The Working With... Podcast: Recent Episodes
Carl Pullein
“In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst thing you can do is nothing.”
That was Theodore Roosevelt, giving his thoughts on making a decision, and in this week’s episode, I am answering a question about why we may be trying to solve a time management problem the wrong way.
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Script |428
Hello, and welcome to episode 428 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
If you’ve followed this podcast for any length of time, you will have heard me talk about processes and routines. It’s these little things that have the effect of automating your daily decision-making requirements.
If you always start your day in the same way, you no longer have to decide what to do when you wake up. You do it automatically.
And this is important.
Reducing the number of decisions you make each day prevents something called “Prefrontal Cortex Overload”, which is often called “decision fatigue”.
And it’s not woo-woo science. It’s very real
The prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that deals with executive function. These functions include impulse control, evaluating something, and making choices. Basically, decisions.
When your prefrontal cortex becomes tired and fatigued, you find it harder to make logical, objective decisions, and instead your brain begins to use the amygdala, the part of your brain that controls emotions.
In effect, you begin making decisions based on how you are feeling.
And that leaves you picking the easy and exciting over the important, mundane tasks.
It also leaves you with little discipline, which often means you eat unhealthy food and stay up later than you should.
When overwhelmed, the brain defaults to the path of least resistance by delaying decisions, defaulting to the status quo, or refusing to choose at all. You then procrastinate, feel exhausted, anxious and overwhelmed.
When you set up processes and routines as well as setting some “if this then that” rules, you reduce the burden you place on your pre-frontal cortex.
And all that explanation now brings me onto this week’s question. Which means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice. Some say she’s always on holiday; all I know is she’s called “The Mystery Podcast Voice.
This week’s question comes from Fabian. Fabian asks, hi Carl, you recommend that you should do your daily planning at the end of the day, not at the beginning. But I am always so exhausted at the end of the day that I find I just cannot do any planning. Is there anything I can do to consistently plan at the end of the day?
Hi Fabian. Thank you for your question.
When I read your question, my thought was that it might be because you are not getting enough sleep, or that your work causes you to make decisions all day about what to work on next. Nothing is pre-planned or pre-decided.
Both of which could be the underlying reason for feeling exhausted at the end of the day.
If you’re not getting enough sleep, the effect you will experience would be the same as if you were experiencing decision fatigue. An inability to make decisions.
And that is why, at the end of the day, you find it so difficult to plan the next day. After all, what is planning? It’s making decisions about what you will work on tomorrow.
So, if a lack of sleep is the issue, then the fix would be to look at your sleep cycle and make adjustments there.
However, for most people, the problem is making too many decisions throughout the day, leaving them feeling mentally drained and lacking in any motivation to do anything.
This is where routines, processes and rules come into play.
Every productive day is the result of hundreds of decisions:
- What deserves my attention?
- What can wait?
- What should I ignore?
- What should I delegate?
- When is “good enough” truly good enough?
If each time you come up with something new and you have to decide whether something deserves your attention, whether it can wait, or whether you could ignore it, you’re tapping into your prefrontal cortex’s energy reserves.
And your prefrontal cortex does not have an 850cc engine that only draws a minuscule amount of energy. No. It has a full-throated V8 and drinks fuel like it’s put a straw in a lake and called it a warm-up.
This is why pre-establishing what your core work is matters. Once you know what your core work is and what that work looks like at a doing level, you are pre-deciding what deserves your attention. It’s the work you are employed to do. It’s important and must be done.
Now, all you need do is decide when you will do it.
And with core work, given that the type of work you’re doing will be the same, you can pre-block time each day for doing it.
For example, you could protect 10 am to lunchtime for doing your core work each day. That means you are no longer deciding what to do each day. You’ve pre-decided; it’s blocked on your calendar, and all you need to do now is turn up and do the work.
It’s always fascinated me that the most stressed-out people I’ve come across in my professional life are the ones who’ve told themselves they can’t do that, and that they have to be available for everyone immediately they ask.
Complete nonsense, of course, but there really are some people who believe that.
In this situation, a person is constantly having to decide whether they should respond to this person or that person. Who is more important? Should I call my boss, or perhaps send her a text message? “Oh shoot! This person’s been waiting 10 minutes. I must call them immediately!)
It’s also why the least stressed-out people are the ones who are comfortable turning on Do Not Disturb on their devices when they sit down to do some focused work.
They’ve made the decision that for the next hour or two they will work on a specific type of task. If something was a genuine emergency, they would be told somehow.
I remember last year, when we were changing our car, that the sales manager we dealt with was wonderfully laid-back. Within a few days of starting the process to change our car, I worked out that he would respond to our messages between 11:00 am and 12:00 pm or between 4:00 and 5:00 pm, depending on when we messaged him.
It was consistent, and I was hugely impressed.
When I picked the new car up, I asked him about it, and he said he gets so many messages and emails each day that he wouldn’t be able to do any work if he responded instantly to everything that came in. So, he does an hour before lunch and an hour before he finishes the day.
Brilliant. And I bet you he never gets any complaints about it.
So, having a process for dealing with your communications is just as important as having time protected for doing the work that matters each day.
Then we come to your routines. If you were to have a small fifteen-minute closing down routine at the end of the day, this would again minimise the decisions you need to make.
For example, at work, I will close down by clearing my desktop and tidying up my desk. I clear out Todoist and process my inbox. Then I open up my daybook and plan out tomorrow by writing in my appointments and the most important things I have to do tomorrow, and that’s it. Done.
It tells me that my workday is now finished.
There can also be other things you might do too. For example, at home, perhaps before you go to bed, you load the dishwasher and turn it on, or if you don’t have a dishwasher, you wash all the pots and mugs before going to bed.
That’s a routine. A going-to-bed routine. Pre-decided, and after a few weeks, you would feel uncomfortable if you didn’t do that.
And then there are your rules, or standards.
Again, this helps you make pre-decisions so that, on a day-to-day basis, you don’t have to.
For example, I have many of my coaching clients make a commitment to respond to their emails within a specified period of time.
Let’s say you set a rule to respond to all your emails within 24 hours. This means that any email that is close to your time limit must be responded to today. Anything else can wait.
For emails that will require you to do a lot of work, the response time still holds, but the response is to reply with something like: “Thank you for your email. I will get it back to you as soon as I can”
This way you filter out the genuinely urgent from the non-urgent. If the person you’re responding to comes back to you saying they need it by such and such a date, now you know it’s important, and you can prioritise it accordingly. If they respond with, “Thanks”. You know it can wait.
The difference between a rule and a routine is that routines happen automatically. You do the same thing at the same time. A rule is conditional. A sort of “if this, then that”.
If I have a presentation to do this week, I will protect an hour the day before for preparation, for example.
Processes are pre-decided methods for doing the different types of work you do. For example, “if I get a sales enquiry, this is the process I follow.”
What these routines, processes and rules do is they reduce the number of decisions you need to make each day. This helps to prevent you from overloading your decision-making abilities, which in turn reduces the amount of mental fatigue and tiredness you experience at the end of the day.
Daily planning the day before is a decision-reducing routine. When you plan the day before, it leaves you knowing exactly what you need to do when you begin the next day. No decisions to be made. You know exactly what needs to be done and when you will do it.
You can then preserve your energy for the decisions that may need to be made if something changes and you have to decide what you will work on. The new circumstances.
This is why NASA’s Mission Control in Houston in the 1960s practised every possible eventuality before any mission. It was this practice that enabled the brilliant people in Mission Control to get the Apollo 13 crew home safely in April 1970. They had practised that eventuality so many times that the decisions required were already made for them.
So there you go, Fabian. I hope that has helped.
Turn your daily planning into an end-of-day routine. Create a checklist to guide you (again reducing decisions). This daily planning will also help reduce the decisions you need to make the next day, which in turn will leave you feeling less exhausted at the end of the day.
Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.
Don’t forget, my Productivity Academy is now open, and we have a date for our first live event. Sunday, 30 August. The topic will be where to start and a general Q&A session. Not to be missed. Joining now will give you plenty of time to do your homework before the session.
I’ll leave the details of the Academy in the show notes for you.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Are you on a mission to find the best productivity app or system, and find that no matter how many apps or new methods you try, you still find yourself overwhelmed, backlogged and stuck? Well, this week I want to tell you about a new way I can help you.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Learn more about the Productivity Academy
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Subscribe to my Substack
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script |427
Hello, and welcome to episode 427 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Eleven years ago, I began writing blog posts on time management and productivity. My goal was simple. To help people navigate the rapidly changing world of time management and productivity.
In 2015, it seemed almost every day a new task manager or notes app would come out promising to make organising your day easier.
This meant established productivity apps such as OmniFocus, Things, Remember the Milk and Todoist had to change to keep up. So these apps started adding features, changing their design languages, and everything started to become more complicated.
AI today is doing exactly the same thing. Promising a lot and forcing established productivity tools to add more and more features, whether we want them or not.
When trying to decide if a new productivity tool is all that it promises to be, I’ve noticed that many of these promises are repackaged things that already exist.
For example, I’ve been using an app called TextExpander for fifteen years now. TextExpander inserts pre-written “snippets” of text through a keyboard shortcut.
I use it for writing dates so I don’t need to look up the date. All I type is “Edate”, and it will give me the date in the UK format: day, month and year.
I also have some pre-written thank you emails there too. They are written by me in my writing style, and a simple keyboard shortcut will give me the email. While TextExpander won’t send the email for me, all I need to do is hit Command and return on my keyboard, and it will send it.
Then we have tools such as Calendly and Acuity. These tools allow you to set up times on your calendar that people can pick from to set up an appointment with you. Once set up, this works in the background, and you have nothing to do.
No back-and-forth negotiating a time. People just click on a link, and these tools deal with time zone differences and all the admin.
No need for AI to get involved.
AI will inevitably change the way we work; for many people, it already has. However, there are some principles that never change.
There will still be 24 hours in a day, you will still be able to only focus on one thing at a time, and you won’t be able to be in more than one place at a time.
Your energy will fluctuate, and you will need to get enough sleep.
The need to manage our time is still there. We still have friends and family, work commitments and perhaps some hobbies. They all need time.
And the principles of time management will not change. If you want to do something, it will require time. Whether that’s cleaning out your car or sitting on the sofa chatting with an AI bot.
Time management and productivity skills will still be needed no matter what advances AI brings to our workplaces and lives.
Thinking about all this led me to look at how people are engaging with my Learning Centre. This is where I have courses and programmes to help people become better at managing their time and become more productive.
As I was looking, I noticed something interesting. The people who have made the biggest positive changes in their lives weren’t the people who bought the most courses.They were the people who kept learning.
They perhaps began with my COD course, my free productivity fundamentals course, then went on to purchase the Time and Life Mastery programme or the Time Sector System course.
Some went on to join my coaching programme so they could have guidance on building their own, tailor-made system.
This highlighted a mistake many people make with time management and productivity. They approach it as if it were a destination. Find the perfect app, read the right book, take the right course, watch one more YouTube video, then they’ll finally be organised.
Yet that’s not how it works, and you’ve probably noticed.
A few years ago, the trend was minimalist desk set-ups. This is where people stripped everything from their workspace so all they had was a small plant, a simple lamp and a laptop attached to a large monitor.
YouTube was full of videos of people showing off their desk setups. They looked great, but did absolutely nothing for their productivity.
Now the trend is to have books and notebooks everywhere. The plants survived, but the little desk accessories have reappeared. Minimalism seems to have lost its appeal. Few people have been able to stick with it.
It seems keeping things minimal is challenging and time-consuming.
I also saw something similar when I was at university; I studied part-time. 6:00 pm to 9:00 pm every Tuesday and Thursday.
On our first day, there were just over 200 students crammed into the lecture theatre. All excitedly looking forward to their graduation day four years later with an LL.B Honours degree.
