A workflow that helps you cut through the noise and stay focused

One of the reasons I love product management so much is that we get the chance to interact with different stakeholders in our company. We need to understand from the Support team what the biggest problems are, hear from Sales what will help us win more deals, and communicate requirements to R&D. And it’s not just to hear them out. Every department has its needs and goals, and is pushing hard to achieve them. It’s for Product to refine the needs and prioritize them.

But one of the biggest challenges is keeping track of everything that goes on simultaneously. A sales manager pings you on Slack, a customer escalation is heating up in an email thread, you’re being tagged and asked for comments on requirements documents, and your boss just thought of something that we must do, and she writes to you, so she doesn’t forget. It’s like juggling too many balls at the same time, and you just know that once you drop the first one, all the rest will follow.

At Gloat, we love to move fast. Our company has grown at a very rapid pace in the past couple of years, and our product has grown along with it. I joined Gloat almost a year ago, and I still find it hard to believe everything we accomplished in one year. In this kind of fast-moving environment, it’s all the more critical to get your things in order. I’ll share a workflow I created and the tools I used for it, and I hope it can help you in your situation.

You need your work to flow so you don’t drown

The only way to keep up with all you have going on is to build a method, a workflow that works for you and helps you get through all the noise.

You can find a ton of information online about productivity and the different methods to handle your day-to-day. A key aspect of all of them is to have everything you’re working on in one place, where you can see all that you need at a glance, and can start organizing and prioritizing your work. With all the different tools we use, I found that to be the biggest challenge, and that’s why I’ll focus mainly on it. So let me show you what I found.

My setup

Selecting where to capture everything

One of my guidelines was to use as few tools as possible, and I found Notion to be really practical for that. I started using Notion a few months ago as a tool to consolidate everything I needed for my day-to-day. It’s where I keep my notes and where I save things I want to come back to, like articles and videos. The reason I selected it was that I can also manage my tasks there. But to make it really useful, you need to steer all your other apps to Notion.

I used Zapier for that. If you’re not familiar with Zapier, it’s an automation tool that allows end users to integrate the web applications they use and automate workflows. I created two flows, or Zaps, as they’re called. Now, every time I ‘star’ an email, it automatically creates a new task in my to-do list in Notion. And every time I save a Slack message, it also creates a new task in my to-do list in Notion. Let’s dig in a little deeper to understand how to do it.

Automating Gmail and Slack

First of all, you need a process to manage your email. The number one distracter in your inbox is all the irrelevant, unnecessary emails that make you lose sight of what you need to do. I created two filters to help clear out the unwanted noise. I noticed that a huge amount of the emails I received were meeting invitations and confirmations. So I created a filter to send all calendar items into a dedicated category and skip the inbox. The other filter helped me remove junk by sending an email with the word ‘unsubscribe’ in it, to the Spam folder.

Once I only had relevant emails, I could start processing them. I configured my inbox to have three sections. The top section shows all the starred emails, the second holds emails that are marked as ‘important’, and the third is for everything else.

Then I created a couple of filters. Every email that mentions me is marked as important. This is really effective because all the tools we use have email notifications. So, it doesn’t matter if it’s a designer mentioning me on a Figma file, a developer mentioning me on a Jira task, or another product manager commenting on a roadmap deck, each of those creates an email, and they all go to my ‘important’ section.

When I go over them, I start with the ‘important’ section and then go to the ‘everything else’ section. For any email that requires action, I ‘star’ it. In my little world, a star means a task. At the end of every day, I archive all the emails and try to get to ‘inbox zero.’

A lot of our communication also happens on Slack. Slack is amazing when you need something done right now, but my biggest problem with it is that you can’t leave anything unfinished. If you read a message that requires your action and don’t do it immediately, good luck finding it later among all the different channels and conversations. So every time I need to mark something as a task in Slack, I save it. I end up with a flow that looks like this

Processing tasks in Notion

Once I have all my tasks in one place, I can see everything I have on my plate and start sorting and prioritizing. As mentioned earlier, you can find an endless amount of content out there about productivity. Over the years, I found that a slim version of GTD works best for me, and that’s what I aimed to apply on Notion.

All tasks start in my tasks inbox. I first make sure that everything makes sense to me, and if needed, I break it down into smaller actionable tasks. I also associate my tasks with projects and make sure to review my projects regularly. I found that adding a due date is not enough, so every task has a ‘work date’ column for when I plan to work on it. Once the due date and work date are added to the task, it’s out of the inbox. I then work off a daily tasks list, which shows all the tasks that I plan to work on that day.

Find what works for you

This flow really helped me consolidate the different tools I use and organize my work. But if you’re using different tools, that’s okay. Because the tools don’t matter, what’s important is that you build a workflow that works for you, helps you remove as much noise as possible, and lets you focus on what you need to do.