How to Categorize Your Activities to Feel Productive
Learn how to categorize your activities so that you spend most of your time productively.
We'll cover the following...
Feelings of satisfaction as a manager
Regardless of how organized you are, various forces act against you feeling happily productive. As a programmer, I could look back at the code that I’d written at the end of the day, point at it, and say “I did that.” I could also point at our ticket tracker and say, “I did those tickets.” Even on frustrating days where there was a production issue or something gnarly to debug and fix, we would eventually solve the problem, commit the code, and again I could point at it and say, “I did that!”
Several reasons explain why it’s often hard to find this satisfaction as a manager:
-
You’re primarily working through other people, so there’s less to feel that you have tangibly done by yourself.
-
You do dozens of little tasks rather than fewer substantial ones.
-
You are context-switching throughout the day, which can be tiring and frustrating.
-
More of your time is spent in meetings and discussions, which do not produce a concrete document, block of code, or production deployment.
-
You’re more likely to be interrupted and just end up not being able to get your work done anyway!
If you’re unable to frame all of your managerial work in a way that makes you ...