I remember the professor in charge of the course telling us that 70 to 80% of those in that lecture theatre would not graduate. Not because the course was particularly difficult. It wasn’t. But because committing six hours a week to attending lectures for four years would be a commitment beyond most people.
And on our graduation day, there were just 24 students left. Almost 200 students had quit!
It didn’t matter what tools or processes you had. What mattered was understanding the basic principles of time management. Turning up consistently and doing the work.
It had nothing to do with academic ability or how smart someone was. The people who graduated were the ones who turned up constantly and managed their time so they were able to attend the lectures and do the reading (there was a lot of reading to do for a law degree) week after week for four years.
Being good at time management and consistently productive is more like fitness. Let’s say you wanted to get fit. You wouldn’t expect to take a three-hour course on weight training and suddenly become stronger.
Fitness doesn’t work like that. The same is true of playing the piano, learning a language, cooking, and photography. These are not one-time learning experiences; they’re continuous.
And learning to better manage your time and be more productive is no different.
Our lives and work change. We may begin as a junior administrative assistant, but within a year or two we are managing a team of four people and overseeing projects.
You start a family; now suddenly you have a little monster waking up every two or three hours screaming through the night. And as your kids grow up, you have commitments to take them to and pick them up from swimming or football practice.
The time management skills you learned at school and university don’t work in the workplace. And as you change jobs, you need to learn new ways to manage your time both professionally and personally.
The real challenge isn’t knowing what to do. If you’ve followed this podcast or my YouTube channel, you will already know you should plan your week and day, spend less time reacting to emails and messages, and protect time for your core work (at least I hope you do). The challenge is applying what you know consistently while juggling meetings, deadlines, family commitments and the unexpected events that arrive every day.
This is why consuming more productivity content isn’t going to create the change you want. As James Clear’s Atomic Habits (a fantastic book) shows: Information fades; your habits remain.
Over the years I’ve noticed something about many of the people I’ve coached. The ones that become brilliant at managing their time don’t just complete a course or have one or two coaching sessions and disappear; they keep coming back. They ask questions, refine their systems, and they adapt as their careers and family lives change.
They come back to ideas we implemented years ago and learn new ideas because they now have different challenges.
My best clients have been with me for over eight years, and they are the ones who’ve seen incredible changes, so much so that they’ve inspired me!
I realise now that when my driving instructor told me years ago that: “You don’t learn to really drive a car until you’ve passed your driving test.” the same is true about your time management and productivity: you don’t become more productive and better at managing your time until you start practising what you learned.
All this got me thinking about what productivity education should look like over the next five to ten years.
I don’t believe it’s about creating more courses, and it’s certainly not about developing more complicated systems, packaging them up and selling them.
Instead, it’s about creating a place where people can continue learning, refining and improving over time, just like many of my coaching clients have done. They understand that becoming organised and in control of their time isn’t a project; it’s a lifelong commitment. And like every commitment, it works for those who stick with it.
So, going forward, I will be introducing more live training events for you.
I started doing a few live training events in 2023, and some of my favourite moments have been in those sessions. I’ve been able to answer questions, explore new ideas and help people apply what they’ve learned to their own situations.
Standalone courses don’t allow me to do that, because we are all different, with different professions and responsibilities; no ‘one size’ will fit everyone, and that’s frustrating as a teacher.
Live training changes that. It gives you a place to ask me questions directly related to your challenges. That is what I want to make an ongoing part of the learning experience, not something that only happens occasionally.
The courses and programmes give you the technical knowledge and theory. The live training gives you the practical skills to put what you learn in the courses into practice in ways that work for you.
It’s the difference between learning to drive by reading a book or getting in a car with an instructor and actually going out there and driving.
All this thinking led me yesterday to launch my Productivity Academy. It is the result of months of work, giving you a place where you can keep coming back, get answers to your questions, and work with a group of people on a similar journey as yourself.
And it includes monthly live training sessions that you can join, ask questions, and have the principles applied directly to the way you work.
It will also give you access to all my current and future courses, along with a recommended roadmap for taking them.
My overall goal hasn’t changed. That’s to help as many people as I can become better at managing their time and being more productive so they can enjoy the things they want to enjoy doing.
But I realise I need to do more, and the best way I can do that is to increase the live training element, which will allow me to help you navigate the current and future ways we work.
If you’ve already purchased several of my courses, please don’t think you need to replace them. You don’t. Those courses remain yours exactly as before. The Academy is simply a different way to learn.
The courses will give you the theory and know-how. The Academy will give you the practical skills (and some accountability) to put what you have learned into practice.
If you enjoy learning independently, nothing changes. If, however, you’d like regular guidance, monthly training and access to everything I create going forward, I think you’ll really enjoy becoming an Academy Member.
I will put a link in the show notes to the Academy’s website, and feel free to email me if you have any questions.
I hope to be able to “meet” you in one of our live training sessions soon.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me to wish you a very, very productive week.
What drives your day? Your calendar or your to-do list? Or perhaps your boss? The answer to that question will determine whether you are or will be productive each day.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Learn more about the Time Sector System here
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
Plan Your Week With Me: The Weekly Planning Matrix.
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Subscribe to my Substack
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script |426
Hello, and welcome to episode 426 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
If you were to look at the paper planners of the 1980s and 1990s, you would instantly see they were all built around your calendar. Some of the more sophisticated planners had a to-do list and a place to keep notes. Most were just a vertical list of times and the day’s date with a small area at the bottom for notes.
And there was a reason for that. People working in the 20th century understood that no matter what you wanted to do each day, it would require time.
Dropping your kids off at school likely involved a twenty-minute detour on your regular commute. Restocking your paper-clip box would require you to walk to the stationery cupboard to fill it, another ten minutes, and then there was all the travelling around to meet people. (No Teams or Zoom in those days).
Needs drove how we managed our time, and your diary was the only tool that could prevent you from overloading yourself. You could see in an instant whether you could sit down and type out the report or proposal. Because, given that there were no smartphones or tablets, and laptops were prohibitively expensive, you also had to be in the right place in order to do much of your work.
I fondly remember the days when I left work at the end of the day, and there was no way a client, colleague or boss could contact me until I arrived for work the next day. My work Email was only on my work desktop, and that was in the office.
Now, somewhere along the timeline, those barriers have been broken down. Your work can, and does, follow you home.
I recently saw a before-and-after picture of people sitting around a resort swimming pool in the 1990s and one in the 2020s.
In the 1990s, people were sitting around the pool talking or reading a book. In the 2020s, people were staring at their phones. No talking, no books. Just eyes glued to a screen.
It’s quite sad really to see. It’s also why your clients, colleagues and bosses are on holiday with you.
If you’re carrying your work life on your phone, then there’s no escape at all. It would require a superhuman effort to avoid occasionally looking at your emails and messages. I know some people can do it; most cannot.
Today’s episode is about how to put your calendar back to where it belongs: being your primary productivity and time management tool.
So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the recently returned Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Judy. Judy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you say many times that your calendar should be your primary productivity tool. I really struggle with that because I have so many tasks to do, and so I find myself beginning and ending my day in my task manager. Do you have any suggestions on how to make my calendar my primary focus?
Hi Judy, thank you for your question.
There is a problem with task managers today, and that is their sophistication.
Before we went digital, if you used a to-do list, you needed to handwrite it each day. While this may not have been very convenient, it forced you to only write out the tasks that needed to be done.
Remembering to watch a TV show or read a newspaper article would rarely, if ever, be written on a to-do list unless it was something you genuinely wanted to do.
Even then, when I think back, I knew that The A Team would be on a Saturday at 6:00 pm, and that Ally McBeal was on a Sunday night at 9:00 pm. And I was always at home at those times, and if I wasn’t, because there were no streaming services, I wasn’t going to see the show then unless I set the video recorder, and to do that you needed a doctorate in Theoretical Physics.
Today’s digital To-do lists are fantastic. You can add tags and labels, set start and due dates, make tasks recurring, and create multiple lists.
All great features.
And if your to-do list can do all that, what’s the point of using a calendar? You can put events and date reminders into your task manager and have one single place to see everything you have to do.
Doing things this way immediately poses a problem, though. You remove the time constraints a calendar gives you.
With a calendar, you can see your day as a whole. You get your 24 hours, and if you tried to over-schedule yourself, you would instantly see it with multiple appointments at the same time. You can then act and reschedule things or cancel a meeting or two.
With a task manager, you cannot see that. All you get is a list of things to do. And if you’re not curating that list each day, the list just gets longer and longer.
Then you find important must-do tasks get lost among low-value, would-like-to-do-someday tasks. This then requires a lot of time to sort and organise.
But rather more damaging is what this does to your sense of control. Maintaining all this in your task manager creates a sense of overwhelm, and the increase in decision-making required leaves you feeling exhausted at the end of the day.
When you use your calendar as your primary productivity tool, you only need to decide what type of work you will do at any given time in the day.
For example, imagine it’s the tax reporting season, and you need to get all your finances in order. Not a small task, and something you likely need four or five hours to complete.
If you were to have a task in your task manager that says “do taxes”, that’ll be a task you will keep rescheduling. It’s not a pleasant task to do, and you know it will take you four or five hours to do.
However, if you managed this on your calendar, you could schedule a couple of hours on Saturday morning one weekend and a further two hours the following weekend. Now you know you have the time protected. All you have to do is turn up and do the work.
Not turning up and doing it is an entirely different problem. That’s not respecting your calendar, which is never a good habit to have.
One other thing you will notice about scheduling this kind of work on your calendar is you see it there well before the time, and that helps you to mentally prepare for the task.
Perhaps you decide to get all the paperwork ready on the Friday evening so you are ready to go first thing Saturday.
On a task list, a task like this will likely be buried away somewhere, and you only see it when you do your daily planning that day.
I’ve always found historical figures’ to-do lists fascinating. People like President Eisenhower, Leonardo Da Vinci, Johnny Cash, John Lennon, Maya Angelou and Margaret Thatcher’s to-do lists never contained any dates.
Now, people like President Eisenhower and Margaret Thatcher had diary secretaries. These were people who managed their calendars and informed them at the start and end of each day what their schedule was for that day.
This is something I’ve found Siri and Alexa superb at. I can walk into my office in the morning and ask what my appointments for the day are. I can also ask them to block out time tomorrow or Friday for doing a specific piece of work.
With AI coming on board, that feature can only get better. If I say to Siri, “schedule a deep work session on Friday morning at 9:30”, Siri will inform me that the cleaner will be coming at 9:30 am, and I can decide to keep the focus session or change it to a time I will not be interrupted.
Each week I write a script for this podcast. I usually do this on a Thursday morning after my meetings. Today, my last meeting was cancelled, so I was able to get to writing earlier.
I haven’t needed to look at my to-do list once yet, and it’s already 11:00 am. My day began at 8:00 am with a one-hour meeting. It finished at 9:30 am. Originally, my plan was to finish my meetings at 10:15 and begin writing at 10:30 am. As it happened, because of the cancellation, I was able to begin writing at 9:45.
I don’t need to change my calendar; I knew that once my meetings were finished, my next task was to write. So I did.
So where should a task list fit into your overall system?
Task managers are great at collecting stuff you have to do. Far better than calendars, as a calendar will demand a date at the very least. Task managers don’t need a date. You just add a task to the inbox, and there it will sit until you decide to do something with it.
If you follow the Time Sector System, you process your task manager every 24 to 48 hours, and when you do so, you decide when you will do the task. It will either be this week, next week, later this month or next month.
On your calendar, you protect time for the different categories of work you do. For instance, if you write proposals, then you would have time protected on your calendar for writing proposals. You will likely also have time set aside for dealing with your communications (emails and messages, etc.), and admin.
Then at the appointed time, you use the tags or labels in your task manager to pull up the tasks that match that category of work.
That’s an oversimplification of the system. If you want to learn more about the Time Sector System, I recommend checking out the course I have for it. I will put the details in the show notes.
