You’re the Product Manager of Your Own Life

When you’re trying to live a goal-oriented life, you’re trying to be constantly improving yourself. That gets harder as you creep toward middle age, because now there are honest-to-god bucket list items you either haven’t started or just aren’t making any progress on. They sit there. They mock you a little.

I’ve been an engineering manager for more than 30 years, and the way I’ve started thinking about this is that, just like at a company, the projects I’ve taken on for myself are a backlog. I’m a blue belt in jiu-jitsu — I’d love to get to purple someday. I’m trying to claw back my Spanish after letting it rust for 30 years. There’s general fitness and health, which gets harder, not easier — you can’t just flop into bed at the end of the night and pop up eight hours later like you could in your 20s. Now it’s a struggle to get to sleep, a struggle to stay asleep. Oh, and I’m trying to write three books. Not one. Three.

If you’ve ever worked in software, you know what this looks like: a pile of open Linear tickets that have been sitting there for years. The tasks have subtasks. The subtasks have subtasks. Every time you look at the board, you feel further behind than the last time.

The cycle that eats your life

Here’s where it gets ugly. You put all these expectations on yourself, you fail to live up to most of them, and then you beat yourself up about it. The self-criticism kicks the anxiety up a notch. Anxiety scrambles your emotional state. And when you’re not in a good emotional state, it’s really difficult to get any work done. It’s actually painful.

I think this is one of the reasons people distract themselves so much. When you’re staring at what feels like an insurmountable list — a list you put on yourself, by the way — your brain reaches for the cheapest available dopamine. Phone. TikTok. Instagram. “Just five minutes.” Two hours later, you’ve done nothing, and the list is still right there waiting for you. The cycle is: overwhelm → distract → still overwhelmed, but now also two hours behind. It’s maddening.

Manage yourself like an engineer

I know how to manage engineers. I’ve spent decades doing it. So I figured: maybe I should start managing myself like an engineer.

Here’s the thing about that. In my work life, I’ve gotten pretty practiced at staring down product managers and telling them — politely, but firmly — to put everything in priority order. Product managers are great people, but their literal job is to ask engineering for things. And if you’re not careful, a well-meaning PM will overwhelm you with “must-haves,” because to them, it’s all must-haves.

So I push back. I say: there is no must-have line. Everything goes in priority order. Top to bottom. Because every single day, every engineer on the team is making decisions about what to put their attention on, and they need to be able to look at the list and just start at the top.

The same thing applies to your personal life. The problem is that you are both the product manager and the engineer. You’re the one piling on the requests, and you’re also the one who has to do them. And you, the PM-version-of-you, can absolutely overwhelm you, the engineer-version-of-you, with very well-meaning requests.

Build a bomb-proof priority list

What you need is a bomb-proof list of priorities, in the actual order they’re important to you in your life. Not aspirational order. Not “what would sound good on a podcast” order. The real order.

When you have that, then on the days when you’re overwhelmed and can’t even figure out where to put your attention next, you don’t have to figure it out. You just go to the top of the list and ask: am I making progress here? Am I falling behind?

For most people, health probably belongs at or near the top. It’s also the easiest thing to fall behind on. By health I mean the boring, well-known stuff: drinking enough water, eating real food regularly, getting enough sleep, exercising. We all know we should do these things. That’s not the hard part. The hard part is the motivation, and the motivation gets a lot easier when health isn’t competing for attention with eight other things you also told yourself were “must-haves.”

Stop blaming the people around you

One more thing, and this one is uncomfortable.

When you put too many expectations on yourself, there’s a real tendency to look around at the people in your life and start blaming them. They’re asking too much of you. They’re not helping enough. They’re getting in your way.

Be careful with that. In most cases, you’re the one asking too much of you. You are the product manager of your own life. You are the business manager of your own life. If you’ve put so many expectations on yourself that you can’t possibly do it alone — that’s fine. Get help. But look in the right places for help, and don’t reflexively blame the people around you for not solving a problem you created.

I tell engineers this. I tell my son this. It is totally okay to need help. But you are the one who has to ask for it. You have to figure out who, and how, and in what way to ask. Sometimes the most useful help isn’t even someone else doing a thing for you — sometimes it’s just a person looking at your list with you and saying, “Yeah, you don’t actually have to do that one.”

TL;DR

You are the product manager. You are the engineer. The PM-you can overwhelm the engineer-you, and when it does, the engineer-you starts scrolling TikTok at 11 p.m. instead of sleeping.

So manage yourself the way you’d want to be managed. Make the list. Put it in real priority order, top to bottom, no must-have line. Start at the top. Ask for help when you need it. And every once in a while, give yourself permission to look at a ticket that’s been open for two years and just close it.

Not every goal deserves to be on the board.