#67🛠️ Understanding and Improving Productivity as a Product Manager with ADHD
Product managing yourself to create the most successful productivity strategies
Welcome to Tech Atypically 👋, your weekly blog for navigating the challenges of ADHD and being in the tech industry.
I am a coach specializing in ADHD and product management, and I help you change one belief and take one action each week.
Part 10 of the Performance and Productivity series.
🐼Are you an overwhelmed tech worker with ADHD? Get help now.
🦋The Takeaways
The Belief: Finding the right focus or ADHD tool or app will solve my ADHD problems.
The Reality: Tools are most effective when you understand your behaviors and use the tools that best fit your style.
The Action: Focus on routines over results.
⭐️Introduction
As an ADHD and Product Management coach, I'm often asked, "What app or strategy can I use to be more productive or focused?"
The answer is both simple and complex. While some strategies and apps can help, finding the ideal one requires increasing your self-awareness of how you feel and identifying the factors that allow you to be more focused.
Today I discuss how to cultivate more self-awareness to identify your unique user requirements to create the ideal system of productivity for you.
The goal is to save you from another book or app that you bought with grand dreams and never touched.
😵💫The Belief – I’m just a hack, book, or app away from solving my focus issues
If you’re like me, you secretly hope that there’s a magical fix for your ADHD struggles just around the corner. Something that will magically unlock your potential like the Ultra Divine Water in Dragon Ball Z.
You’ll find it, and everything will be fixed forever.
A lot of people out there who share my belief as evidenced by the number of ADHD and productivity apps in the market currently.
In the last month, I’ve tried 4 productivity apps and 3 AI products with limited success.
TickTick, Prosper, Trello, Infocus
Claude, Pi AI, 2 ChatGPT ADHD coach user-built chatbots
Except for Claude, the rest of the tools were installed, played around with for 5 minutes then never looked at again. They sit in a graveyard of unused apps on my phone.
None of them were the Dragon Ball Z Ultra Water I was looking for, but they did teach me I was looking for my solution in the wrong way.
🤝The Reality – Being more connected with how you feel, and work is the key to being more productive
Finding a successful strategy or tool depends on understanding your ideal conditions for success.
There may be nothing wrong with these apps. If used properly, they may revolutionize my productivity. However, except for Claude, I haven’t found a way to integrate the apps into my routine.
I tried them hoping that in 5 minutes they’d unlock my hidden potential. They didn’t though, and so I moved on. I don’t think that’s the right way to search for my silver bullet of focus.
I need to stop thinking of productivity apps and tools as external forcing functions. Things that will “make me” focus despite my ADHD challenges.
Instead, I need to think about how the tools support or strengthen how my brain likes to operate.
This requires me to understand how I feel act at my best and create behaviors that help me get to that state to do the tasks I want to do. Using these parameters, I can create routines that work best for me using the tools and strategies that best support me.
🛠️The Action – Focus on Routines over Results
Instead of focusing on accomplishing a certain task, create routines that help you get things done most easily.
Focus on: Routines over results.
This means focusing on creating systems that work with your brain to get things done, rather than solely on the task outcome. When you focus only on the task outcome as a measure of your success, especially with things you struggle with, you're not setting yourself up for success.
Take the time to understand the feelings behind the avoidance, overwhelm, procrastination, etc.
Here's a framework to help you create a routine for tasks you've struggled with:
Feel your emotions.
Believe you’re not the problem.
Become aware of what’s best for you.
Reflect what you know.
Create your routine.
Allow yourself to feel what's happening with the avoidant task.
What am I feeling? Where are the feelings coming from? Write them down and process the feelings instead of avoiding them.
Example: I feel overwhelmed because I've been given 90 days at a new job to create a 1.5-year roadmap for a product I'm new to.
Recognize you are not the problem.
Step back and look at the problem as a whole instead of your perceived failings.
Example: Being given 90 days to create a new roadmap would be a challenge for anyone starting a new job. It's not because you suck.
Determine your ideal environmental factors for focus.
When am I most focused? What time blocks do I need for deep work? 30 minutes? 60?
What actions can I take to feel my best before starting the task?
Example: I do my best work in the morning after a run with 60-minute blocks of time with no phone, email, or Slack alerts.
Write down as much of the problem as you know now.
Reflect on what you already know. You'll likely find that you know more than you originally thought, boosting your confidence.
Use frameworks to help you avoid the paralysis of a blank page. AI is great for things like this.
Example: I may be new to the company, but I can learn about the company’s products just as a customer might. What can I learn from that experience and put it in my roadmap?
Create your routine and give it time to work.
Write down your routine for your next big task and give it a shot.
Changing long-standing behaviors takes time. Keep practicing and adjusting your routine to your behaviors for success.
Example: My roadmap routine is to start where I envision the product to be in 1.5 years, and the top 3 challenges I want to solve for my customers in that time.
✨Conclusion
I haven’t found that magic water or app yet. I’ll keep searching though.
I know if I keep searching, I’ll keep learning new ways both large and small to help me to be better emotionally regulated and focused. I’ll learn new ways to better show up for myself and others.
I think that’s the key to productivity. Knowing the conditions for how you best perform and how to set up conditions for others for others to be their best.
I think that’s what product managers do at their best, and so should you.
However, remember to look within before you go reaching for Michael Jordan’s Secret Stuff from Space Jam or your next productivity app.
🐼Work with a PM with ADHD to create your productivity strategy
⏭️Next Week
I’ll be taking a break next week for some family time. I’ve had a crazy month of job interviews, whiskey release parties, and company planning for 2 different companies.
I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished in the last month, despite the interview failures. I need a break though.