This ensures you are not over-scheduling yourself or attempting to do more than you can do. It also teaches you to say no. You can see whether or not you have the time and space to do the work being asked of you.
If you consistently follow this method, backlogs no longer grow, and you stay reasonably on top of your work, although being on top of your work at all times is rarely achievable.
The biggest, more positive change you could make to your productivity system is to put your calendar back in its proper place. Namely, make your calendar your primary productivity tool and use your task manager as a support tool that tells you what to do when you sit down to work.
I should add that for some of you this change will be uncomfortable. If you’ve allowed your calendar to fill up with meetings, leaving you no time to do the work you are meant to do, sticking your head in the sand and ignoring it won’t make the problem go away.
This is when you may have to have a conversation with your boss. More than five hours of meetings a day, and you’re not going to be able to do much work beyond responding to messages. When you take into account toilet breaks, making coffee, and your lunchtime, there’s not going to be much time left for anything else.
I hope that has helped, Judy. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
The legendary American Football coach, Vince Lombardi, said: “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up."
Now that’s true in American Football, and it’s also true in life.
No matter how well you plan your day or your week, your plan will inevitably get attacked by outside influences.
A disorganised, reactive boss, a tired son or daughter who won’t get out of bed in the morning, a traffic jam on the way to an important meeting, or your accountant telling you that you need to pay a big tax bill.
These are all sudden, impossible to plan for attacks on your carefully planned day.
Having a plan is one part of a productive day. Having an arsenal of tools to defend your plan is another. And it’s that part that most people never prepare for.
In this week’s episode, I will share with you a few ideas that will help you defend your plan and show you how to get back on track if you are prevented from following it through.
Let’s go.
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Script |425
Hello, and welcome to episode 425 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Whenever I ask a client how their week went, most answers are negative.
They usually go something like:
“Well, it started well. I got everything I wanted done on Monday and Tuesday completed, but then I had to suddenly go out to see a customer on Wednesday morning, and that just threw me off track. I didn’t get back to the office until 4ish, and then I had to report back to my boss. That went on until 6:00 pm. Argh! It was a disaster”
Well, was is a disaster?
Perhaps not. All it was was one day out of five that did not go as planned.
It’s possible that a day like this will have put you behind on your plan for the week. It could also mean that getting everything you want done that week will no longer be possible. But that does not necessarily mean it’s become a disaster.
The issue really is not preventing things from going wrong; that would be a challenge beyond almost everyone. Instead, the focus should be on recovering from an unexpected event or interruption to minimise the damage to your plan.
And in this week’s episode, I will share a few ideas to help you quickly get back on track after one of these inevitable, unexpected events.
But before I do that, I’d like to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, but sadly, once again, she’s sunning herself in a resort somewhere, so I’m afraid it’s me reading out the question again.
This week’s question comes from Will. Will asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve finally become consistent with my weekly planning (thank you for the tip about doing it on a Saturday morning). My problem now is when I look at my plan at the end of the week, I’ve got practically none of it done. There’s always some emergency that throws me off my plan. How do I get myself to stay on track?”
Hi Will,
Thank you for your question.
Now, the first thing I would tell anyone is not to go for perfection. If you have ten things that you plan to get done over the next seven days but only manage to do seven, I would say that was a pretty good week.
You did seven important things that you wanted to do. That’s a 70% success rate. I’d take that.
The reality is you are unlikely to ever hit 100%. I know I never have; in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has.
There are just too many things that can happen that will throw you off track. Plus there’s the human side of things too.
We often expect to be able to do far more than is possible, and then there’s always a missing piece of information that you need to ask someone else for, and they are away all week at a conference and won’t be able to send it to you until next week.
There could be a proposal you submit, anticipating approval, only to have it sent back to you for adjustments that will then require resubmitting.
None of these can be anticipated; building in some buffer time can help, but it’s still not likely to give you a 100% success rate.
If you are hitting 100% consistently, that’s likely to suggest that you are not pushing yourself hard enough to develop, but that’s a whole different story.
One trick I often suggest to my coaching clients is to build in a “catch-up” afternoon, or, if you can, a “catch-up day”, later in the week where you avoid scheduling meetings or other commitments and keep it free for catching up on anything you may have fallen behind with.
For example, I don’t schedule anything on a Thursday afternoon. I often have meetings mid-morning (I think of it as a calls day), and one task: writing this script.
Other than that, there’s nothing. This means that if I am behind on anything, I have a whole afternoon to catch up. (There’s always something I will be behind on) This week, I am behind on a few videos I want to record. Should have got them done yesterday, but I ran out of time. So, this afternoon I will be recording.
Another tip is to look at your weekly plan not as a task-level plan, but as a set of objectives. In other words, plan for bigger things such as making progress on a project, getting four exercise sessions in, clearing a backlog or resolving an issue with a customer.
This is a reason why I developed the Weekly Planning Matrix. It’s four squares representing four areas of your life:
Core work: the work you are employed to do. (Just as an aside here, if you’re a part of my Learning Centre, last week’s Learning Note has an excellent example of how Warren Buffett identified his core work)
Projects and issues: these are the higher-level things you want to make progress on professionally.
Personal: For things that need addressing in your personal life, such as scheduling a doctor’s appointment, deciding how many exercise sessions you will do, etc.
And finally, the radar, which is for things you do not need to do anything about but should be aware of. For instance, if your in-laws are coming round for a few days later this month, or you’re waiting for a package to be delivered.
Because you’re limited for space in each square, you become mindful about trying to do too much. If your projects and issues square is full, and next to that you see all your core work tasks, you will instantly see if you are being over-optimistic about what you can get done that week.
I’ll leave a link to a video I did on doing the Weekly Planning Matrix in the show notes for you.
The next idea is related to your daily planning.
Because it is almost inevitable that an unexpected event will occur at some point during the week, your daily planning can be used to reassess your weekly plan.
Let me give you an example from my week this week. I planned to record some additional videos on Tuesday, but when I went to set things up, I discovered that the local government had decided Tuesday was a great day to dig up the road right outside my office. Jackhammers, reversing vehicle warning beeps, and road cleaners were all in full operation. It was an orchestra of wonderful modern city life noise
That plan had to be scrapped. So, I looked at my calendar and saw that Thursday afternoon was clear (it always is, remember, for catch-up), so I moved the time block to Thursday afternoon.
Now, I did that calendar adjustment as soon as I realised I wasn’t going to be able to record the videos, but I could easily have left it until later in the day, when I did my daily planning.
That’s why your daily planning is so useful. It allows you some time each day to step back, reassess your plan for getting the important things done and make any alterations based on the new information you have.
And that brings me onto the timing of your daily planning.
Time and time again, when one of my clients switches over to planning their day the evening before, they tell me that it was life-changing.
It’s life-changing because you will immediately discover your evenings are more relaxing. Once you’ve planned the day, your brain lets go of all the stuff you’re feeling a little anxious about. It quietens down.
You also find you sleep better because you know what you will be doing the next day and that all your “bases” are covered, so to speak. No more “oh Crikey. I forgot to do X” just as you’re drifting off to sleep.
And when you begin your day, you’re already clear about what needs to be done. That gives you a tremendous amount of focus and prevents you from going looking for trouble by looking at your actionable email, sifting through Slack or Teams messages or going into Jira looking for open tickets.
Now, I know all that’s well and good, but what happens if one of these legendary Unexpected Events happens when you’re in the middle of doing your most important work for the day?
This is the proverbial Vince Lombardi’s “getting knocked down” situation. And as Vince Lombardi says, it’s all about getting back up again once you’ve been knocked down.
The only thing I’ve found that works here is that once you’ve dealt with the Unexpected Event, pause. Yes, that’s right. Stop.
Just briefly. Look at your calendar and see when your next committed appointment is, and take a look at your prioritised task list and see what’s left to do.
Often you will find that now that you no longer have the time you thought you would have, some of the remaining tasks can be rescheduled to another day.
You may need to send a quick message to someone who is expecting something from you, but what you want to be doing is resetting your priorities based on the time you have left.
For those of you who wisely set aside time to deal with your actionable emails and messages, you could reduce the time you spend there. For instance, if you have an hour protected for admin and communications later in the day, cut it to 30 minutes.
Remember, with things like messages and emails, one is always greater than zero. Giving yourself thirty minutes today means you’re not going to have to find an extra hour tomorrow.
What was that old proverb, “a stitch in time saves nine”? Something like that.
I would add an extra tip here. Something I’ve found very helpful. That is to reassess your prioritised task list between each session of work.
Emails and messages, for example, can be devastating to even the best-laid plans. Given that most of us check our messages between sessions of work anyway, there’s always the danger that you’ll find an Unexpected Event” that requires thirty minutes or so of your time.
So, give yourself a few minutes away from your desk and mentally re-evaluate your plan for the day. Be comfortable switching things around. For example, if you have to attend an unplanned meeting after lunch, you may find that moving your communication and admin time forward will reduce any pressure you may feel after the meeting.
So there you go, Will. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Socrates, that wise philosopher of the 5th century BC, said:
"The secret of happiness, you see, is not found in seeking more, but in developing the capacity to enjoy less."
And the consensus across the centuries has always been clear: happiness isn't a destination you reach by wanting or accumulating more, but a state of mind achieved by reducing what you want.
This week, I’m exploring the common problem of wanting to do more and more, yet never finding the time to do what you want.
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Script |424
Hello, and welcome to episode 424 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the most common questions I get asked is: How do I find the time to do everything I want to do?
And as David Allen said in his book Getting Things Done, you can do anything you want, but not everything.
In other words, you can do all the things you want to do, just not all at once.
This is a problem all humans have faced since the dawn of time: we are limited by the number of hours we have each day.
And before we acknowledged time and dates, we were still limited by daylight hours and the need to sleep.
In many ways, truly understanding that we will always be limited by time is the first step to discovering peace and happiness.
I remember many years ago having an argument with a colleague about why the iPhone’s constraints were better than Android’s lack of constraints.
This was back in the day when you really didn’t have many options for what you could add to an iPhone’s home screen. The date and time, design, and colours were fixed, and the apps you downloaded were presented as Apple allowed them to be.
Android phones, on the other hand, let you download widgets, move your app icons wherever you wanted, and install thousands of different themes.
What was interesting is that my colleague was always fiddling with his phone. Never being happy with the way his home screen looked.
I had no choice. Which meant I wasn’t fiddling with my phone all the time, trying to find the perfect setup and design. I was therefore happy with what I had.
Funnily enough, now that Apple does give us more choice as to how our phone home screens look, I do waste a lot of time trying to find the right colour combinations and layouts. (And I’m still not happy with it!)
So with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question:
This week’s question comes from Scott. Scott asks: Hi Carl, I have a lot of things I want to do, such as learning to play the guitar, reading more books, and taking my kids out on the weekend. Yet I never have time to do any of these, and when I do, I’m so exhausted that all I want to do is sit and watch TV. It’s so frustrating. Do you have any ideas on how to fit all these things into my week?
Hi Scott, thank you for your question.
I’m not sure whether you have completed the “Perfect Week” calendar exercise yet, but I would recommend it.
This is an exercise where you take a blank weekly calendar and map out all the things you want to do each week by when you will do them.
Start with your personal life, then add your professional life. I will put a link in the show notes to a video I did on this.
This exercise tells you whether you are being overambitious. You will quickly see if what you want to do is realistic, impossible, or somewhere in between.
What most people find when they do this exercise is that they are being wildly unrealistic.
I’m currently reading Sir Alan Lascelles’ diaries from 1940 to 1945. Sir Alan was the Private Secretary to King George VI at that time, and it’s interesting to see how he spent his days.
Sir Alan loved going to the theatre, gardening and reading books. Those were his main hobbies. However, being a senior member of the Royal Household, he was also in demand from the King and the government of the day.
