s offices and of most of the Product and Design teams, I have the rest of the morning pretty much to myself. I put this to use by getting into “deep work” – longer tasks that require concentration or creative effort. Writing specs, working on mockups, planning projects.

Then it’s off to lunch. Lunchtime is both an opportunity to be with my family and also a pretty hectic moment where help is needed to get everyone fed and ready for whatever they do in the afternoon (usually school).

Then in the afternoon, things get busier as more people are around by this time of day. I’m now usually chatting to people on our internal chat platform, attending our teams’ daily stand-up meetings or other meetings. And because of the time zone differences, this will sometimes go on until 7 or even 8 PM.

What are those meetings about, you might ask? A considerable part of Product Management, at least in a larger team, is to ensure that what people are doing is aligned to your product’s vision and business goals. Keep all the parts moving in the same direction. So you end up getting involved in a ton of different projects, large and small, and you have to ensure that your particular part of the product is heading where it’s supposed to go.

The attentive reader will now be thinking “but wait, the guy starts at 7 AM and works until 8 PM, that’s crazy!”. What I haven’t mentioned is one of the other perks of remote work. It is not uncommon for me to take short breaks during the day. This can be a 15-minute break to get some coffee with my wife, or half an hour to go out and pay some bills. So it makes the entire day much lighter, as I can regularly refresh my head. Often I will still think about whatever I was doing at work during the break, but that’s actually great as the change of scenery often sparks new ideas.

So overall, I’d guess half of my time is spent on individual, focused work while the other half is spent talking to other people. I am pretty sure this would not be like this if I worked in an office. Or maybe it would, it’s been a while since I’ve done that regularly…

† A sitcom that originally aired between 1994 and 2004. Really, you never watched Friends?

Earlier this week I was considering a change of direction for a personal project. It seemed good at the time, and even though it would mean quite a bit of extra work in the log run the benefits seemed worth it. This morning, while reading a friend’s newsletter, a new idea came to me that would give me the same benefit that I was looking for with hardly any of the extra work the previous idea required. Had I not given this a week to mature, I would have either lost a bunch of time due to rework (bad) or would have been stuck with something that required a lot more work in the long run (awful).

First of all, there are different kinds of decisions that we need to identify. My hypothesis is that while you should always be fast for some kinds of decisions, there are others that are best left to simmer for a while.

Consider prioritising support tickets. This is clearly a case where speed is beneficial. In they come, out they go, delighting your users along the way with your fast response times. You might not be able to make on the spot decisions about all of them, but driving your average response time downwards seems to be always a good idea.

Support tickets are work items that, in general, tend to require little effort to tackle. If you make a wrong decision, you might lose a few hours of time from one engineer. That seems a reasonable price to pay for delighting your users in all the other cases where you get it right.

Let’s switch now to important, sweeping product changes. Suppose you’re evaluating a large project that will require multiple months of product and engineering effort. Does it really make a difference if you start that project today or after a couple of days reviewing some data and taking some walks thinking about whether you should really take your product there?

The decision-making process in these two cases is likely very different. With the former you can follow some general guidelines and make a call with little data and some thoughtful questions that are often easily answered – How big is this ticket? How many people does it affect, and how often? Which people? Is there a known solution that fits into the product? The latter case, however, requires answering broader questions that are not so simple. How big is this, and do we believe our estimate? Does this make sense in terms of your roadmap? Who is going to work on it, and therefore who is not going to work on other things? Each of these questions is more complex and will often require consulting other people in the organization. Importantly, some of these questions can affect your product positioning. These are the decisions that, in my opinion, should not be made quite so quickly.

This is another case where you should take commonly found advice with a grain of salt. Always being fast can lead you to wrong decisions while always being slow will certainly drag you down. Be mindful of how you approach each decision you need to make, to ensure that you’re using the appropriate process for each situation.

In any profession, we should always strive to keep curious and to cultivate a beginner’s mindset. Always learn, so you always improve. Rolling stones gather no moss, as the famous philosopher Robert Allen Zimmerman once said paraphrasing one of our Mediterranean forebears.

What do you need to learn to build great products?

What should you learn, though? This is a question that is particularly tough for Product Managers or for anyone looking to build an online product. The skillset required is very broad. For Product Managers, this role often sits smack in the middle of a bunch of different areas. To make matters worse, product management means different things for different companies. Some require technical experience. Others require design knowledge. Others might want Product Managers focused on user research or data-driven optimization. Or none of those. Or all of those together.

