Making Time for Your Products... and YOU! w/ John Zeratsky, Co-Author of Sprint and Make Time

Hey everybody, it's Mike Belcedo, co-founder of Product Collective, and we are back for another industry interview. Thank you all for joining us. And I'm excited about this week's, this particular industry interview, because the guest that we have is the author of a book that's just about to come out. But the first book, Sprint, I remember reading on a plane while I was on my way overseas. And I fell in love with the book, in fact, so much that when I landed, I ended up putting together a little kind of meetup about the book that I just read on the plane when I got there. So I was excited about that. But I know I'm kind of alluding to our guest. I'll introduce him in just a second. Before I do, I just wanted to kind of, you know, a couple of housekeeping type things. First of all, if this is your first Industry Interview, thank you for being here. We do these usually twice per month. So usually it's the first and third Wednesday of the month. Um, an exception will be next month because the first Wednesday we will be tied up with Industry, uh, the product conference, which is the conference that we organize for product people. If you haven't had a chance to check that out, you just go to industryconference.com. We're a week and a half away, so if I look a little flustered, maybe you can forgive me for that. But it is shaping up to be really exciting. We have, I think it's two dozen speakers this year, including BJ Novak, former writer and actor on The Office, which will be a little bit of a different kind of a talk that we have had in the past, but I think it'll be pretty awesome. So definitely check that out. These industry interviews though, you know, we love catching up with some product leaders from all over the world. This is your chance to ask questions too. So I have questions for our guests, but if you notice, there is a chat section. You can use that to interact with each other, introduce yourself, that'd be great. But use the ask a question section section at any point. You could start right now if you'd like to. I'll be monitoring those and kind of pulling in audience questions throughout. And while I do have questions for our guests, I'd much prefer that we, we go with your questions. So definitely feel free to do that. And then, yeah, well, I— the next industry interview isn't up on the site yet, but it will be probably within the next 24 hours. So you'll see in mid-October we've got one, and and we'll have a couple more to close out the year. So with all that though, I'd love to introduce our guest, John Zeratsky, who's the author of the book that's coming up, Making Time, and the author of the book Sprint. And John, it's awesome to have you with us.

Yeah, it's such a pleasure to be here. Thanks.

Absolutely. So yeah, I didn't even share that story with you about how, you know, when I read Sprint for the first time, like, I fell in love with it and it's something You know, I also teach a product management class now, which, by the way, didn't exist like just a few years ago, but at Case Western Reserve University. And, and I love incorporating what I learned through Sprint. But Making Time is a totally different type of book. So I just— maybe we could start here. I'd love to hear a little bit more about kind of what led you to writing this new book. And maybe you could just share a little bit more about what that book's all about.

Yeah, for sure. Sprint is obviously about the 5-day design sprint process, but I think one of the reasons that people have enjoyed it so much, and maybe one of the reasons that you enjoyed it, is that it gives people a formula or a recipe for wiping away the defaults of how work usually happens. So when you're in the office, you've got, you know, things happen a certain way. All the meetings are 30 or 60 minutes long. You've got meetings kind of back to back, you've got email coming in, you're expected to stay on top of that email, instant messaging, whatever is going on. And with the design sprint, teams can, can wipe all that away and they can put in place a new set of defaults for a week where they can work together on a project that's really important to them, a problem they've been trying to solve. And the new book Make Time is really an extension of that idea. So it's all about that idea of rethinking and resetting the defaults about how we spend our time and how we think about our days, but for individuals and for every day, not just these special once-in-a-while things that we do like a design sprint.

Yeah, and this is for, I mean, anybody, right? I mean, I'm sure this is like a pain point and problem that A lot of people have, a lot of us feel like, oh, there's not enough time in the day. And I know our audience is generally that of product people and we're pressed for time too. But this is really something that we, it could be useful in our personal lives as well, right?

Definitely. Yeah. So, so I wrote this book with Jake Knapp, who I wrote Sprint with, and Jake and I worked together at Google Ventures for about 6 years where we developed the design sprint process together and ran more than 150 sprints with all sorts of different companies. And one of the reasons that we wanted to write this book is that we struggled with this stuff. I mean, we still struggle with this stuff. You know, we are not— we have no superhuman powers of willpower or discipline or an ability to resist all the distractions and all the things that keep us from doing what we really want to do. I think, you know, those of you who work in technology, particularly working in large tech companies, you know that in many ways that's kind of the epicenter of this fast-paced, back-to-back meeting, always connected, always online type workplace culture. And it's not unique to tech, but I think in many ways, because of the way that we embrace new technologies and new apps and new tools, it's worse in tech companies. So we felt those things working at Google and working at YouTube, and we saw those problems and we would go in and work with companies in the Google Ventures portfolio. And so, yeah, the book is largely like a memoir of our experience getting through those challenges and finding ways to make little tweaks, little changes in how we plan our days so that we actually have time for the things that are important to us.