Yet, what I learned is that even during the war, because his “interests” were small, he was able to maintain all of them.
Take gardening, for example; Sir Alan’s home was outside London. So during the week when he was required to stay at Buckingham Palace, he could not attend to his garden. But at weekends, when he was not travelling with the King, he would spend his days pottering about in his garden.
During the week, when he was in London, he would combine lunches and dinners with meetings with government officials, and maintain his social life by going to the theatre with friends and family.
Now, in those days, people engaged in what we would call “knowledge work” today had much more flexible hours.
Most mornings were spent doing their most important work. The work that required focus.
One thing Sir Alan did each day was take a walk with the King for an hour, where they would discuss the affairs of state. In many ways, this was their daily meeting, though neither of them really considered it one.
This walk invariably took place just before lunch.
Lunch, again, was usually business, but occasionally it would be with his wife or son, or a friend.
Afternoons were often meetings, and they ran into dinners. From the diaries, it seemed that most evenings were spent meeting with a colleague or an official to discuss business.
If he didn’t have a business meeting in the evening, he would go to the theatre with his wife or a friend.
What’s interesting about this way of living is that there were no real-time barriers between work and personal life. Some of those evening meetings went on into the early hours of the morning; other times, if there were no meetings in the afternoon or evening, people would go shopping or take afternoon tea with a family member or friend.
There were instances where an important communique needed to be written, and Sir Alan would be up late at night writing it.
I would say that Sir Alan was working around 50 hours a week, but they were not evenly distributed. Some days he’d work 18 hours, the next maybe only 4.
Our obsession with the “work-life balance” has distorted our lives. Now we are trying to cram so much into our 8-hour work day that we leave ourselves exhausted at the end of it.
There’s no energy left to do the things we want to do. All we are fit for is crashing on the sofa and watching TV or scrolling our social media feeds.
What people like Sir Alan did was to spread their work more evenly throughout the day. They would take a walk for an hour mid-morning, have long lunches with friends, have business meetings in the evening over dinner, and often work on an important piece of work late into the night.
Now, it’s true that in the 1940s TV was not a thing. All people had for entertainment were the radio and record players. So reading books, going to the theatre with friends, and gardening were likely easy to do.
Today, we do not have any more time than they had in the 1940s. We still have the same 24 hours a day.
What has changed is we have far more options than they had.
And that’s where the problem is. It’s not time. It’s the options we have.
The activities you mention, Scott, should be entirely possible. Spending an hour or so each evening playing the guitar should not be a challenge; neither should reading a book for 30 minutes before bed.
If you were to get home around 7:00 pm, have dinner with your family, and then practice the guitar around 8:30, would that be impossible?
If not, what would you do instead after dinner?
Likewise, if you want to take your kids out at the weekend, what’s stopping you? What are you doing instead?
One of the best things I’ve ever done was to strip out the artificial lines between doing my work and my personal life.
Now, I do my most important work in the mornings and, wherever I can, avoid meetings at that time. I keep the afternoons relatively free for chores and family outings and do some work between 8 and 10 pm. That could be meetings, project work, or dealing with my communications and admin.
I’ve recently started reading books for 30 minutes or so after lunch. I find it refreshes me, and I’m ready for whatever’s in store for me in the afternoons. I used to read the news or look at social media at that time, which often drained me mentally. Reading a book does the opposite.
I’ve noticed that with my team too.
We don’t have any regulated work times in the company. People can work whenever they feel like it. My Marketing Manager likes to do her work early in the morning; my video editor prefers the evenings.
We work on timelines. For example, I supply my video editor with that week’s videos on a Wednesday afternoon, and she has until Sunday evening to complete the edits.
As the boss, the only thing I care about is receiving the edited videos no later than Sunday evening.
The final issue most people face is wanting to do too much.
Reading Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey books, we learn that Lord Peter had two hobbies. Playing the piano and collecting books. When he’s had an exhausting day or was stressed about something, he would either pick up a book or play the piano. They were his go-to relaxation methods.
What do we do today? We get ourselves stressed out because we want to learn to play the violin, take up pickleball, go to the movies with our friends or our partner, learn to cook, clean out the wardrobe, redecorate the bedroom, read more books, and write in a journal every day.
Well, you can do any of those things, just not all of them all at the same time.
The problem is when we are faced with too many choices, we end up doing none of them. Instead, we’ll end up crashed in an armchair scrolling.
One thing you can do if you have multiple things you want to do is divide them into seasons.
For example, if gardening is something you want to do, you could spend your time gardening on longer, warmer days. On the colder, shorter days, you could switch to indoor activities.
So Scott, first I would suggest doing the “perfect Week” calendar. That will tell you how much time you actually have for all the things you want to do.
Then be a little more flexible with how you divide your time in the day. Squeezing all your work tasks into a single 8-hour slot is exhausting. Try to break up your day with longer breaks. I know not everyone can do that, but it is something worth trying if you can. You’ll be a lot less exhausted in the evenings.
Finally, be realistic about what you want to do. Remember you can do anything, but you cannot do everything.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
You may have come across the quote: “Motivation gets you started, but discipline keeps you growing." By John C. Maxwell, the author and leadership mentor.
Motivation is an interesting concept. It’s often required to get things started, but if you only rely on your motivation to do something, particularly if that something is not easy or particularly enjoyable, it won’t keep you going.
This week, we’re looking at how to use motivation to develop the right habits that will keep you consistent.
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Script |423
Hello, and welcome to episode 423 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the consequences of writing a journal every morning is that you come up with a lot of ideas about how you would like to change your life or the way you work. And many of those ideas can motivate you to try something new.
That could mean reading a real book every evening instead of watching TV or scrolling through the news and social media. Or perhaps to go out for an evening stroll after work, or plan your day the evening before, so you can enjoy a more relaxing evening.
All seemingly easy to do.
And then you decide to do it. The first day is easy, the second a little less so and by the time you get to the end of the week, you’ve lost all motivation and picking up a book or going outside for a walk feels like the last thing you want to do after such a hard day. So you skip it.
It’s only one day, it can’t do any harm, can it? And then the next day you don’t do it, and the day after that and so on. Eventually, that great idea you had about changing a bad habit has ended up in the pit of tried-but-forgotten great ideas.
It happens to all of us. It doesn’t mean that there’s anything wrong with you; all it means is that you’re relying on one of the most overrated ways to change something, motivation.
Motivation is fleeting; it never lasts, and it hates reality. It’s also affected by the quality of your sleep, how distracted you are, and your overall mood. It’s a very unreliable friend.
Great at encouraging you to get started, but terrible at keeping you going when things get difficult.
The good news is there is a more reliable way to make changes, but the bad news is you may need to initially feel uncomfortable. Yet it’s worth it.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Fran. Fran asks, Hi Carl, what do you do when you don’t have the motivation to do what you have planned to do?
Hi Fran, thank you for your question.
To answer your question directly, I don’t rely on motivation. I remember the days when I smoked, and almost every night, when I went to bed, I would motivate myself not to smoke the next day.
Thinking about that now, it’s funny, because as I was “motivating” myself, I was smoking my last cigarette of the day. “No, I won’t smoke tomorrow!”
Then, when I woke up in the morning, I would make my coffee, then go outside for my first cigarette of the day.
Where was my motivation when I needed it most? It wasn’t there.
In the end, I finally quit smoking by removing all temptation from the house and not carrying any money with me when I went out. Just my travel card and a lunchbox.
It was tough, but after a couple of weeks, the habit was disappearing, and by the end of the month, I could not imagine smoking again.
I’ve seen this time and time again with people. Those who motivate themselves to go out for an evening walk after dinner, for example. It’s easy to do that in the summer, when it’s likely still light outside and the weather’s warm and dry.
Then the temperatures cool, the light fades, and the rain comes down. “Ah, it’s cold and raining, I won’t go out tonight, I’m tired anyway, and I left my umbrella at the office.”
The one that still surprises me, though, is the daily planning.
Daily planning takes no more than five minutes and can be done just before you finish your work for the day or as the last thing in the evening, before you go to bed.
Five minutes, and after a while, it can be done in 2 or 3 minutes.
And yet, people still struggle. Why?
Because they are relying on motivation.
I remember when I first read Hyrum Smith’s Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management, and when I read the chapter on planning your day, I was incredibly motivated.
I was fortunate that as I was reading the book, I was setting up my Franklin Planner and one of the steps when using a Franklin Planner is to do the “planning and solitude” exercise every day.
It was suggested that you give yourself 15 minutes a day for this, and the first thing you wrote at the top of your Prioritised Daily Task list was “Planning and Solitude,” which would be given priority A1. It was the most important task of the day.
And that’s what I did every evening. I sat at the table with my planner and planned out the next day. Then, I checked off the Planning and Solitude task. This meant that by the next day, my first task was already complete.
And since then, which was the early 1990s, I haven’t missed some form of a daily planning ritual. I cannot imagine going to bed not knowing where I need to be and what needs to be done.
I doubt now I could get to sleep without knowing. I even do this when on holiday.
Just saying that now means I’ve consistently planned my day for over 30 years! WOW!
The people who succeed at staying consistent with their plans are the ones who start small.
Often, we will take a course or read a book, get motivated and try to change everything all at once.
That’s the hardest way to do it.
Recently, I’ve been watching documentaries on how great football managers turn teams around. I’ve now studied Pep Guardiola, Sir Alex Ferguson, Johan Cruif and Mikel Arteta.
And there’s a common thread between all of them.
When they took over a team, the team was not performing. Often, they were struggling at the bottom of their league.
Yet, the change didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow, step-by-step process. In all cases, they first fired old players who may have been brilliant, but were unwilling to adopt a new philosophy or were a bad influence on new players.
They recruited professional players who were willing to adapt to the new style of play. And in almost all cases, their first season was not great.
Then things began to change: the team started climbing the league and eventually winning trophies.
These managers treated the necessary changes as a project. It wasn’t about “motivating” the players to play better; it was about having them buy into the new culture of doing things.
As Arsene Wenger, the legendary Arsenal manager, said in one interview when talking about his successor following his retirement:
“We need someone who understands that football is not just about winning. It’s about how you win. The philosophy has to come first. The results follow the philosophy, not the other way round. The philosophy is not a tactic. It’s a value”
In other words, when you decide something needs to change, knowing why it needs to change is important. What’s your reason, your philosophy and the value behind that change?
When you know the reason you want to change, “motivation” no longer comes into it.
One of my clients works for a company that was advised by a well-known consultancy to change its management methods to an “Agile” system.
There was then a flurry of activity by senior management, a great deal of money spent on training, and many employees were made redundant.
Ten years later, that company has slowly moved back to the way they managed things before they were force-fed Agile. What went wrong?
Well, the motivation was high at the start of the transformation. Senior managers were buying into the vision that the consultancy company was selling. The problem was that there was no clear reason to change.
Sales were great, the culture was one of the best in the industry, and people loved working for the company. The company’s sales team had strong relationships with their customers, and while there were areas for improvement, there was no need for a root-and-branch change in how everything was run.
Today, the company is struggling against its competition, the employees are demotivated, and sales are average at best.
And yet the Agile methods could have worked had the reasons for the change been better communicated. My client still has no idea why the company changed its management methods.
Without a strong reason to change, you will find your motivation runs out very quickly.
Talking with some of the members of my Retirement programme, I’m surprised by how quickly they start taking health and fitness seriously after retirement.
We go through our working lives sitting for 8 hours a day, slowly and quietly destroying our posture and mobility. We don’t sleep enough and eat convenient food because who’s got time to eat healthily when you have hundreds of messages to respond to, and you’ve got to get the latest marketing campaign finished by the end of the week?
And then we go for a medical check-up and discover that we are pre-diabetic, we have early signs of heart disease, we are no longer able to get up out of a chair without using our arms, and we haven’t seen our feet for years.
