My oldest daughter is a basketball player. I’m so proud of her. She plays for Maccabi Tel-Aviv’s youth team and takes it very seriously. Three times a week, when she gets back from school, she takes a bus across Tel-Aviv to get to her practice. She has to take quite a few things with her, including among others a basketball, a skipping rope, and an additional pair of shoes. She also needs to wear her practice uniform. 

A few weeks ago, she called me from the bus, telling me that she forgot her uniform at home. I couldn’t help her right away, so imagine my surprise when she got back home from practice wearing a practice uniform! It turns out that it was that exact same day that they got the new practice uniform, so it was a good day to forget the old ones at home. But still, I wanted to help her to avoid it in the future.

Initially, I suggested that she puts the practice uniform in her bag after cleaning. That is, instead of putting it in her closet, make the bag the storage place for the uniform, so that even if she forgets to wear it before she leaves home she still has it with her and can change before the practice. When she got the new uniform, I suggested an even better alternative: she can put her old practice uniform always in her bag. It weighs close to nothing, so no real price to pay here, and it assures her that she has a backup in case anything happens. 

The idea is that instead of managing it every time, she creates a one-time routine that works for her. Push instead of pull, if you want.

I have to admit that she doesn’t forget her uniform a lot, so perhaps it’s not really worth dealing with in this case. But if we take it to your world, I’m sure there are many things you need to manage, time and again. Wouldn’t it be easier to create a routine that would help you to do it not only better, but also more easily?

Here is a quick guide to creating management routines that work for you, as well as some of my favorite examples of such routines and processes.

Understand What You Need

Following this article, I hope you start looking for places to implement routines that work for you wherever you go. But for now, I would recommend finding the areas that are most painful for you to manage today and starting there.

Let’s start by mapping the areas that you feel don’t work well for you today. A good place to start is with your own task list. Specifically, look into what you need to report to your manager. Usually, it’s various status reports, which typically are also things that you need to know about to be able to do your job well, not just as part of reporting upwards. As a manager, however, you don’t know all of the details yourself and need to gather input from your team in order to be on top of things. Can you do it without your team? Well, I’m not a big believer in getting status directly from tools. They only tell part of the story, while what you need is often a softer and more complete understanding of where things stand. So, how hard is it for you to gather that information from your team? Do you work for the process or is there a process that works well for you there?

Another good place to look at is where you want to take things to the next level. For example, let’s say that you want to help your product managers become more strategic. There are sporadic things that you can do to get there, for example, share with them the strategic context whenever you can. But that still means that you have to be the driver behind that process. Depending on how hard it is for you to do it today, it can be an opportunity to think about it differently.

Create a list of things that you wish were easier for you to achieve. Then, prioritize the list of gaps so that you can address them one at a time. 

Understand what you want

Now that you have a clear understanding of where things don’t work well for you at the moment, start thinking about each of them, and understand what would help you most. Don’t limit yourself to what’s feasible at this point, you want to remain open-minded. You might find out that you need a specific resource in order for the process to be optimal for you, and many times it’s not a resource that is hard to get. You probably would need your team to take some of the load, and since they are busy themselves it’s probably easier said than done, but I deliberately ask you to deal with it only later. If you limit yourself to what you think is possible right now, you will most likely only come up with solutions that you have already thought about. But we want to create a revolution in your productivity and effectiveness, not a standard evolution.

So at this point, I want you to think about what an ideal solution would look like (don’t worry, we’ll deal with reality later). In order to do that, pick your favorite magical creature – a fairy, a wizard, a genie – and ask yourself the following: if they were able to make it work best for me, what would it look like? In other words, if everything was possible, how would you solve it best?

In the example of weekly status reporting, I want to know where things stand on a weekly basis. I need it in order to be able to truly manage things, not just to report to my manager. In my case, an ideal solution would be that the information about where things stand would come naturally to me by the end of each week, without me having to ask for it. It sounds magical, but when I realized that this is what I need, I found a way to ask my team to do just that. I’ll share what it is below, but I’m sure I wouldn’t have gotten to that method if I hadn’t asked myself what an ideal solution would look like, so make sure you don’t skip this important step.

Make It Work

Now that you understand what you really want, it’s time to create the routine that would make it work. A good routine is simple to keep and yields the results you want. If I take my daughter’s example above, you can see that both solutions I suggested adhere to these conditions. Another potential solution would be a reminder, but I would not say that it’s a good solution. We would need to work for it instead of it working for us. For one, if the reminder pops up when she is not at home, there is nothing she can do about it at that moment, and would have to keep remembering it (or snooze the alert) until she can. Then, the practice time might change, and changing the reminder time accordingly won’t really work (we are all practical people and know what can and can’t stick). So while initially, it might seem like a good solution, a reminder on her phone isn’t simple to keep, and therefore isn’t really a good one.

Look into the solutions you come up with intuitively following your understanding of the ideal solution above, and see if they are simple to keep as well as do the work. In the example above of a product leader who wants to help their product managers become more strategic, an initial solution might be to set a strategy meeting at a regular cadence, say once a month. It’s a session that would be dedicated to sharing the strategic context and discussing how it applies to the product managers’ work. It should also allow them to contribute to strategic decisions. 

While it sounds great on paper, in reality, most likely, these would be the first sessions to be canceled when there is something else more urgent, and being in the product world, there always is. So this mechanism isn’t simple to keep, and therefore won’t work. It also doesn’t hold the product managers accountable for anything, you only invite them to contribute but they may or may not take that opportunity. 

A much better solution would be to require that every new epic they work on would be accompanied by a document that explains how this epic ties into the larger product and company strategy and why it’s good for the business. This mechanism is much easier to keep: you need to create a document template, define that these documents would need review by you or someone else you trust, and clarify that it’s the product manager’s responsibility to make sure the document is reviewed on time and doesn’t create a delay in the overall development process. By doing so, you have shifted the responsibility on becoming more strategic to them (with your guidance of course), and you are also helping them do it just on time – whenever they really need it, which makes it easier to maintain.

In the case of status reporting, the routine I created was the following: I wanted to get a weekly status report over email by a certain time each week. It also had a dedicated format. To help my product managers remember and also find the time for it, I created a weekly 30-minute meeting for the entire team, titled “send Noa the weekly status”. If people respect their calendars, it should ensure that they have the time to write the status (and if not, at least they would have a reminder and know that they need to find the time nonetheless). Another thing that I did was to schedule it for a few hours before I really needed the status so that they have some flexibility in managing before the real deadline. Another reason it worked so well was that it also helped them get on top of things, so over time, they wanted to keep it no less than I did, and even took it to their next companies. 

A routine that works for you is worth its weight in gold, and we haven’t even started talking about scaling. Look into the things that are hard for you today and find a way to make them easier. You deserve it.