About one in 10 people who fail their New Year’s Resolutions failed because they made too many.
Similarly, I’ve felt myself beginning to burn out this week simply because I’ve committed to so much. School. Part-time work. Volunteering. This newsletter. Bits and pieces of many commitments scatter my days, leaving me bouncing between tasks.
I asked a friend for some advice (thanks, Kyler!), and he recommended that I return to my product management roots and figure out my life. You see, PMs have to deal with mounting problems every day. It could be a buggy UI interaction. Maybe it’s a new feature that customers suggested. Or, it might be a fancy new integration for their software.
Either way, it’s more common for PMs to have too many things to work on at once rather than too few.
So, what do they do? They prioritize. Simple enough. How? There are many ways, but I prefer the RICE method. RICE stands for:
R: Reachability - how many people will be able to use the feature?
I: Impact - how much impact will the feature have?
C: Confidence - how confident are we about the influence?
E: Effort - how much effort will it take to implement the feature?
Now, let’s revise that for personal use. I call it ICE:
I: Impact - how impactful is this commitment to my goals?
C: Confidence - how confident am I in the commitment’s impact?
E: Effort - how much time and energy will it take for me to stay committed?
I’ve found that a 1-5 scale works well for me in this context. Once I finished, I added the scores of each category and ranked all my commitments in order of their total score.
But, how do I know how to score each commitment? You trust your gut. Often, you’ve already intuitively decided on a rank but just aren’t aware of it yet. How fitting — I used ICE to fix my burnout.
Until next time,
Ethan ✌🏻