Suddenly, we’ve found the motivation to eat and sleep better. We take those daily walks, and many of us join fitness classes.
But to continue with this new, healthier lifestyle requires more than motivation. There needs to be a purpose.
Recently, it was reported that former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer. He was fortunate that the cancer was caught early, and he’s now in remission.
Suddenly, a guy who lived an unhealthy lifestyle of cigarettes, wine, sitting around, poor sleep and extreme work schedules has become a non-smoking, vegetarian, teatotaller
Sure, the shock of being within a year of death was pretty good motivation, but why is he sticking to his new lifestyle? Because, as he says, he wants to see his grandchildren grow up. Now that’s a pretty good reason for making these difficult changes.
So there you go, Fran. Motivation is great for getting you started, but ultimately, you want a very good reason to change what you want to change.
Getting organised, improving time management, and being more productive are nice things to do. You feel more in control of your life, are more relaxed, a lot less stressed, and you find you sleep better. But the most important thing is to know why you are doing it.
For me, being less stressed, being more in control of my time, and getting the right things done at the right time give me more time to spend with my family and do the things I love.
That’s my “why”. That’s why I make sure I do my daily and weekly planning, why I am strict about what I say yes to and why I will never let my email and messages become backlogged.
I hope that helps, and thank you again for sending in your question.
Thank you to you too for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Zig Ziglar said, “Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. We all have 24 hours a day”
When you know where you are going and what you want, you will often find that time will take care of itself. Yet when we have no direction, no idea of what we want, and allow other people to dictate what we do and when, that’s when time, or rather a perceived lack of it, becomes the issue.
Today, we’re looking at how to discover our direction and decide what we actually want.
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Script |422
Hello, and welcome to episode 422 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the first exercises I ask people to do in many of my training programmes is to establish their Areas of Focus.
There are eight areas that we all share. These are:
- Family and relationships.
- Career or business
- Health and fitness
- Finances
- Lifestyle and life experiences
- Self-development
- Spirituality
- Life’s purpose
The exercise has you define what each of these means to you, and then identify any recurring tasks that will help keep them in balance so that you are living your life based on what you have identified as important to you.
The thing about your areas of focus is that, while we all share the same eight areas, how we define and prioritise them will differ.
This also changes depending on where you are in life. For someone who has retired, career or business will likely drop in priority and lifestyle and life experiences may move up.
Yet the power of knowing what your areas of focus mean to you is in how they help to give you direction and purpose.
This week’s question is about how to maintain that balance when competing demands outside of your control clash with your own priorities.
So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks, hi Carl. I use the Time Sector System, and for the most part it works brilliantly. The problem I have is that my boss and sometimes my family keep demanding my help with things that are not my priority. How can I stay on track with the things that are important to me?
Hi Annie, thank you for your question.
This can be very frustrating, particularly if you have spent time establishing what is important to you, yet other people keep trying to pull you away from doing the things you want to do.
This is where having some structure built into your week can help.
Let’s say that health and fitness is high up on your priority list and that you have chosen to exercise three times per week.
From that, you can pick your exercise days. These could be Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for example.
The first step would be to lock these “dates” on your calendar. Then make sure they are non-negotiable.
For instance, when I was a teenager, I was a competitive 800- and 1,500-metre runner. I was a member of an athletics club and our training days were Tuesday and Thursday evenings and Sunday mornings.
Those days and times were non-negotiable. I would never miss a training session. My social life, as well as studying for my exams, were built around these days.
Pretty soon, everyone in my family circle, as well as teachers, knew that on Tuesday and Thursday nights and Sunday mornings, I would not be available for anything. I was training.
Many years later, when I went to university, I did night school. Our lecture times were Tuesday and Thursday night, 6:00 to 9:00 pm.
I was working full-time at the time, and since it took 20 minutes to get from my office to the university, I had to leave the office at 5:30 on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
I made sure my boss and colleagues knew these times, and not once in four years do I remember missing a lecture.
I made sure I never scheduled meetings beyond 4:00 pm on a university day, and my close friends and family also knew when I would be at university.
University was easier than the running club. The university worked in semesters; my athletics club didn’t. I remember some of my training partners turning up on Christmas and New Year’s Day if they were on a training night.
There’s an old saying, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse”
And having worked with over 500 people in the time management and productivity space, I can tell that old saying is true.
You will find what is important to you by looking at what you will not negotiate on.
I have a friend who is a huge Manchester United fan. He has not missed a home game in over twenty years. It’s now become a point of pride for him.
As soon as the new season’s fixtures list is published, he opens up his calendar and blocks the time out for the whole season.
I remember early on, when Simon began going to Old Trafford, trying to persuade him not to go watch the game and instead to come out with us. The answer was always “no”.
After a while, we stopped asking him. We know he’d go to Old Trafford and maybe, if it was an afternoon game, he would join us later. That was the best compromise we could get out of him.
Looking back now, I have huge respect and admiration for him for sticking to his priorities.
And that’s what happens when you stick to your priorities: people respect and admire you.
It doesn’t happen immediately, but when they see that you do not compromise on what you have prioritised, they stop trying to pull you away.
This is why time blocking, when done right, works.
Everyone in my circle, from my wife to the people who work with me, knows that between 9:30 and 11:30 am, I am doing focused work. For the most part, that work will be my creative work: writing, recording videos or this podcast, for example.
No one interrupts me anymore. They used to. But by sticking to my plan, people left me alone.
It’s only two hours a day, but those two hours add up to 10 hours a week. And you can do a lot in 10 hours.
But it’s not just that you stick to your plan; it’s also that it gives you confidence when you plan your week.
When you know that no one will bother you when you are doing your focused work, you can confidently work with the hours that you have.
Most of the anxiety that we feel is not caused by the volume of work we have to do; it’s caused by not knowing when we will be able to do it.
Yet there’s a fix for that.
Let’s say you have to review and report the sales figures to the CEO each day. As you do that task every day, you will know how long it takes you to do. In this example, you know it takes you 45 minutes, and you have to send the report in by 5:00 pm.
Now you have the two most important numbers.
When you begin the day, you have access to yesterday’s sales figures, so you have everything you need.
That means the question becomes, when will you do it?
If that were me, I would do that as soon as the day begins. Get it done early so that if anything goes wrong in the day, it won’t matter. The sales report is done and only needs to be emailed.
And in many ways, that’s what you are doing. You’re analysing how long it takes you to do the different parts of your job on average and then using that data to decide when, and if necessary, how often you need to do it.
This is like taking your game from being a Sunday League team to being a Premiership team.
The Sunday League team turns up and plays. No thoughts about tactics or strategy other than to score more goals than the opposition does.
A Premier League team strategises, has a plan, and sticks to it. If they go behind, they stick to the plan. They don’t panic.
I recently watched a docuseries on Amazon called All or Nothing. In this particular programme, José Mourinho has just taken over as manager of Tottenham Hotspur.
In one of his first games in charge, Tottenham go behind in the first half and panic. They forget the plan, and everything begins falling apart.
At half-time, you can see Mourinho calming the players down. He tells them to stop panicking and to follow the plan. He talks to them gently and says when they get back on plan, they’ll soon find a way back into the game.
And sure enough, that’s exactly what happens. In the second half, Tottenham are more relaxed, more controlled, and they win the game by three goals.
In our lives, there’s always going to be interruptions and demands from others. Some of them you can politely decline, others perhaps not.
When you cannot decline, because it’s a demand from a boss or a family member, the good thing is the decision is made. You need to do what’s being asked of you.
The key is not to throw out your plan. The key is to get back on plan as quickly as possible.
The worst thing you can do in these situations is to panic. That tenses you up, and you stop thinking objectively. Instead, accept, adjust and execute.
Accept the situation for what it is. It’s something you have to do that you did not plan for. So, adjust your plan. Appraise how much time will be required to carry out the new instructions, and then change your plan accordingly.
Then carry out the work.
It’s helpful if you have a few non-negotiables. For instance, experience has taught me that if I do not spend some time each day on my emails and messages, these will quickly get out of control.
Ideally, I like an hour to respond to messages and emails, but if I’ve had to adjust my plan, I’ll do 30 minutes. It just helps keep things under control and doesn’t mean I have to find more time tomorrow than I planned for.
The most important thing, though, Annie, is that you first decide what is important to you and what is not. This will help you to make the right decisions each day. That’s why going through the Areas of Focus exercise will put you in a much better position.
You will know what is important to you, and you can build your calendar around those priorities.
After that, when things are demanded of you that you cannot decline, stay calm and composed and adjust your plan accordingly.
It’s never the end of the world, and as long as you get back onto your plan as quickly as possible, you’ll soon find that at the end of the week, you’re not far from where you wanted to be.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Annie, and thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
"A million dollars a shot is my price. But I only take one a year. The rest of the time I maintain my skills."
That was Francisco Scaramanga, the villain in The Man With the Golden Gun, played by the superb Christopher Lee. Who, interestingly, was a cousin of James Bond creator Ian Fleming and a regular golfing partner of his.
Now, while I certainly wouldn’t recommend following Scaramanga’s career path, there’s a valuable lesson in that line.
The reason Scaramanga could ask such a high price was not because he worked all the time. It was because he spent most of his time practising, refining, and maintaining his skills so that when the moment came, he could perform at an exceptional level.
And that brings us to this week’s question, which is all about developing, and more importantly, maintaining, your skills at managing your work and your time.
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Script |421
Hello, and welcome to episode 421 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
There’s a belief, held by many, that becoming better at time management and productivity is something you learn once and then you’re set.
Or all you need to do is buy the latest productivity tool and all your struggles disappear.
Hahaha, it’s not quite so easy.
Theoretically, it may be possible to add a new app or use a new process for getting your work done. Unfortunately, life doesn’t fit perfectly into the little boxes we create. There’s always something different or new.
This is why the idea of plotting out every minute of your day on your calendar doesn’t work in practice.
Simple, natural things are not always predictable. You don’t know when you will need a bathroom break, or if a colleague asks you a question, or perhaps you spill your coffee all over your desk.
If any of these things happen when you have carefully mapped out every minute of your day, your day is ruined.
The missing pieces are flexibility and practice, and that is where this week’s question comes in.
So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Kathy. Kathy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve recently taken your Time Sector System course and loved it. One thing that’s worrying me, though, is that no matter how well I plan my week, by Tuesday, my whole plan is ruined. Do you have any tips on staying on plan when things become hectic?
Hi Kathy, thank you for your question.
This is a common discovery. Once you know the theory, putting it into practice can show up bumps in the road that cause problems.
One of the first problems people face is changing habits. If, for instance, you’ve never planned a week or a day, getting into the habit of consistently doing so is hard.
After all, you’ve spent most of your life so far without having a plan; skipping a daily or weekly planning session isn’t going to cause too many problems.
Yet when you are building your system, it’s that skipping that causes a problem. The more times you don’t do it, the longer it will take you to build the essential habits.
The goal is to use your new knowledge automatically. When you’re processing your inbox, you instinctively know what to do. It’s like there’s a voice in your head asking the three questions:
- What is it?
- What do I need to do with it?
- When will I do it?
When you start, asking these questions can be slow. You’re naturally thinking too much. But when you’ve done it consistently for a few weeks, you think less, and you automatically move things to their rightful place.
Today, I can process an inbox of twenty items in less than 6 minutes. When I first started following this sequence of questions, though, it would easily have taken me twenty to thirty minutes. I was overthinking and learning patterns.
In one scene in The Man With the Golden Gun, Bond and Scaramanga are having lunch. The lunch begins amiably, but soon turns hostile. At one point, Bond reaches into his coat pocket to pull out his gun.
The camera pans to Scaramanga, who is pointing his legendary golden gun at Bond.
The surprising thing here is that Scaramanga had to build his gun from a golden cigarette case, a lighter, a fountain pen, and a cufflink. All Bond had to do was pull his gun from his shoulder holster.
