Crisis Mode

When everything starts to slip it's time for professional spring cleaning

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New Product-led Growth cohort starting 1st of October 2024:

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There’s a specific moment when you carry something heavy from your car to your apartment, and you’re on the verge of it falling out of your hand, but not quite yet.

It’s that moment where it takes all your remaining strength to keep it from falling and breaking, and it’s very uncomfortable.

It’s the same feeling that comes over us when things are starting to slip in our jobs. Everything becomes hard to keep from breaking, and we start to feel overwhelmed.

This theme has many variations, but they all have one thing in common: A slow, steady decline into chaos, a sudden realization, and a forced hand. It usually ends in three possible ways:

• You quit…

• …someone else makes that decision for you.

• You go into your crisis mode and recover.

Let’s map it out.

Stage 1: Oh, S***

Whether you are not living up to your expectations or those that have been placed on you, a lot of us end up in a situation where everything is seemingly just too much. I remember multiple occasions in jobs where I was hyper-motivated and had a strong start and energy to change and move things forward.

Time passes.

Until the moment when I entered the “Oh S***” stage.

With time, a slow erosion started to happen, which is hard to notice from a day-to-day perspective unless you’re used to zoom out and notice the early signs:

• Especially in growing companies, more and more scaling processes complicated my daily life slowly but surely

• “Little” favors for others in the org to accommodate their requests that turned out to be not-so-little

• The backlog of little things I meant to get done started to become bigger every day

• You are doing things you’re not sure anymore why you are doing them in the first place

S***, how did I end up here?

Stage 2: Clarity

I was in this very situation about one year ago (and many times before that) before I hired an assistant to help me out with some tasks. I was overwhelmed and started to feel my motivation to go down the drain slowly.

I talked to Teresa Torres about this issue, and she suggested Dan Martell’s “Buy Back Your Time,” which I immediately started to listen to on a walk the same day.

I never finished the book but after two chapters, I understood the gist of what he was trying to say: There’s a specific value to your time making it worth it to outsource specifically things you don’t like doing. Even if the quality might not be what you are used to it may be still worth it.

The latter part is important because I’m a control freak when it comes to my own voice; it takes a lot out of me to let someone else do anything for me that goes in that direction. Trust issues etc.

Without going into too much detail, the book suggested mapping out everything you do and adding columns for how much effort something takes and how much you love doing it on a scale of -3 (Very bad) vs. +3 (Very good).

For example:

Taking the “effort” value and adding the “love” value gives you a specific number or “Net Need”, the higher this number, the less likely you should outsource/kill it.

In the above screen you can see that I was in desperate need of outsourcing travel arrangements (-5 total) and material handling for my Maven courses while focussing further on free portfolio advising and actual advising.

It actually helped me to write this down, even though none of this is surprising. On the more obvious side, it helped me verbalize what I would like to outsource to any assistant or at least rethink and invest time in streamlining.

But what’s much more important is a connection to an important principle I learned through the years:

It’s almost never about time; it’s about energy. And energy has everything to do with whether you like doing something or not.

Enter crisis mode:

Stage 3: Crisis mode

Limits: Manage your energy, not your time

I read a study a couple of years ago that always stuck with me: classical knowledge workers, despite being in the office for 8 hours on average, are maybe 2-3 hours actually productive.

I don’t know whether that number is remotely accurate, but I remember definitely that in the jobs I hated the most, I was definitely the least productive in terms of time.

Especially earlier in my career, it always ended the same. I quit when it got too much and enjoyed the day when I was gone to finally not have to worry anymore about that horrible backlog that piled up. On to a new, clean backlog!

Deep inside, though, I thought that it was my mistake and lack of skill when it came to time management. I slacked off too much, taking too many breaks, getting distracted. Then I felt guilty and ended up in late-night sessions, being overly tired the day after.

“Look how much the others are working! They are soo good at managing their time. Now look at me, such a loser”

Next time with a new project management tool / framework! This won’t happen again!

But it still kept happening until I realized:

Time management techniques don’t work and are often even detrimental. They make you more efficient in managing tasks per hour, but I cannot recall a single time when they got me out of a difficult situation. They can help you stay out for a bit longer, but they don’t deal with the problem at hand at all. In fact, they give you the illusion that you can keep doing what got you into the mess in the first place.

Time management techniques and prioritization exercises strike me as the same motion that you face when you’re trying to lose weight:

You can increase your exercise and burn more calories per hour at a great expense, but at some point, you have to consider eating less and saying “No.” since your day only has that many hours to fit exercise in, it’s simply not a scaleable solution.

We need to reduce the inflow of problems and detrimental activities. If you don’t master this, you have 0 chance of ever being good at your job beyond a basic level because, with seniority, demands from others start to increase.

That really goes to the heart of the issue: it’s not time we have to manage but our energy.

I can go for 15 hours per day with things that motivate me but only a very limited amount of hours with things that frustrate me. In my case, these are typically:

• Administrative work, technical issues, repeated work due to bad system architecture, taking part in meetings I shouldn’t be in, and performative tasks with no clear payoff, like documentation of obscure requests.

