这是medium上的文章，原文作者Chris Jones。觉得甚是有用，因此将其重要片段做了下翻译。
今天看到一句话：我们的时间，永远应该花在正确的事情上，而不是容易的事情上。
以下是原文，加一丢丢翻译
Aligning a Product Manager’s Effort with Their Priorities
Chris Jones
Aug 13, 2018 · 4 min read
By far, the most common complaint I hear from product managers is not having enough time in the day. They are drowning in product execution tasks like requirements gathering, story writing, stakeholder management, project management, scrum rituals, bug fixes, customer success, deal support, recurring meetings, and all manner of fire-fighting.
With all these things to do, it’s difficult to find time for longer-term and higher-impact activities like vision, strategy, product discovery, or hiring. Though most people recognize that these activities are important, they never seem to prioritize their work in a way that reflects this. These tasks always end up happening only after everything else, which often means they don’t get done at all.（真相的一段）
Students of Ike Eisenhower or Stephen Covy will recognize this as the “Urgency over Importance” problem. Despite best intentions, people naturally prioritize urgent tasks first, and tasks that are important but not as urgent never get the attention they require. We always hope we will be able to get to the important stuff as soon as we get past this current crisis, but it never seems to happen. Once we complete an urgent task, a new one takes its place. The important tasks get pushed out again（永远在处理紧急的事情，从来就没有做重要的事情）
The problem doesn’t solve itself. It requires active engagement between a PM and their manager to constantly clarify priorities and allocate（分配） time. One very simple tool for facilitating this engagement is time-spent piechart.
I first started using this as a new manager, and it’s been one of my go-to tools ever since. At the end of the week, I ask each pm to quickly tally how they spent their time. I tell them I am not interested in detail or precision, just the broad allocations. They should not spend more than 5 minutes on the accounting.
I get the best results when I constrain（约束，驱使） the exercise to a set of pre-defined categories in order to frame how I want them to think about their work. My categories change based on the nature of the product and the team, but here’s a collection of I often pull from:
(把时间花费按照以下的分类分好）：
Deal support, field enablement（销售支持？现场支持？）
Solution prototyping（方案原型）
Customer interviews, research, testing（用户访谈、调查、测试）
Story writing, documentation, delivery artifacts（写故事、写文档、上传包）
（注： artifacts是开发中的包的概念）
Hiring, interviewing（面试）
Vision & Strategy（愿景和策略）
Recurring meetings（定期会议）
Stakeholder management（项目干系人管理）
Data analysis（数据分析）
Research: competitive, analyst, market（调查：竞品、行业分析、市场）
Other…
I also tell them that I am interested in accuracy. I want the allocation of how they actually spent their time, not how they wished they had.我想要知道的是他们是怎样分配他们的时间的，而不是他们希望他们是怎样分配的。（这个是作者希望后辈在时间管理时间记录上要做到的目标）
For most PM’s, the simple act of documenting time spent is enlightening for us both. The actual allocations rarely align with what they believe are their priorities. The piechart clearly shows where the problems are so we can develop strategies for fixing them. This is where the real fun begins.（documenting time虽然重要，但是没有分配到足够的优先级）
For example, one PM was a favorite of the sales team, and was called into lots of deals. He loved the excitement of the sales process and loved being able to play the hero who helped close the big accounts. He also believed that by spending so much time directly with customers through the sales process that he was doing real product discovery. Unsurprisingly, this PM had a very large pie wedge for the category of “deal support” and a razor （剃须刀）thin slice for “customer interviews.” Framing the categorization allowed us to have a good discussion on the difference between the two activities and set better targets on how the pie should look going forward.（区分“销售支持”和“用户访谈”）
Another PM was trying to hire someone to help her particular aspect of her product. She was clearly underwater without this help, yet headcount had been open for a long time. Her “hiring” wedge was around 10%, representing the time she spent processing the resumes that the recruiting department provided. I suggested to her that until she hires this person, it was her single most important job and should account for no less than 40% of her time and energy. We then discussed ways for how she could more directly contribute to sourcing candidates, as well as ways to reduce some of the urgent demands on her time that were getting in the way of hiring. Many of these fell to me to figure out through reallocating effort in other parts of the team, de-prioritizing（暂缓） tasks, or resetting expectations in other parts of the organization.
Qualitative product discovery is perhaps the biggest opportunity for a manager to change behavior. Many PM’s realize that direct, non-deal-oriented customer interaction is important（没有销售意图的用户交流是很重要的）, but always seem to relegate（贬低） it to the small spaces left after everything else is done. The time-spent piechart can help a manager invert this thinking. Insisting on a 30–40 percent allocation for direct customer time（坚持每天花2.5-4个小时在和用户交流上） communicates to a PM that product discovery is actually their “day job” around which everything else must fit.
These examples show that it’s not enough to simply create a pie chart. That’s just the staring place. Prioritizing a team’s effort requires hard conversations and even harder decisions to move past the urgent. But if you don’t do it, it is the important things — like the long term success of your product — that suffer.
By the way, if you’re a manager, there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be running this process for yourself. Your categories may be different than your team’s, but it’s just as easy for a manager to fall victim to the urgent and continually defer the important.