How was Scaramanga faster? Practice.
How many hours would Scaramanga have had to practice putting his gun together to get that fast?
I know, it’s fiction. But the point is, you get faster the more you do something.
This is why people who continually switch apps are also consistently behind on their work. They remain stuck at being slow.
What’s happening there is they have to learn new ways of getting things into their system, and then moving tasks, and learning all the new features.
And that doesn’t account for the time it takes to move everything over to the new app.
It’s dead time. Instead, sticking with the apps you already have forces you to get better and faster at using them.
Then we come to the realisation that no two weeks are ever the same. No matter how carefully we plan something, things will inevitably go wrong.
This is where practice and experience come in.
I have a client who travels for work a lot. Sometimes he travels domestically; other times he travels internationally, often to the other side of the world, which involves 20 hours of flying time.
He found the Time Sector System worked brilliantly when he was working from his office, but it fell apart when he had to travel.
When we analysed the problem, we discovered that he was trying to run things the same way while travelling as he did at his office.
How many times have you booked a flight, found that WIFI would be available for the flight and thought, ah, I’ll catch up on my email and messages when flying, only to discover that the WIFI doesn’t work?
Now, you could respond to your actionable emails while flying, but you won’t be able to send them until you get into a WIFI zone. But that disruption to your plans can leave you feeling very frustrated.
The solution in this case was to have a travelling routine. On days when my client was travelling, he reduced his task list to the essentials. Rescheduling or postponing routine tasks
He also set up a routine for international travel, using the flight time to plan and clean things up. None of which required WIFI.
The first few times he used this new process, he found he needed to make adjustments, but after a few tries, he had it working perfectly.
And that’s the key part. Build in flexibility.
In my client’s case, it was not to try and follow the same system when travelling as he does when at the office.
When you plan your week, allow for the unexpected.
One way to do this is to ensure that, when you plan your week, you have time for the essential things. That would be your core work and the parts of your life you have decided are important. Time with family and friends, hobbies and exercise, for example.
Once you have those on your calendar, then really you have the beginnings of a solid plan that should be flexible enough.
Hopefully, you have already locked in your core work.
When I was a teacher, I had an hour each day protected for class preparation. I was teaching around four to five hours a day; those times were fixed each month and were non-negotiable. I had to be in the classroom teaching.
The class preparation time did change from day to day, but it was always there, and I tried to fix it around the same time each day, which made it much easier to make it a habit.
The unknowns often come from project work. Projects, by their very nature, are unique. Each one requires something different. You will find that while you may not be able to plan precisely what needs to be done at a weekly level, scheduling time to work on your projects each week will help ensure you have enough time to keep these moving forward.
If you’ve ever read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you will no doubt remember the chapter: Sharpen the Saw.
In the chapter, Stephen Covey uses the example of a wood cutter who’s working so hard that they never stop to sharpen the saw. Over time, the time required to cut the tree increases, not because the woodcutter is getting weaker, but because the saw is becoming blunter.
Your time management and productivity skills operate the same way. Sometimes you have to stop and sharpen your skills.
For example, I use an iPhone, and every time Apple updates its iPhone operating system, I review my collecting methods to see if anything in the new software will make collecting faster.
For example, when Apple added the action button to their phones, it let me map that button to add tasks to my task manager’s inbox. It’s super fast, and after a few days it became automatic for me to tap the action button when I needed to add something.
The most productive people I know spend time improving their ability to produce.
This is why athletes train, musicians practise scales, pilots rehearse procedures, and surgeons continually update their skills. The performance people see is only possible because of the preparation and practice nobody sees.
This is also why the Scaramanga quote fits this question. His point was essentially the same. As he said:
“The rest of the time I maintain my skills.”
Scaramanga’s version is darker, of course, but the principle is identical. Exceptional performance is not the result of the moment itself; it’s the result of the time spent preparing for that moment.
If you find that by Tuesday your plan for the week looks destroyed, allow for that when you plan your week.
One way you can do this is to plan your objectives.
What is it that you want to get accomplished next week? These could be:
To finish an important proposal
Get on top of your emails
To clean up the garden
To exercise a minimum of four times
To update your LinkedIn profile
With these five objectives, you can then decide when you will do them.
One tip here is to front-load your week with these activities. This way, if you do get waylaid, there’s still time to recover in the week.
This reminds me of a story from one of the world’s top rugby coaches. When he joined a new team, he found that if the team got ahead early in the game, they invariably won.
However, when they went behind early on, the likelihood was they would lose.
When he analysed this, he found that the team panicked when they fell behind, dropped their plan, and spent too much of the game taking unnecessary risks to get ahead.
He reminded the team that it was an 80-minute game and that what really mattered was sticking to their plan.
Tackle aggressively, maintain their defensive line and minimise mistakes. If they stuck to that, they would likely end the game ahead.
You don’t win games in the first twenty minutes. You win the game over 80 minutes.
It’s the same for you, Kathy; you don’t win or lose the week early on. You win the week by sticking to your plan and making adjustments where necessary, without losing sight of it.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
“In baseball, my theory is to strive for consistency, not to worry about the numbers. If you dwell on statistics, you get shortsighted; if you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.”
That was Tom Seaver, an outstanding baseball player. And it points to an important factor in managing your time and being productive.
And it’s a single word: Consistency.
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The COD Productivity Method
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Script | 420
Hello, and welcome to episode 420 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
There seems to be a consistency crisis. If you were to analyse anyone who has been successful at anything, you would find that, hidden behind that success, lies a high degree of consistency in following the basics.
Last week, I talked about your standards. Setting your standards and staying true to them. Well, a close relation to your standards is consistency.
Yet, consistency is hard. It’s boring, and your brain is often your worst enemy. It tells you that you’re tired; you can take a rest. Or you can skip today. You’ve been busy; it’s okay.
But it’s not okay. Not if you want to develop your consistency.
So how can you stay consistent, even on your worst days? That’s what we’re looking at today.
So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Stephan. Stephan asks, “Hi Carl, I’ve been following the COD system for almost a year now, and I know it works. Most days I do well. I collect, and I organise. But I am not consistent. What can I do to get consistent organising and planning my days?
Hi Stephan, thank you for your question.
Now, before we begin, I am not going to advocate that you turn yourself into a non-communicative monk. There does need to be some flexibility. Yet to succeed at anything, you will find that, somewhere in the mix, something needs to be done consistently.
Something in the quote I began this podcast with from Tom Seaver jumped out at me. The line was:
“If you aim for consistency, the numbers will be there at the end.”
I know from experience and from feedback from those who have taken my Email Mastery course that if you consistently spend 30 minutes or more on your actionable emails, your email will never get out of control.
The numbers take care of themselves.
This means when you plan your day, you ask yourself where you will find time for communications.
Managing your communications is not about the number of messages you get. We all get too many. There are messages that need answering, messages for information we should read, and a lot of messages we can ignore and delete.
But, when you begin the day, you have no idea how many you will get and of what type they will be. This means you cannot plan for the number or type of message that needs to be replied to. Numbers don’t count. Yet, if you know each day that you will spend at least 30 minutes on them, it’s unlikely you will ever have an out-of-control inbox.
Some days you will clear them; other days, you won’t. But as long as you’re consistent, the numbers will stay low.
Your consistency will take care of the numbers.
When it comes to COD, that’s the collect, organise and do framework. The only area that needs deliberate consistency is the organising.
You see, once you have established your UCT (Universal Collection Tool), you will naturally collect everything that needs to be collected. And if you have that set up properly, what you collect will drop into your trusted inbox.
However, the key is organising what you collected and that involves asking three questions:
What is it? A note, an appointment or a task
What do I need to do with it? Move it to your calendar, add it to your notes or process the task so that you can ask…
When will I do it? That would be either this week, next week, this month, next month or sometime in the long-term.
If you consistently do the organising step, you will become very fast at organising.
When I began following COD, I confess it would take me 20 to 30 minutes on some days. That was because I collected a lot, and asking and answering the three questions was slow.
But I stuck to it. I went through the exciting first stage, then the boring middle (where you ask yourself if it’s worth it) and finally to the stage where it was automatic.
And the benefit was that, as I was pushing through the boring middle, my brain was establishing patterns that sped up the organising stage.
Now, I can clear an inbox of fifteen to twenty items in less than 5 minutes. Something that used to take at least 15 minutes.
But there are other factors here.
The biggest factor, aside from consistency, is that I don’t change my tools.
I’ve been using Todoist for 15 years, Evernote for 17 and Apple Calendar for 25. I know these tools inside out. I’ve set up keyboard shortcuts, and they are now part of my muscle memory.
When any of these tools update and add features, I will look at the new features and ask myself whether each will improve my workflow and make things faster. If not, I don’t use the new feature.
Evernote, for example, has recently added an AI-enabled feature that automatically assigns a title to a note. Nice. But it takes me less than ten seconds to add a title, and I know from the mistakes I’ve made in the past that if I don’t add a title that means something to me, I’ll not be able to find the note as quickly as I would like in the future.
So, I don’t use that feature.
So, how do you become more consistent? There are two things that will help.
The first is to start small.
Doing a huge overhaul of your system and adding multiple steps to keep it organised will ultimately fail. You’re asking too much of yourself.
Instead, pick one area.
For example, when you’ve run COD for a while, you will realise that your notes rarely contain anything urgent. The urgent area will be what you throw into your task manager.
This means you can start by committing to yourself to always process your task manager’s inbox at the end of your workday, and to leave your notes, perhaps organising and cleaning up, once a week.
When you make this commitment, don’t just imagine you will be able to do this from your laptop while sitting at your desk. Consider how you will do it if all you have is your mobile phone.
While I like to do my organising on my laptop at my desk, there are days when I am travelling and cannot.
However, checking my task manager’s inbox each day is a must, so I will do that on my phone.
I’ve done this from airport lounges, buses, my parents’ living room and once from a motorway service station.
Another area where consistency is incredibly helpful is doing the daily planning.
Daily planning involves three steps.
The first is to check your calendar to see where your appointments are tomorrow and where you need to be in the morning. (20 seconds max?)
The second is to curate your to-do list so that your tasks for tomorrow are realistic. (Around two to three minutes)
And finally, to decide what your two must-do tasks are for the day. (Another 2 to 3 minutes)
When you are consistent with this, it will take you no more than 5 minutes. And best of all, if you are pushed, you could do this from your mobile phone.
One of the benefits of consistency is that you no longer need to look at how much you have to do.
Because you are consistently planning, clearing your communications, and protecting time for your most important work, all you need to do is ensure you are prioritising the right things each day, and the number of things to do will take care of itself.
I recently saw a documentary on Cristiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese football player (soccer player for my friends across the pond).
Ronaldo is 41 years old and is playing in a record sixth World Cup this summer.
How has he remained at the top of the sport for so long? Can you guess? Consistency.
Interviews with former teammates talk of a person who turns up for training an hour before anyone else. Who stays and practices his shooting long after his teammates have finished and a person who prioritises sleep and diet.
Ronaldo was doing that long before other professional footballers were.
When asked about it, Ronaldo says he learnt early in his career that consistently paying attention to what matters was the key to getting to the top.
Being consistently on time for meetings, handing in work on time and doing what you say you will do when you say you will do it are just examples of good manners and professionalism. Not doing so damages your chances of promotion.
But I again go back to what I said earlier: don’t try to change everything at once. Pick something you want to improve and start there.
It takes time and effort to build consistency. If you have to remind yourself to do something, you’re not ready to move to the next one.
Doing my focused work in the morning and allowing 45 minutes each day for my communications didn’t happen overnight. It was a stuttering start. Yet, eventually, it just happened. I no longer needed to think about it.
It’s the same with doing my daily planning each evening. Today, I cannot imagine not going to bed without knowing where my appointments are tomorrow and what my must-do tasks are.
That’s how you build consistency. One step at a time.
