#80📊 Mastering Prioritization: Data Strategies for Work-Life Balance and Self-Care in Tech and ADHD
How to bring prioritization into your home life for better self-care
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I am an ADHD and product management coach helping you change one belief and take one action each week.
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Part 5 of the Self-Care series
🦋The Takeaways
Belief: You can prioritize everything and do it all.
Reality: Effective prioritization requires understanding your capacity and being transparent about trade-offs.
Action: Apply data prioritization strategies to your self-care routine.
⭐️Introduction
This week I wanted to challenge myself to connect self-care and prioritization. If you're a product manager, prioritization is a core function of your job. If you're like me, your sense of prioritization is amazing in a crisis and flawed in basic or mundane tasks.
To help me discuss prioritization in the tech industry, I invited my friend and a principal technical program manager at Amazon June Dershewitz for a chat. She's a seasoned data leader, angel investor, and newsletter writer.
In our conversation, we explore how strategies for data prioritization can be applied to self-care and vice-versa. Get ready for a mash-up of data and self-care strategies to help you on your next project.
😵💫The Belief – You can prioritize everything and do it all
As a tech worker with ADHD, you might often fall into the trap of believing you can take on everything. You say yes to every request, thinking you can manage it all. Time blindness be damned!
This mindset can lead to overcommitment and burnout.
June highlights this challenge: "We want to be able to say yes to more than we can actually do. And when we do that, we're doing a disservice to ourselves and to people around us, too. If the only way that we can get all that stuff done is if we work nights or weekends or cut corners on something and deliver a shoddy a end product, it's not going to land well."
This belief that you can do it all often stems from a desire to prove your worth or a fear of missing out on opportunities (and ADHD). However, it's crucial to recognize that saying yes to everything means saying no to something else – often your own well-being.
🤝The Reality – Effective prioritization requires understanding your capacity
Effective prioritization is about understanding your capacity and being transparent about the trade-offs involved. It's not just about ranking tasks; it's about recognizing your limits and communicating them.
Letting people know what it costs them and you to say yes to new things.
June emphasizes the importance of transparency: "I think it's important not just for the individual contributors, but also of the leaders of portfolios of work to make sure that they've got the right balance of offense and defense in their portfolio.
Because if they don't, if they only incentivize and reward the offense, then it can be like really morale crushing for the people who recognize the need for the focus on defense, but are getting no reward for it."
This balance between "offense" (directly tied to business outcomes) and "defense" (foundational work) is crucial not just in data teams, but in your personal life as well. You need to prioritize both immediate tasks and long-term self-care.
June also stresses the importance of clear communication about priorities: "Something that I've been trying to get at through my article series has been moving from service desk to thought partner. And if you're not careful, if you're just saying, “Yes, I'll give you the spreadsheet,” you become a service desk, and people will perceive you that way."
When you don’t let others know your capacity, you put yourself at risk of trying to do it all and burning yourself.
🛠️The Action – Apply data prioritization strategies to your self-care routine
To improve your prioritization skills, both at work and in your personal life, you can borrow strategies from data prioritization:
Balance "offense" and "defense": In your personal life, ensure you're balancing immediate needs (offense) with long-term well-being (defense).
Don't neglect foundational self-care activities just because they don't show immediate results.
Focus on the routine, not the outcome.
Be transparent about trade-offs: When you commit to a self-care activity, be clear about what you're saying no to. This helps manage expectations, both for yourself and others.
Every time you say yes, you are saying no to something else.
When you say nothing to others when you’re over capacity, when you fail, people assume broken people, not a broken process.
Regularly reassess priorities: June emphasizes the importance of involving stakeholders in prioritization.
In your personal life, regularly check in with yourself (and loved ones) to ensure your priorities still align with your goals and values.
Are these the top things? Or am I trying to do other things to avoid what I want? If so, how do I overcome that barrier?
Account for risks: Use your gift of “anxiety" to anticipate potential obstacles to your self-care routine.
Worrying too much is a gift when you need to make a plane stay in the air. It’s a hindrance when you want to choose what’s for dinner.
As June notes, "It's a fine line between worrying too much and just fully understanding and accounting for the risks."
Listen to your anxiety signals and integrate them into your routine. For example, if you’re anxious you’re going to miss brushing your teeth at breakfast, set a reminder in the morning and at lunch. Allow yourself to make the miss and recover in the next checkpoint.
Remember, prioritization is an ongoing process. It’s meant for you to handle change. Not to make a static decision and hold to it no matter what. (Unless you’re OCD like me).
✨Conclusion
Prioritization isn't just a work skill – it's a life skill. By applying data prioritization strategies to your self-care routine, you can ensure you're giving proper attention to your well-being amidst the demands of your professional life.
As June wisely points out, "It's such an art to pick how to spend your time in. When you've got all these different ways that you could spend your time, which one is going to have the outcome that you want, either for you personally or for your employer, or both?"
By treating your self-care with the same “ruthless prioritization” (I hear this term a lot as a PM) you apply to your work projects, you can create a more balanced, sustainable approach to your professional and personal life.
Self-care isn't selfish – it's a crucial "defensive" strategy that enables you to perform better in all areas of your life.
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⏭️Next Week
How to invite others to make space for self-care for themselves by asking for space for yourself.
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