Yeah. Well, and I, if I recall, I mean, I haven't had a chance to read the book. It's not, it's coming out in just a few days, right? It's not really technically out yet, right?

Yeah. It comes out next week.

Next week. So keep tabs on that, everybody. But when I was reading about the book, it kind of stood out to me that, you know, this whole notion of being able to make time in our lives, like, it seems like, like, gosh, that would be maybe even for some people, it seemed like an insurmountable task. Like, how do we do it? We can't invent time. But the book takes an approach of breaking it down into kind of 4 steps, right, that we can think through and it helps us make that time. Can you talk about those steps a little bit and kind of what goes into that?

Yeah, for sure. So, the first step is proactively choosing a highlight, one thing prioritizing your day so that no matter what else happens, you can get to the end of the day feeling like you made time for that one important thing. The second step is laser. It's all about beating distraction so that you can be laser-focused on your highlight and really on everything else. Really about reconfiguring technology, reconfiguring your environment so that it's more difficult to get distracted. It's not about willpower or discipline. It's really about creating barriers to distraction. The third step is energize. It's all about recharging our brains using our bodies. So taking care of our bodies, it's difficult to make good use of our time. It's difficult to really just have a good day and feel like we're enjoying ourselves when we're tired, when we're worn down, when we're feeling stressed out and frazzled. And then finally, the fourth step is to spend a couple of minutes every day thinking about what worked in terms of our time and our attention and our energy. And what changes you might want to make for tomorrow.

Now, I have to imagine it probably wasn't just super straightforward to like come up with those 4 steps because it's hard to boil something down, at least something like this, down into 4 steps. I'm just like, how did you arrive at those? Did you kind of— did you go through some stumbles? Were there other things that you thought of first but ended up here? Like, I'm just curious about that process.

Yeah, well, I should say that the, the lessons we learned from design sprints really helped us. Sprints were kind of this laboratory where we could— we had these ideas about, about time and about how people might be able to use their time more effectively. But, you know, we had only, we had only sort of tested those ideas on ourselves. But when we were running design sprints with the GV portfolio, we got to kind of go into these teams and say, you know, work with us, let's try to do things differently, let's try to think differently about our days and about our weeks and see what works. So that was really a big part of the process was running all those sprints and learning from those. I would say in terms of, you know, missteps or problems that we ran into, for me, by far the biggest detour on the road to to make time was kind of becoming obsessed with productivity. And when I say productivity, I mean that in sort of the sense that, you know, you're being efficient, you're optimizing your time, you're trying to fill every minute, you're thinking about how to avoid wasting time as opposed to how to make time or how to use that time really well. And this is something that actually arose for me when I was just starting my career. One of the first jobs I had was at a startup in Chicago called FeedBurner. And the team at FeedBurner was super experienced. They were very talented, very competent. And I was just this like kid. I had this amazing opportunity. I felt very lucky, but I was not in the same league as the people that I was working with. So I wanted to make sure that I was making good use of every minute of my day. But I found that working in that way where you're really thinking about productivity all the time, it made me kind of feel like a machine. It made me feel like I was just, you know, setting up the bowling pins and then trying to knock them down again. It wasn't necessarily— my days weren't necessarily organized around what was important. It was just what was what was on the list in front of me, what was easy to do, easy to knock off. And so, you know, that experience, which was like 13 years ago now, helped me take a step back and kind of think more broadly about like, what does it mean to make good use of my time? Is it about trying to do as much as possible, or is it really about trying to do the things that are important to me?

Yeah, no, that— and I can relate. Like, I— so now, I mean, it used to be that my day-to-day would be like, I go to an office and have a job, and I leave the office at the end of that day. And now, um, you know, I'm co-founder of Product Collective, but I also co-host the podcast, which is Rocket Ship FM. And, um, we do these live video Q&A chats. I mentioned how I teach, it's just one class a week, but I have found myself needing to force my I have to force myself to find those productive moments. And I definitely don't have all the answers, but that's why when I heard your book was coming out, it's something I know I desperately needed and definitely can relate to. So, yeah.

