Meetings multiply until they consume all available time

I think there is this... everybody is doing one-on-ones with everyone else. So the manager is doing one-on-ones with their team. They're also doing one-on-ones with all of their peers... You cannot expect to maintain a one-on-one approach to kind of organizational relationship building and awareness passed a fairly small team/company.

At some point, if you haven't already gotten there, many of you have, but for those of you who haven't, you will get there, where your scope will be so large, that no matter what you do in terms of efficiency, whatever framework you use for prioritization, whatever framework or tool you use to manage your to-do list, whatever tools and techniques you use, whatever prioritization you do, your scope is so large that you are still going to be incredibly busy.

What I constantly hear from product managers though is, 'I am so busy, I don't have time to do the things that I need to do correctly. I'm so busy trying to line up customer interviews,' or, 'I'm so busy just trying to get data out of systems. I'm fighting these fights to get the things that I need to do my job correctly that I don't have time to do my job correctly.'

Part of, I think, context switching is one of the things that is really, really difficult. It's hard to context switch in your job. It's really hard to context switch across your job and your life.

Begin your day with intent, okay? What are the three to five things I'm hoping to do today? Second, minimize meetings, okay? Minimize meetings. That sucks the life out of everybody, including you.

Overwork kind of lets you just sidestep doing the hard work of figuring out what's important in the first place.