Now you mentioned the COD system, Stephan, and on that subject I do have some news. I’ve just cleaned everything up and added a new quick start guide to the resources section.
If you’re already enrolled, head over to the course on your dashboard, and you will see the guide at the bottom.
If you’re not enrolled and want to learn more about COD, you can do so for free by taking the COD course. I will leave a link for it in the show notes for you.
Thank you, Stephan, for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
If you follow the English Premier League, you will know that Arsenal won the Premier League title a couple of weeks ago.
It’s been a tough 6-year journey for their manager, Mikel Arteta, but what stood out is that no matter how hard things got, Arteta stuck to the standards he set at the club and, more importantly, focused on following his plan.
He knew that to take Arsenal back to the top, there had to be a plan, and to ensure the plan was followed, standards needed to be set.
In this week’s episode, we’re looking at how your standards matter and why having a plan to fall back on will always give you clarity, focus and make better decision-making easier.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
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Script | 419
Hello, and welcome to episode 419 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
If you’ve followed me for any length of time, you will know I have written and spoken a lot about having standards.
Standards for how Long it takes you to respond to emails and messages, and how you manage your calendar, for example.
It’s the standards you set for yourself that will ensure that you do the right things day after day. That if things go wrong, you have something to fall back on that feels familiar and keeps you doing the right things.
My communication standard is to respond to emails within 24 hours. This means that no matter how busy I am, if I have an actionable email I have not responded to that is approaching the 24-hour limit, I will do whatever it takes to respond, even if that means working a little extra time at the end of the day.
This week’s question is related to these approaches. So to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Sonya. Sonya asks, Hi Carl, I love COD and the Time Sector System. Both have really helped me to get much more focused on what matters to me. But what frustrates me is that I still have too many days when I procrastinate and don’t get what I want done. How do you stay so consistent?
Hi Sonya, thank you for your question.
As I alluded to, it comes down to the standards you set for yourself. I know that sounds easy, and I know it is not, but the standards you set are what help you push through when you are not in the right frame of mind to do what needs to be done.
Let me explain.
It can be very tempting, when you have just finished reading a book or have taken a course, to be full of enthusiasm to change things.
And that’s not a bad thing. But it’s important to be realistic when setting up your processes and new way of doing things.
If you were to set up a two-hour closing-down routine at the end of each day, you would fail. It’s too long.
Similarly, I’ve seen people get excited by the idea of having a solid morning routine. Then they add so many things to their morning routine that it takes them two or three hours to complete them.
That’s never going to promote consistency. There will inevitably be days when you cannot complete those routines, and then you get it into your head that you’re a failure or that having routines doesn’t work for you. Neither of which is true.
The place to begin is with your non-negotiables. What must happen every day, no matter what?
I know many people, for instance, who will not go to bed until all the dishes have been washed and put away.
That might seem a small thing, but to the people who do that, it is their standard. They couldn’t imagine going to bed without doing it.
One standard I try to get my coaching clients to follow is to do a five-minute daily planning session before they end their day.
That planning session is to review your calendar for appointments, look at your list of tasks, make sure it is realistic and to decide what your two must-do tasks will be.
That’s it. Five minutes tops.
This is a realistic planning session. You can do it from your sofa and on your phone if necessary.
Once you have set it as a standard, you do this every day, including weekends and holidays. Now, weekends and holidays are easier. You will likely have fewer tasks and appointments, but it’s a standard. You do it anyway.
Consistency can be hard when you don’t have any clear standards. Yet, those standards need to be realistic.
One way to do this is to set minimums.
Imagine you decide to read a book every day. Now, I’ve seen people set very unrealistic targets here. This usually begins with deciding to read something like 50 books per year, which is then broken down into reading a book a week.
So far so good.
But what happens if you read something like Andrew Roberts’ book on Winston Churchill or Walter Isaacson’s biography of Leonardo Da Vinci? Both are over 1,000 pages. Those books will take you longer than a week to read.
That’s why this kind of target setting is wrong.
Let’s start with what your purpose is here. Is it to read a set number of books? If so, choose short books, and you’ll hit your target.
But it’s more likely that you want to build the habit of reading. This means it doesn’t matter how many books you read in any given year. All that matters is that you spend time reading each day.
So set a realistic minimum.
If you were to set the target at reading for a minimum of twenty minutes each day, it would not be long before you settled into a routine and just did your reading.
What happens is that the books you get into and enjoy reading, you’ll read for longer than twenty minutes. Slower, harder books will likely have you reading for twenty minutes. That’s fine; you’re still reading.
You did what you set out to do, and after twenty minutes, you can stop.
That’s a realistic standard to set for yourself and one likely to become a non-negotiable.
Incidentally, you can do this with exercise and dealing with your messages. Set a daily minimum amount of time you will spend doing these activities.
And I should say there is some psychology behind the twenty-minute minimum. If you were to tell yourself you will spend an hour on a particular activity every day, your brain will push back.
On the days you are feeling tired, a little sick or ‘just not in the mood’, that one hour will feel like an eternity.
Twenty minutes, on the other hand, seems achievable, no matter how you feel. Remember, it’s a minimum. Once you’ve done your twenty minutes, you can stop. Often you won’t, but you can if you are still not feeling up to it.
I do this with my emails and messages. I like to finish my day with all actionable messages cleared. But there are days when, for one reason or another, I cannot do so. I then apply the twenty-minute minimum.
I tell myself I will spend twenty minutes clearing as many as I can.
It’s this standard that makes it easy to keep on top of messages.
I began this episode by explaining how Arsenal’s manager, Mikel Arteta, turned around the club by setting non-negotiable standards.
Arteta’s attitude is that if you cannot accept these standards, then you’re out the door. It’s as simple as that.
And I saw this with Manchester United’s former manager, a brilliant manager, Alex Ferguson. Ferguson took over the management of Manchester United in 1986. On his arrival, he set about setting some very high standards at the club.
It took around four years, but by setting those standards, Manchester United turned the 1990s into Manchester United’s greatest generation.
Change is hard. It’s particularly hard to stick to your new set of standards when things don’t seem to be improving. When there’s no immediate payoff.
Your old habits don’t want to die, and they will fight to stay around. This is why trying to change everything all at once almost always fails.
Instead, start small. Daily planning is an easy place to start because all you are doing is reviewing your appointments for the next day, ensuring your list of tasks is realistic, and identifying your must-do tasks.
With practice, you will be able to do this in about two minutes, and the more you practice, the more you see the benefits of having clarity on what must be done and where you need to be each day.
From there, add in a weekly planning session. This is where you set your plan for the week and decide your objectives. It is not about reviewing all your tasks and projects. You’re not reviewing, you’re planning.
Reviewing is entirely different.
The best time to review a project is when you’ve just finished working on it. The project is fresh in your mind, and you will know precisely what needs to happen next.
It’s by having a plan that you will find you procrastinate less. You don’t become frozen by the number of things you need to do. You know what your objectives are for the week, and you will do what needs to be done to accomplish them.
Commit to your plan, and you will have the energy to push towards it. Without a plan, you’ll procrastinate because all you will see is a mountain of work to do, and you have no idea what to do or where to start.
Let me show you this in action:
Imagine you have thousands of emails in your email inbox, and you are desperate to get it under control and clean it out. But the sheer size of it freezes you. Where do you start? What would be the best way to go about it? And you’ll be thinking this will take forever.
But what if you decided to start with the oldest ones and spend a minimum of 20 minutes a day on this project until it’s done?
Let’s be honest, if you’ve got thousands of emails in your inbox, it doesn’t really matter where you start. You’ve just got to start somewhere.
Twenty minutes a day, from the oldest to the newest. Now that’s a plan.
And you’ll find that by starting with the oldest first, you’ll be deleting a lot. Most of what you have will be out of date, moved on or already resolved. That builds momentum, which in itself generates energy.
If you’d like to learn more about setting your non-negotiables, having a plan for the day and a set of clear objectives for the week, my recently released Quiet Productivity Method programme will help you.
It’s packed with ideas like these, along with the right set of tools to give you clarity, focus, and a sense of calm throughout your day.
I’ll leave a link in the show notes for you to learn more about this immersive programme.
Thank you, Sonya, for your question, and I hope this answer has helped.
Thank you also to you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.
Is it possible to remain calm and focused when everything around us is getting faster, noisier and seemingly more demanding?
I think it is, and in this week’s episode, I’ll share some of my insights so you, too, can remain productive in a quiet, focused way.
Links:Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Learn more about the Quiet Productivity Method here
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Script | 418
Hello, and welcome to episode 418 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Recently, I had a call with one of my coaching clients who is completely on board with AI. He’s gone down the usual rabbit hole of ChatGPT, then Claude, then back to ChatGPT, then to Google’s Gemini and now he’s obsessed with Claude again.
It reminded me of the late twenty-teens when everyone was switching between Evernote, Notion, Apple Notes, and then Roam Research. It was an amusing merry-go-round.
One of the ironic things about my client is that he’d had to wake up at 5:00 am to review the materials for a workshop he was delivering that day because he suddenly thought Claude might not have given the correct information, and he needed to check everything before 9:00 am.
I asked him how long he usually took to prepare for a workshop like this, and he replied that it normally took three or four hours. However, he said emphatically, with Claude’s help, it’s taking him around six to eight hours.
I did point out the obvious. With AI’s help, it’s taking twice as long, but he dismissed that, saying AI was the future and that by doing it this way, he was learning and would eventually be faster.
Fair point.
But he did have to wake up two hours earlier than normal. Not something I would enjoy doing.
This reminded me that life, whether it’s our personal or our professional lives, shouldn’t be lived at speed. Life should be lived at our own pace.
Two YouTube videos I recently watched emphasised this. One was by Matt D’ Avella, and the other was from Samurai Matcha.
In Matt’s video, entitled I Tried to Optimise my Life. It made it Worse, Matt pointed out that trying to live a productive life left him feeling frustrated. All the curated lists and time blocks on his calendar just set him up for failure.
If he didn’t clear his to-do list or he was unable to follow his time blocks, he’d end the day feeling that he’d failed. This left him feeling miserable all evening and wondering what was wrong with him.
Then I watched Samurai Matcha’s video entitled “10 Real Japanese Organisation Tricks”, in which he explained why his girlfriend’s organisation philosophy was brilliant.
Her philosophy was that the goal of organising is to always know where everything is. This meant that things were stacked so you could see what was in a cupboard or refrigerator as soon as you opened the door. That clothes were arranged so that, just by looking in a wardrobe, you could instantly see what was in there.
It isn’t about having everything look pretty and tidy, only to be unable to find what you are looking for. It’s about knowing instantly where everything is.
So there you have one person trying to optimise everything and setting himself up for failure every day. And another who is essentially working by her own logic, making her life as simple and easy as possible.
You can guess who was the more relaxed, settled and happy with life.
And this is the point. Life’s not about optimising everything. We’re human beings, but we’re trying to turn ourselves into machines that can be programmed to wake up at a particular time, jump into a bath of freezing water, do a two-hour morning exercise routine, spend an hour writing morning pages and then finish it all off with twenty minutes of meditation.
That’s not what life is about at all.
One way to get started in creating a calmer, quieter way of living is to begin with your non-negotiables. What are the things you must do each day?
There are the obvious ones, such as sleeping, brushing your teeth, washing and eating. Most of those our bodies have ways of ensuring we do them. We get sleepy, and we get hungry.
But what other things would be non-negotiable for you?
For me, taking Louis out for his walk, doing a little exercise and enjoying a cup of tea with my wife when she gets home from university are non-negotiable at a personal level.
At a professional level, my non-negotiable is spending 2 hours a day creating. That could be writing, recording or planning. It doesn’t matter what I create; all that matters is that I create something.
And that’s it. Together, that’s around four to five hours a day.
Once you have established what your non-negotiables are, it becomes easy to say no to things that could interfere with them.