Yeah. I think that we find that when our days, our time is sliced up and when we're being pulled in a lot of different directions, it makes us feel like time is going by really quickly. Which isn't a great feeling. Nobody likes to feel like time is flying by. We want to feel like we can hold on to it, like there's things that are happening and things that we're doing that really feel good. But at the same time, when our days are sliced up like that, we don't have the bandwidth to actually do the work that we're trying to do. So I remember having this feeling of like sometimes, you know, when I was working in an office job in tech companies, I had this feeling of getting to the end of the day and being done with my meetings and thinking, okay, now I can get my work done. You know, now at the end of the workday, I actually have the space and the time to focus on my work. And so one of the things that we hope people can do with, with Make Time and with the ideas in this book are to just start to rearrange their schedules a little bit, to take back time from sort of that default mode of scheduling days, from those default ways that we interact with our phones and, you know, our our web browsers and social media so that we have more space in our days, so we have time for the things that matter, but also so that our perception of time slows down.

Yeah, that— I'm glad you brought that up. You kind of alluded to things like social media, and I know now there's all sorts of platforms, you know, that things like Slack, which I know, you know, for me and my team We're in Slack all the time. I'm curious your take on, like, do you have those platforms actually helped make us more productive, or do you feel like they've had a counter effect in some way? I'm just curious, you're like, what is your take on that?

Yeah, my— so the way that I think about it is that every new platform, every new tool that a team adopts is like taking on debt. And that debt requires a payment. In the case of the tools that we're talking about, it requires a payment every day or every hour. And I like that analogy because debt is not good or bad. As individuals or as businesses, we have good reasons for using financial debt. It allows us to make investments and buy things and pay for things that we wouldn't otherwise. Um, but debt can also be really dangerous if you take on too much of it without getting the benefits of it, then you're stuck making the payments. Um, and so, you know, I think, uh, when teams pile on too many of these new tools and new platforms, um, that are meant to make us more productive, sometimes it can have the opposite approach. My take on it is that we should use as few different platforms as possible. If that means, you know, only using Slack for internal communication and using email purely for external, maybe that's a good approach. If it means using, you know, something that you're already using like Google Spreadsheets to manage projects instead of taking on a new, you know, really fancy, complicated project management app, you know, maybe that helps. I think that we're sold on the best-case scenario, but very much like taking on debt, the reality is a little bit more complicated, more mixed.

I like that though. Yeah, it's not as if these platforms can't be helpful. They are. I mean, Slack does help us as a team. I know it. But if you're working at a company and they're saying, hey, here are the 20 platforms we use to make sure we're all productive, that can be overwhelming to people. So I like, you know, kind of finding the few that work best for you and your team, whatever those might be, and, you know, kind of sticking with them. I think that's, that makes a lot of sense to me.

I also think it's interesting when you, when you think about the role of leadership or management in, in an organization, because the decisions that those people make have sort of an asymmetric effect on the way that everybody else uses their time. So a relatively simple, small decision by an executive sort of ripples out into creating huge effects on all the people that they work with. And so, you know, particularly as we're talking about adding new, new tools for communicating or for collaborating, if an executive says, you know, hey, I heard about this new thing, we should try it. That's a relatively small decision for them, but that's a big deal for the people that they work with. So I think if we can look at these decisions through that lens, not just of us as individuals, but as how our choices affect everybody that we work with, it just forces us to slow down and be a little bit more thoughtful.

So for you VPs and CPOs and CEOs that are listening in here, I hope you heard that point on behalf of all of us product people anyway. I have a few more questions, but again, going back to the audience, I'd love it if you have questions for John. We have like 10 minutes left, so definitely go to the ask a question section. I'd love to get to your questions. Otherwise, I'm going to, I'm going to have fun with the questions that I have for John. And I will go back to that, actually. So, you know, we talked earlier in the chat about those 4 steps that when we all read the book Make Time, you know, we'll, we'll learn. Are any one of those steps like, I guess, what's their, what's their order of importance, if there is? Or is there any one step that sort of you've noticed a lot of people can get caught up on easily? Because maybe that's one that we should be keeping in mind as we sort of start to digest all this.

