I'm doing two seminars on Tuesday the 15th of April covering How to Plan and Execute a High-Impact Product Launch. The material is based on the Product Launch Toolkit(tm), and every attendee receives a copy of my book and a discount on my new Expert Product Management Toolkit Bundle.

Here are the details:

Mid Peninsula Professional AllianceMorning meeting at Scott’s Seafood Restaurant, Palo Alto, CA7:30 AM to 9:00 AM. Preregistration price/deal: $31.95 includes breakfast, presentation and FREE book, “Expert Product Management” by Brian Lawley. More info and sign up here.

Silicon Valley Business MeetupEvening meeting at Apple Computer, Cupertino, CA5:30 to 8:30 PM. Preregistration price/deal: $20 until April 13, ($25 after April 13th). Includes autographed copy of the book, “Expert Product Management” by Brian Lawley. More info and sign up here.

I'm doing the keynote presentation at the PMEC (Product Management Education Conference) in San Diego at the beginning of April. Come join me for an excellent conference if you get the chance.

Here's a description of the talk:
Do you ever wonder why some product managers seem to get promoted and advance much faster than others? Are you interested in learning strategies and tactics you can use to speed up the advancement of your own career? In this presentation Brian Lawley, Founder of the 280 Group and President of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association will share the different ways he has seen product managers successfully accelerate their careers during his twenty year career in product management.

More details here...

How to Reduce Time in Meetings

Few things can boost your productivity more than cutting down on the amount of time you spend in meetings. If you want to buy yourself a few extra minutes (or hours) each day to work on important priorities this is an area to focus on.

Here are a few suggestions:

1. Make the meetings that you run be 30 minutes rather than one hour whenever possible. You would be surprised how efficient everyone becomes when they know they have to get through the agenda but have less time.
2. Insist that people take irrelevant, off-topic or non-group items offline to talk about after the meeting. Don’t allow them to waste everyone’s time discussing something that is not relevant to everyone else during the meeting.
3. Take notes during the meeting on your laptop and keep a running list of decisions and action items. Mail this out before you leave the meeting room if at all possible.
4. If there is a meeting with a large number of items to cover that don’t need your involvement ask if the group minds if they cover your items first so that you can leave the meeting earlier.
5. State and get agreement for the rules for meetings you run and ones you participate in. Let everyone know that there is a five minute grace period maximum. If people are late publicly humiliate them. Or better yet, assign them some action items. :-)
6. Bring donuts to morning meetings – you’ll be surprised how many people show up on time in order to get their favorite kind. This is especially good for meetings with your engineers.

If you follow all of these guidelines and make a point of being diligent about it you will likely free up several hours during your week. This may be just what you need in order to be able to spend time thinking strategically or focus on being more of a leader in your role.

As a Product Manager you can't afford to waste time.

Email sucks up your time for a number of reasons. You may read the same email multiple times. You may be tempted to respond immediately to messages as they come in. You may allow emails to get you off track from doing what is most important. Not to mention the fact that having an overwhelming amount of email is just plain stressful.

I get about 100 valid (non-spam) emails a day. Over the years I've read several books on how to manage email and have come up with a system that works pretty well. Here are the highlights:

• Only check email three times a day. When you first arrive. Right after lunch and right before you leave.
  
• Turn off outlook notifications - they just tempt you to be distracted.
  
• Process email rapidly and empty your mail box. Try to process it as quickly as you can. For each email immediately decide to delete it, write a quick and short response (if it will take less than a minute), file it to read later or, if it will require a lengthy response, turn it into a task (drag it down to the bottom left corner of Outlook, drop it on the task menu and choose to save it as a task with an attachment.)
  
• Send short responses quickly. Don't spend a lot of time writing and rewriting your responses.
  
• Use keyboard shortcuts. In Outlook Alt s saves and sends your email, F9 sends and receives for all accounts and Ctrl1 gets you to email, Ctrl2 to calendar, Ctrl3 to contacts.
  
• Avoid jumping in on long threads - oftentimes they work themselves out within a few responses. Let other people chime in - wait and see if they can resolve the issues. If the thread continues wait and read all responses at once. You'd be surprised how many times things just work themselves out if you just resist the urge to instantly jump in.
  
• Turn long responses into tasks. If an email response needs a long time and lots of thought to write turn it into one of your high priority "A" items for the day (see previous article on prioritizing).
  
• Save all email that you want to read but doesn't require a response for later. Read it once a week when you are out of energy or not motivated to do other work (Friday afternoon is a great time to do this).
  
• Clean out your email each night and before you leave for the weekend. This is another great thing to do on Friday afternoon. You will be amazed at what a relief it is to start your evening or weekend without the burden of email hanging over your head, and it will make starting the next morning much more pleasant.

I've found that by using these ideas I can usually keep the time I spend on email down to less than thirty minutes a day.