How to Categorize Your Activities to Feel Productive
Understand how to categorize your daily managerial activities into information gathering, decision-making, nudging, and being a role model. This lesson helps you recognize the value in each task to improve productivity and find satisfaction in your management role.
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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:
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You’re primarily working through other people, so there’s less to feel that you have tangibly done by yourself.
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You do dozens of little tasks rather than fewer substantial ones.
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You are context-switching throughout the day, which can be tiring and frustrating.
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More of your time is spent in meetings and discussions, which do not produce a concrete document, block of code, or production deployment.
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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 ...