Yeah, I think one thing that, that trips people up when they're trying to reduce distraction or take control of their time or make time for things that are important is the myth that smartphones are distracting because of notifications. I think that notifications can be pretty annoying, but I think that it's— I think it's an overstatement that notifications are the cause of distraction. And the reason I believe that is, you know, you think about driving or you think about walking down the street and not while using your phone, but you think about doing something like that in an environment where you're being bombarded by noises and visual distractions. And we as humans, we have the ability to tune those things out, to continue focusing on what we're doing. You're driving down the street, you've got cars all around you, you've got billboards, you've got something on the radio, whatever you're doing. But we have the ability to block those things out and to focus on driving the car. And I think notifications are kind of like that. I think that we have the ability to sort of ignore the sounds and the buzzing and the active attempts from our phone to steal our attention. What I think is much more dangerous and kind of insidious because it's not where we, initially start when we're trying to solve these problems for ourselves is the sources of those notifications and those distractions. It's not the notification from Twitter telling you that there's some new tweets you want to look at, it's Twitter itself. And don't get me wrong, I use Twitter and I love Twitter and I use all of the, we call them infinity pool apps, all these distracting apps that have endless amounts of content. I use them, so I'm not, I'm not saying that we shouldn't use them, but I'm saying that if we want to focus on our attention, if we want to be less distracted, I think we need to get to the root of the issue, which is doing something like removing Twitter or Instagram from our phones, not spending time working around the edges, you know, tweaking the notifications and, you know, rearranging the home screen so it looks really calming. And, you know, there's a lot of things that you can do that feel like you're getting at the problem, but I think you're really not. So I think that is one place where I see people kind of, in my opinion, you know, get focused on the wrong avenues, go down the wrong road in terms of trying to solve these problems.

Yeah. Well, I did get a few audience questions in, so I want to make sure I can get to some of those. One of them was about balancing the type of activities that one might go through in a day. So the question is, if you have any suggestions on balancing, say, learning activities versus producing activities, you know, sometimes we can become more skilled by doing, but then sometimes it's also learning. So as we're trying to go about setting our day, is there— do you have any sort of suggestions on, on the type of balance that maybe people should seek out? It might be a personal personal thing, but I'm curious your take on that.

Yeah, it is, it is a personal thing for sure. Different people have different times of day when they feel like they have the most energy, when they feel like they can really concentrate on something that's important. For me, and for really a lot of people, the morning is when we have the most energy. It might not be right when we wake up, but just kind of statistically, you know, if you're looking at people in general, the morning people tend to have more energy than in the afternoon or in the evening. So I think it's, if there are activities that require energy, whether it's making something or whether it's engaged, engaging in some sort of learning activity that really challenges us, that really requires that we pay attention so that we can learn and grow, We should try to align those things with the part of the day when we have the most energy. On the other hand, the things that don't require a ton of energy, like answering emails and going to meetings and taking care of errands and stuff like that, we can push those to the end of the day. We can push those to times when we feel like we don't have energy, when we're a little tired out, we're a little worn down, and maybe Maybe if we weren't doing something, we would kind of sit there and zone out and stare at our phone for half an hour. But if you can instead answer a few emails, you can run an errand, you can clean something up, you can just kind of take care of something that needs to happen anyway, that can be a really nice time to both keep yourself from reinforcing that sort of addictive distraction loop, but also feel like you've made time for the things that are most important.

Yeah, that's great. Another audience question that came in, it's sort of along the same lines, or at least it has to do with prioritization. And in this person's case, prioritization is a big issue. They said, hey, look, we have 10 things and they're all important, like, and prioritizing takes time. So what feedback would you have to somebody that comes to say, like, well, hey, how do I prioritize these 10 things when they're all important to us?

Yeah, that's a tough one. I wish there was a simple answer.

Magic wand, right?

Yeah. It reminds me of a lot of the conversations I used to have with startups in the GV portfolio. And oftentimes we would break those down and we would try to map them out in terms of dependencies. So if you think about building a business or a product or doing something new, there are things that you need to figure out now, and there are things you can figure out later. It's not always obvious which of which those are. You might be, you might be drawn to a really hard problem because it seems daunting and scary and hard, but you actually don't need to figure it out until, until later, until a few months or, you know, even a few years down the road. So one approach that I've often used when talking to people about prioritization is sort of the, you know, what do we need to figure out now that's going to unblock us to move forward? You can also try to translate these projects or these initiatives into risks or unknowns or assumptions that you have, and you can think about you know, what needs to be true in order for this project to succeed overall? And that's something that we do on the first day of a design sprint is we, you know, gather from the team important questions that represent assumptions that we need to check. And I think going through that exercise also helps you make that decision of what's both important and urgent. What are the things that we should focus on right away?

