How do you think about balancing your time between meetings, emails, and work that needs to be done with relationship building and even trying to ensure you still have personal time?

This is a tough one and one that I still struggle with myself. Here are a few things I like to do:

• Prioritize tasks: Focus on high-impact work and block off deep work time. I like to set time to do deep thinking work either at the start of the day or at the end of the day.

• Use productivity tools: Leverage tools to streamline tasks and automate routine activities like ChatGPT, or Notion, etc.

• I count meetings and relationship building both as work in my role:

  • Optimize meetings: Only attend essential meetings, keep them concise, and stick to the agenda.

  • Build relationships: Schedule regular check-ins and integrate relationship building into other activities

• Protect Personal Time: Clearly define and respect your personal time. Prioritize self-care as you would any task.

• Review and adjust: I attend to assess and tweak my time management to stay balanced and productive week by week. Product marketing is so cross-functional that our schedule every week looks pretty different.

I spoke (in my previous response) about underlying principles to achieve balance but your question is more about the day-to-day so let's dive into the tactical aspects a bit more here. For me, it is a fine dance that involves constant recalibration between deep work, relationship-building, meetings, refining customer & product sense, and calendar management - some weeks, relationship-building takes center stage; other weeks, you’re heads-down on strategy & deliverables - challenging and deeply satisfying when you nail it. The key is to stay aware, adjust as needed, and protect your personal time fiercely. The more senior you get in your career, the less flexibility you have just due to the sheer volume & complexity of stuff that comes your way but you certainly get better at making important tradeoff decisions and being firm with boundaries.

TL/DR: Begin your day with intent, minimize meetings, spend time with customers, manage your own career, and balance time between doing/thinking, plus some other stuff.

Some actionable things I do to optimize my days and weeks:

1. Be Intentional with my time. Time is the ultimate currency and I try to think of my day in "buckets":

• Deep Work: This is where the "work" happens—think time, strategy, content creation, customer needs, analysis. I block uninterrupted time on my calendar for it. The prime real estate of my day goes towards this.

• Meetings: Where collaboration and decision-making happens. The intention is to keep these focused and purposeful.

• Relationship Building: Relationships are the grease that keeps everything moving smoothly. Whether it’s a quick Slack message to check in or grabbing a coffee, I make room for this intentionally.

• Emails/Slack: Handle in batches, turn off notifications periodically. We live in a digital rabbit hole. If it is urgent, someone will find you.

• Personal Time: Non-negotiable. But I will admit I'm not inherently good at this .. but getting better.

2. Spend time with customers: I prioritize making time for focus groups, advisory councils, and usability sessions with customers. Also, allocate time every week to looking at data (product usage, churn metrics, survey data, NPS scores, A/B test results) and I see it as an extension of getting to know customers at scale. Keeping my ears close to the ground with customers & data helps me formulate hypotheses for product development, marketing campaigns and strategic narratives. Finally, I spend time every week researching competitors and other products in the space/adjacencies to sharpen product sense and identify trends.

3. Be ruthless with calendar management/Time blocking: Your calendar is your frenemy so prioritize what matters. I will politely decline meetings without clear agendas or where my input isn’t critical, embrace async updates where possible. If it’s not on my calendar, it’s not happening. Use tools like "Pomodoro", Todoist, Flow to get stuff done.

4. Master Prioritization & Delegation: Not everything can be urgent or important—no matter how it feels. Every morning, I build my daily to-do list with:

   1. What drives the biggest impact?

   2. What can wait?

   3. What can be delegated or eliminated?

   I've used frameworks like Eisenhower’s Matrix (urgent vs. important) to decide where to focus and how to allocate time.

5. Relationship building takes work: Building relationships and having personal connections isn’t separate from work— it’s a part of it. Some of my most productive conversations and authentic "unlock" discussions have happened during informal catch-ups or walks. I make time for small gestures — sending team kudos, giving feedback, or just checking in on how my peers and team are doing. Relationships pay dividends in trust and collaboration and make work truly rewarding.

6. Commit to learning: Make time to read. Learn more about the science and art of product, best-in-class storytelling, and building & scaling high-performance teams. Ask for feedback. Make learning a habit and make it non-negotiable.

7. Protect your Personal Time: No one will protect your time but you. This requires communicating boundaries clearly and sticking to them politely. Log off when you say you will (ha! chuckling as I'm typing this). I’m not perfect but I’ve learned that stepping away makes me more productive not less.

Balance isn’t about doing it all perfectly; it’s about doing what matters most and letting the rest go. And finally, don’t forget to celebrate the small wins—sometimes, balance looks like finishing your to-do list and still having time to hit the couch for a Netflix binge or squeezing in that Pilates drill.