Hey there, punk!

As of today, I'm off for two weeks. School's out, and I'm swapping the desk for a fortnight with my wife and kids.

My first instinct was to write and schedule a couple of issues in advance so you wouldn't notice I'd gone. Then I caught myself. Because the whole reason I'm taking a break is the thing I'd be quietly refusing to do by faking that I'm carrying on through it: stopping. So I'm not going to.

Before I disappear, though, a few thoughts on why you should probably do the same at some point, if you can.

Let's dig into it.

Quote of the Week 🙊

Insight 🦉

Product management attracts a certain kind of person. The kind who reads newsletters about product management (like this one). Who writes blog posts on the weekend, argues about prioritisation frameworks with strangers online, and treats "what are you building?" as the most interesting question at a party. The work isn't a job. It's an identity. And an identity is much harder to switch off at 6pm.

Which is why so many of us are quietly running hot.

The pressure never lets up. Ship more stuff. Become t-shaped. Do the research, learn to code, don't learn to code, learn AI, be strategic, build a brand, learn AI again, ship more stuff. For a role that's supposedly about creativity, innovation and judgement, the treadmill is relentless. And the treadmill is the enemy of all three. There was a LinkedIn post doing the rounds recently, probably apocryphal, about a guy in San Francisco who effectively resigned from his own family to become one of the top AI users at his company. Everyone laughed. Everyone recognised the impulse.

Here's the uncomfortable part: the striving doesn't produce the work. It produces the burnout.

The record industry worked this out the hard way. In the fifties and sixties the machine ran on volume. Singles every few weeks, albums every few months, all to service one-sided contracts signed by twenty-somethings who had no idea what they'd agreed to. It chewed through extraordinary talent and spat it out. Look at the photoshoot for Beatles for Sale. Four of the most successful people on the planet, and not one of them has the energy to smile. That's what the grind looks like from the inside.

And when it broke people, it broke them completely. Jimi Hendrix, gone at 27 after barbiturates and a bad night. Jim Morrison, dead in a Paris bathtub before he'd turned 28. Syd Barrett, Roky Erickson, Skip Spence—three incredible talents who simply couldn't withstand the pace and disappeared from the industry that made them. Not cautionary tales. Just people the machine used up.

The tech version is less lethal and no less real. Nobody's joining the twenty-seven club at their standup. But talented people are hollowing out—going through the motions, shipping competent work they don't care about, mistaking motion for progress. The pressure to keep up is very good at generating activity. It's hopeless at generating anything that matters.

The Beatles stopped touring in 1966. The screaming had grown so loud they couldn't hear themselves play, and the live show had curdled into a chore with almost nothing to do with the music. So they stopped, retreated into the studio, and came out of it with Sgt Pepper—an album so intricate they couldn't have performed it live if they'd wanted to. It didn't come from keeping up. It came from stepping out of the grind and building something on their own terms.

I saw another post recently: a career summary that read "decades at Microsoft," then "self-employed goose farmer." I'm not suggesting we all buy livestock. But the instinct underneath it is sound. The distance is the point. Judgement—the one thing in this job that AI can't yet do for you—doesn't sharpen under pressure. It sharpens in the gaps. In the walk, the holiday, the fortnight where you deliberately don't read a single thread about agentic workflows.

So the next time you feel the pull to add one more skill, one more side project, one more evening of catching up, consider that the highest-leverage move available to you might be to do nothing at all.

Action 🚀

Next week, block out a real gap. An afternoon, a day, whatever you can actually defend. Put it in the calendar as a meeting so nobody books over it.

Then don't fill it with busywork. No podcasts at 2x, no "quick" reading list. Go for the walk. Do the thing that has nothing to do with product.

You'll feel like you're falling behind. You're not. You're giving your judgement the room it needs to tell you something worth hearing.

Inspiration 💡

The AI Treadmill – Deb Liu names the trap precisely: AI lets you do more, and somehow that leaves you feeling busier and further behind, not freer. Her point is the one this whole issue circles—creativity comes from making space to think, not from cramming more into the day. More output was never the same thing as better work. Read more

if it pleases you – Visakan Veerasamy’s personal version of all this. He clocks his own inherited workaholism—rushing through his life so fast he misses the small pleasures inside it—and decides to slow down, be more deliberate, and actually be present for the people he loves. Being good at your work is worth very little if you sprint straight past everything else. Read more

Why a sabbatical can change everything – Lenny Rachitsky breaks time off into three kinds of taker—Achievers, Seekers, Explorers—but the useful bit is what separates a real reset from an expensive holiday. It isn't the length of the break. It's turning up open enough to let it change you. Read more

Signing Off ✍️

If this resonates with you, hit reply and let me know what product or team rule you’re ready to break this week. And if you think a friend or colleague would enjoy The Punk PM, feel free to share it with them!

Play it your way,

Toby