Yeah, that's, that's helpful. That's definitely helpful. And I want to get to one more audience question, I suppose, before we kind of wrap things up. And this question came from somebody that they work at a small startup and they were curious if you have thoughts on this notion of sort of like, no, everybody blocks out no meeting time. And I don't know how, you know, whether that's an hour a day, several hours a day, certain days of the week. Have you— are things like that, like, are they a good idea to try, or have you found that they actually don't solve the problem that they're trying to solve?

In general, I think they're a really good idea, but making them work can be tricky sometimes. This idea of blocking time on your calendar We actually write about it in the book. It's something that I learned from a manager of mine when I was at Google. I was a UX designer. I was working on advertising products. And my manager, he had this crazy calendar. He was back to back. He was running around, typical sort of corporate manager type stuff where he's just always in meetings. But I noticed on his calendar, because at Google and probably many other companies, you can see other people's calendars. I noticed that he had scheduled time with himself every morning. And so I asked him about it and he's like, well, that's my time. That's when I get up early, I go to the gym, I come into the office and I actually work on the projects that require my deep attention and focus before the rest of the day sort of takes over, before those defaults set in. And I asked him about that. I said, well, you know, you've got this, It's almost a target. You've got this 3, 4-hour block on your calendar. Everybody wants to be on your calendar. What do you do? And he says, I just tell people I already have plans. I just say, look, I'm busy during that time. Can we find another time? So we write about that idea and that tactic in the book because it can work really well. And that's an example of how it can work really well. I have been talking to a few friends who work at different tech companies who have basically agreed as a team that they're gonna have certain days when they don't have meetings or certain times of days when they don't have meetings and then other days when they do. And it seems the pattern that I'm seeing is that it works really well when it's a small team or a sub, you know, a part of a team. It probably works less well as an entire company It probably doesn't make a lot of sense for, you know, even if it's just 50 people, but, you know, especially if it's larger to say, you know, we have no meeting Wednesdays here or whatever. Because I think that the more people you try to impose that policy on, the more likely you are to run up against kind of the realities or the idiosyncratic features of what their job is and and why they might actually need to have meetings on that day, depending on what they're working on. So I would say, do it as a, as a small team, agree on, agree as a team on the specific days and times that you want to block. And then probably the most important of all is that you have support and you have buy-in from, from your manager, from your decision maker, because like I mentioned earlier, people who are in these decision-making positions, the choices that they make affect the ways that all of us use our time. And so if we have no meeting Wednesday, but the one time that the boss wants to have a recurring meeting is on Wednesday morning, there goes the policy. So those are kind of the ingredients that I've seen. But short answer is I think it's a great idea. Longer answer is I think it have to be a few ingredients to make it work.

Yeah, for sure. Well, that's fair. Um, and you know, I'm looking at the clock, we're, we're already at the end of our time. So, you know, I could definitely chat about this with you all day, but, um, we do have to wrap things up. And I'm just, you know, wondering, I'm sure people, maybe they have other questions, and you are on social media like Twitter and such. Maybe you could just share the best way that people can get a hold of you.

Definitely. Yeah, if people want to follow up just with me personally and ask questions, the best way to do that is on Twitter. Like I said, I do enjoy using Twitter, although I don't have it on my phone. When I'm done looking at Twitter, I log out in my browser so that it doesn't become this impulsive habit. But that said, my username is Jazer, J-A-Z-E-R, and I love to hear from people and respond to people there. If you want to follow along with the writing that Jake and I are doing, go to timedorks.com. And to find out more about the book about Make Time, the address is maketimebook.com.

Yeah, and there should be a little green bar for everybody. Maybe it's like right here. I don't know. I can't see the bar, but I put it there. And that should link you right to the book. So hopefully y'all can check that out. I know that I'm excited. When it comes out to get my hands on it as well. So, John, thank you so much for, for joining us. And, and everybody else, thank you for joining us as well. Hope you all can join us for another chat.

Thanks a lot. It was a lot of fun.

We'll see you, John. Thank you. Have a good one, everybody.