I also know that my most productive hours to tackle complex, difficult problems is in the first 3-5 hours of a day. Putting in there the draining, menial stuff is just not the best use of my time energy. That’s why I shift those into the evening where I can just work them down (like going through open emails, one by one)

I am in a fortunate position as a solopreneur that I can outsource some of these tasks but my broader point here is that we have to be crystal clear on what eats up our energy before we can do something about them.

Learn how to complain professionally.

If I know what’s bad for my performance, I can invest time in optimizing these processes or push back on them.

Some of the most talented individual contributors I’ve worked with commonly went above and beyond for the jobs they had and were thus perceived as “10 x” individual contributors.

They commonly stayed in the office the longest and compensated with their personal time to control the chaos and make it work. Not because they were motivated but because they were driven by guilt and not wanting to let others down. This never sat right with me, and with time, I started to understand why:

If you don’t push back on overload and bad processes there’s no incentive anywhere in the org to change them. Especially as a product leader, I depend on my PMs, Group PMs, and Directors to challenge internal processes, aka complain to me.

I never perceived this as laziness or anything detrimental. It gave me the necessary ammunition to do something and question outdated processes.

Whether through additional budget, restructuring, or other adjustments. If no one hears about it, don’t expect anything to change.

Complaining on the water cooler, by the way, is not good enough; you have to make this visible.

In the case of a PM, that would be a slide where you highlight what you can handle and what falls off the table as a result of capacity (energy or time): And you need to do this over and over in conversations about prioritization or taking on new responsibilities. (Commonly quarterly plannings etc.)

It keeps your back free from unwanted expectations and gives leaders arguments to act. Complaining is not a weakness if it’s done while giving reasonable context.

Kill your backlog. Today.

There’s a point where you have to admit defeat against your pile and the energy that you can throw at it. It’s just not happening anymore.

Just making the pile more elaborate (with time and prioritization frameworks) usually doesn’t help, as already pointed out. Not only do we need to learn how to say no going forward, but we also have to clear the existing demons that rob our sleep right now.

The most common method of doing that is quitting your job, which kind of works, but chances are you’re just temporarily getting relieved and will end up in the same situation again in a year.

I suggest doing an assessment like the one I did above with everything you have on your plate and then strategically going around killing it.

Even if it means you have to go back on your promises to others to this point. It’s still better than just running into the inevitable moment where you just don’t deliver anything without saying something hoping they won’t notice.

You don’t have to quit your job for that; give it a try and start from zero at your current job. It usually hurts less than you imagine (some people might be actually glad for more realistic expectations going forward). Call it professional spring cleaning.

For those reasons, I still run most of my business out of a one-pager in a notebook to this day. It forces me to be very careful when adding new stuff.

This is also reflected in the fact that I don’t take on too many clients at the same time. It’s again less about time but context switching and the energy this takes out of me.

I have to focus on fewer things and do them right. This only works by saying no when new things come around to not dilute my attention too much.

I learned to respect my limits. Whenever I fail at that, I do this professional spring cleaning routine.

Allow your core mission to change with your surroundings

Just because you started as a product manager or product leader who did things in a particular way doesn’t mean you have to do them forever that way.

Let’s look at the two main factors that can change a job during a tenure:

• The company around you starts to grow / evolve

• You grow in your line of work becoming more senior (from Junior to Senior to Leader)

In both cases, the dynamic around you change so much that you need to change with them.

As a company grows and becomes bigger, a lot of your energy (and time) will be necessarily occupied by new processes. That’s just how it is in bigger companies and comes with the territory. That also means that it is perfectly reasonable that when you take them on, you reduce your original scope.

I see the task of any good leader to keep these additional frictions as low as possible. Instead of throwing constantly people at problems (making the organization bigger) it helps much more if they address the root problems and recognize the same dynamic as well: reducing the expectations they had from being a smaller company and adjust accordingly.

As you grow in your career and become more senior, the dynamic from being a junior to a more senior person also shifts: As a junior, you’re expected to do what you’re being told; as a senior individual contributor, it is expected that you find opportunities yourself. As a senior leader, you’re expected to guide seniors with structures that make sure those go in the same direction; it’s mostly about alignment and facilitation. (Through tooling, hiring, and processes)

I specifically remember mentees I’ve had who struggled to step out of their junior mindset (while having “senior” titles). They were always frustrated with the tasks they were given and told me how little sense they made to them but were unable to make better suggestions on what they should spend their time on.

In either case, it’s worth it to be open to change and question methods that used to work for you but don’t anymore, so you can advance.

Do the next logical step.

Such a professional spring cleaning or change in how you perceive yourself can feel daunting to get started because you’re already feeling overwhelmed.

People with executive dysfunction (common in ADHD) will know this next tip. Whenever you can’t get started because it all feels overwhelming and you’re paralyzed, do the next logical step:

• If you want to clean your house but you can’t make yourself start

  • Go take out the vacuum

  • Clean the bathroom; if you can’t make yourself start that

    • Clean the top inside the bathroom or only the shower

It sounds silly, but in a work context, this also works; whenever I had to prepare for a complex initiative, I broke it down into overly simple steps and just got those done. Instead of thinking about everything, I just did little things that I had to do with it anyway, resulting in me not stopping after that as it felt more natural to just continue.

Sometimes, the next logical step is to look for a new job. But I’d wager it’s worth it to give a professional spring cleaning a chance to get out of your crisis mode.

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New Product-led Growth cohort starting 1st of October 2024:

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