Spend your time actually learning, rather than looking for courses.

I was facing this challenge, so I started looking up courses that I could take online to help me advance my skills. But the wide variety of courses that you can take is just staggering, and you end up spending so much of your free time just looking for the good ones, rather than actually learning something. That is why I decided to put together this newsletter. To help others spend their time actually learning, rather than combing through the interwebs looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack that is the current market for online courses.

Sign up to receive a monthly curated list of the best online courses that will help you learn how to build a product. {#signuptoreceiveamonthlycuratedlistofthebestonlinecoursesthatwillhelpyoulearnhowtobuildaproduct}<div align=center style="background-color:#EEE; font: 15px arial, sans-serif;"> </div>

1. Inventory {#1inventory}

As the saying goes, what is measured improves. So the initial step towards improving how we use our time is to estimate how we currently use our time, to set a baseline against which we can start measuring. First, make a list of all of the larger categories of work that you currently do during the week. Then estimate how many hours you spend on each of those things in a typical week. You may find it difficult to estimate how long you spend on things. This is very normal because often we don’t pay much attention. It’s not a problem, though, as we will have the opportunity to adjust as we move along with the method.

Example of what your spreadsheet should look like

Notice that the focus here is on larger buckets, and not individual tasks. So we should see things like “Personal branding” rather than “Research cute cat image for blog post about the internet”. Also, I have both work (“Client Work”) and non-work things (“Guitar”) in there. Some of these non-work things are important to me, and I want to make sure I carve out the time to pursue them. The most glaring omission from my spreadsheet is family time, but I assume that is what happens on all of the blank spaces in there.

If you want to work towards some goal, you need to make sure it fits into your life. And the only way to do that is to be very aware of where it is your time is going.

2. Distribute {#2distribute}

Now that you know how you currently spend your time, figure out how much time you want to spend on each of the major categories you have identified from now on, including the projects that will lead you towards your personal goals. Be honest with yourself – will you really consistently manage the to do all of this?

There’s a trick I use to make this easier to remember during my days. I have a separate calendar in Google Calendar called “Time Planning”. In this calendar, I create events that represent chunks of time at least one hour that I plan to spend on each project. This way I can clearly see on my calendar what I’m supposed to be spending time on during each day, and I also get notifications when I’m supposed to change to the next project. Here’s what that looks like (the gray blocks are my “Time Planning” calendar):

The gray blocks indicate what I am supposed to work on.

3. Track {#3track}

Now you’re ready to start executing. This is the simplest part of the method, but also the hardest to do right consistently. Essentially, all you have to do is to track diligently all of the time you spend. Get hold of your favorite time tracking tool (I like Toggl), and use it from the moment you start working to the moment you go to bed. Measure everything that you do.
At first, you’ll likely forget to turn on the time tracker. Toggl Desktop helps with that, as it pops up a warning when you’re not tracking anything. It is annoying at first but helps you form the habit of using the tool. Plus, you see it less and less as you get used to following the method.

Yes, that’s what I am doing.

If you use a productivity technique such as the Pomodoro Technique, you will see it fits this method perfectly. You simply determine how many pomodoros you will do for each project. And if you use pomodoros regularly, you may even be able to do away with time tracking and simply count how many pomodoros you use for each project.

4. Adapt {#4adapt}

Once you start running this method, you will see that the work you really do differs quite considerably from what you thought you did. Don’t worry about it, that’s fine. Keep tracking your time. After about a week, go back to the Time Planning spreadsheet, and armed with a report from your time tracking tool (again, Toggl has some nice, and easy reports) check where the differences are.

Toggl’s lovely reports

For instance, let’s suppose you initially thought you spent two hours per week on your personal branding activities, and you check your weekly report and find that you actually spend a lot more than this. What should that teach you? Either that you need to optimize those activities so you can do them in less time (automate!) or that you need to take time away from other activities to account for this. Either way, you now have data that you can use to prioritize your time based on your priorities.

I recommend reviewing your time tracking reports once a week and comparing to your time planning spreadsheet. Then you can continuously adjust, based on the way you’re currently using your time and making room as new projects come in and old ones end.

Try it, and let me know how it goes!