Another way to bring some calm and quiet back into your life is to focus on time not what you have to do.
Let me explain.
Most of what comes at us each day is not within our control. You do not know how many Slack or Teams messages you will get today. Neither do you know how many emails you will get nor what you will be asked to do.
What you do know is how much time you can dedicate to these inputs.
Over the years, I’ve learnt that if I allow 40 minutes or so each day to respond to my actionable messages and emails, I’ll mostly stay on top of my communications. Sure, occasionally I am behind, but as I can see I am getting behind, I can allow a little extra time to catch up if necessary.
I also know that if I have two hours a day to create, I’ll always hit my publication schedule.
If you work on projects, what would happen if you dedicated 2 hours a day to quiet, focused work on them? No distractions, no interruptions, just quiet, focused work.
From the people I’ve worked with who have done this, they’re amazed at just how much work they get done each week. And how deadlines no longer become stressful or missed.
Two hours may not seem much, but over a working week, that’s ten uninterrupted hours. Ten hours you know you will not be interrupted by anyone.
The great thing about this approach is that you gain control over your time. And with a little consistency, you soon find yourself on top of your work.
You also learn where your limits are.
I know my brain gets tired around the 90-minute to 2-hour mark of focused work.
Sure, there are days I would love to spend three hours in focused work, but experience has taught me that the extra hour is a wasted hour. I make more mistakes; I start snatching a quick look at my messages and emails, looking for anything to distract me. That pile of washing suddenly needs to be put away, or those cups and dishes need washing and putting away.
Once you know your limits, you can work within them.
This approach is a more human way to go about your day. It’s not optimised to create impossible days, leaving you feeling exhausted, unfulfilled and disappointed with yourself.
It’s set up to work with your strengths and, more importantly, with your biorhythms. Your body’s natural rhythms.
The advantage of this kinder, calmer way of going about your day is that you naturally slow down. You have the space to deal with the urgencies and the demands of your bosses, clients and colleagues. And that results in fewer mistakes, leaving you with less corrective work to do.
The problem with being human is that we are really quite fragile. My client, who woke up at 5:00 am to fix Claude’s mistakes, will find the afternoon a dead zone. He’ll be exhausted and trying to operate at 100% with less than five hours of sleep.
That lack of sleep will likely affect his food choices at lunchtime. He’ll probably grab a quick sandwich or something else high in carbohydrates, which will spike his insulin levels, leaving him feeling drowsy afterwards.
And then we’re also susceptible to all sorts of bugs and illnesses, which can have a debilitating effect on our energy levels.
Again, not within our control unless we seal ourselves off from the outside world. Not a great idea.
I can assure you that the best approach to managing time and improving your productivity is to be human about it. Work with you and your natural state, rather than trying to be like a machine.
Take care of your three foundations: get enough sleep, eat healthy and move frequently.
Then, have a plan for the day. Not a minute-by-minute plan, but one that takes care of your non-negotiables, allows for some focused work time and has enough flexibility to take care of unknowns that will inevitably pop up throughout the day.
Since the 1980s, technological advances have consistently promised us less work and more leisure time. And yet that’s never materialised. Instead, the opposite happens.
Smartphones took business communications out of the office and made them omnipresent, leaving us with no place to hide. The desktop computer eliminated the typing pool and left managers and executives responsible for crafting their own letters and emails.
Cloud computing eliminated the filing cabinet and placed company documents within our reach 24/7, even when we were supposed to be on vacation.
What’s more, all this technological advancement has sped everything up. And it’s this speeding up that has left us with so much more to do. What used to take us three or four days to do is now expected to be done in an hour.
That’s where the problem is.
Fortunately, there are ways to mitigate this: be human. Make your own decisions about what you work on and when. Wrestle back control of your calendar and protect time to do the things that matter.
These are simple steps, not easy to implement initially, but worth putting the effort into implementing them.
As Matt D’Avella has discovered, and Samurai Matcha’s girlfriend already knew, keeping things human, simple and logical to yourself is the best way to live in a calm, quiet, focused way.
Now, before I go, if what you’ve heard today in this podcast resonated with you and you want to learn more, my Quiet Productivity Method programme will do just that.
Recently updated to cover your non-negotiables, the superb daybook system and how to plan your days and weeks so you are living within your time means, this programme will teach you, step by step, how to create a system that works for you. How to find time for what you want, and much more.
In addition, you will also become a part of the Quiet Productivity Method community, where you can share ideas, ask questions and join the monthly live sessions that will answer your questions and hold you accountable as you move away from the unsustainable task-based systems of old and towards a sustainable, humane, time-based system.
I do hope you can join me.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
There’s a conflict in time management and productivity that few people ever talk about. That’s the conflict between being productive and being responsive.
It’s almost like the Ying and Yang of life. A sort of Newtonian “everything has an equal and opposite reaction.”
While we may want to shut ourselves away and give our full focus to an important piece of work, there’s always someone, somewhere, who wants to interrupt us and keep us from being productive.
It’s this that we will be looking at this week.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here.
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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Script | 417
Hello, and welcome to episode 417 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I’m sure we’ve all been there. We have an important piece of work to complete, and we need a good two or three hours of uninterrupted focus to do it.
We block our calendars and pre-plan our day to minimise the risk of anything happening that will interrupt our plan.
And then the day starts, you turn up for work, and all hell has broken loose. Bosses and colleagues are in a panic, and you’re told you must attend an urgent meeting in twenty minutes. No ifs or buts, you must attend.
Argh! It’s enough to have you asking what the point is in making plans when this always happens.
Well, not so fast. It’s just Newton’s third law of Motion acting in a way Sir Isaac Newton never expected.
The pressure of needing two or three hours of quiet, focused work is matched by the force of people needing your attention right now.
Finding the antidote to this phenomenon is what this week’s question is all about.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tim. Tim asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve tried to do time blocking for years and have never found a way to stick with it. My colleagues always seem to have urgent questions or need me to do something right now. Do you have any ideas to avoid this from happening?
Hi Tim, thank you for your question.
You may have heard of the concept of manager vs maker (or sometimes producer). A manager’s role is to ensure the work is getting done, allocate resources, and hold meetings.
A maker’s role is to produce the work.
The conflict is between the manager’s need to know what’s happening and the maker’s need for uninterrupted time to produce the work the manager is chasing.
In my experience working with teams, the best teams are those where managers trust their teams to get the work done. Where the flow of information is smooth and works both ways, and the need for “update” meetings is minimal.
The most ineffective teams are those where managers constantly want to know what’s happening, are unclear about what they want and by when, and don’t protect their team from interruptions.
You can tell these managers by the number of “status” meetings they have each week. Every day is full of them.
I remember seeing an interview with Toto Wolff, the CEO and team principal of the Mercedes-Benz Formula 1 racing team. In one response to a question, he said:
“My role is to hire the best people, tell them what I want, and then get out of the way and let them do their work.”
Toto Wolff is not an engineer or aerodynamicist, but he is an excellent leader and manager.
Many of the software engineers I’ve spoken with tell me they need about 4 to 6 hours a day to focus on writing code. And even with the help of AI, there’s still a lot of focused work required.
AI doesn’t magically produce code. It needs prompting, the right context given and a clear outcome. And the results need to be carefully checked and tested. A lot of focused work.
The answer to many of these issues for the people who produce the work is to use time blocking.
Now, time blocking often gets abused. I’ve seen countless articles and videos suggesting that you block every hour (and sometimes minute) with something.
This is wrong. That’s not time blocking. That’s setting yourself up for failure, bordering on self-abuse.
Time blocking that works is when you protect two or three hours a day for deeper, focused work. You then leave the rest of the day open for meetings, interruptions and lighter work such as responding to messages and emails.
It’s balancing the need for being productive with the need to be responsive.
Yet it’s also about putting in place barriers that help you get your work done, and communicating to your colleagues and bosses that you cannot be disturbed right now.
I’ve found it’s that communication step people struggle with. There seems to be a fear that people will think less of you because you are not available to their every whim when they need you.
Complete fallacy. The people in your organisation who get the most respect are the ones who are strict about when they are available and when they are not. They have clear barriers, and no one crosses those barriers.
The people who get the least respect and are often the ones left behind on the promotion ladder have no barriers. They are always willing to stop and chat about this, that, and the other.
These are the people who end up taking their work home and are always the last to submit on a project.
As Jim Rohn said, "When you work, work. When you play, play. Don't mix the two.”
The problem here is that when you don’t set boundaries and are always available, your bosses feel they have to supervise you more. You get caught in a vicious circle.
And because you are always submitting your work at the last minute, you’re being interrupted by colleagues and bosses asking how you’re getting on.
When it comes to protecting time on your calendar for focused work, timing is everything.
According to several studies, around 80% of people are at their most focused and creative in the morning. This means, if you want to produce your best work, do it when you are at your most focused and creative.
If that is the morning, protect time in the morning and leave your afternoons open for discussions, meetings and other responsive tasks.
To give you one example, I have a client who is a software engineer.
She’s the manager of a team of engineers, and each morning at 8:30 am, they have a 15-minute ‘stand-up meeting’ to inform everyone of their plan for the day. (They all follow the Daily Planning Sequence).
This informs the team when each of them will be doing their focused work time (usually a three-hour block), what meetings they have, and when they will be available to discuss projects.
My client blocks her calendar from 9:30 am to 12:30 pm for doing her focused work, but does allow 9:00 am to 9:30 am to discuss any issues with individual team members or her bosses.
Then 9:30 hits, and she shuts down Slack and email, opens up her coding software, and for the next three hours, it’s complete and total focus time.
Since she and her team adopted this practice, they’ve never missed a deadline, and no one ever has to take work home. And more importantly, their productivity, as individuals and as a team, has shot through the roof.
This has the added benefit of their bosses now knowing not to disturb them during focus time. There’s plenty of time to update projects or gather information before and after a focus block.
It works. It’s balancing the need to be productive with the need to be responsive. And during an eight-hour workday, her team is only unavailable for three hours, not all at once. So there is always someone available to field questions from higher-ups and clients, if necessary.
Now, there is another block I would highly recommend, and this one will help to reduce and even eliminate backlogs. This is the communications and admin hour.
Let’s be honest, Slack and Teams didn’t do what they promised. Make communicating between teams and colleagues easier and faster. All these tools have done is take away the immediacy of email, move it to another tool, and made it noisier than email ever was.
We still get far too many communications, and far too many low-value and time-wasting messages.
The problem today is the one we’ve faced since the dawn of email: the feeling that we must respond immediately. Now, I’ll take you back to the two opposing forces at play in your workday: the need to be productive and the need to be responsive.
If you were 100% productive, you wouldn’t be communicating with anyone and would be focused solely on your work. If you were 100% responsive, you’d never get any work done, as you’d be responding to interruptions and answering questions and messages all day.
So, there’s a need to find some balance.
In my real-life tests, I’ve found that if you set aside an hour later in the day to respond to your messages, backlogs rarely occur, and if they do, they remain under control.
This only works, though, if you are consistent with this method.
You’ll never be on top of your messages if you sporadically deal with them throughout the week.
But if you consistently spend an hour or so responding to these messages and catching up on relevant threads, you’ll never feel overwhelmed, and if things do build up, adding an extra 30 minutes is often all you need to get things under control.
Now, let’s deal with the elephant in the room. You’re open calendar.
Time blocking will never work if you do not get control of your calendar and get in first. In other words, your focus block and your communications and admin time should be pre-blocked on your calendar.
I’ve seen people wait until Monday morning to find time to get their productive work done, only to discover their calendar is full of meetings.
No, no, no. It doesn’t work like that.
You have to go into your calendar and begin protecting time today. Perhaps your calendar is now full for the next two weeks. If so, go out three weeks in the future and set up some recurring blocks of time for doing your productive work now.
You can change these later if the time you’ve protected is needed for something important, but if you don’t do it now, you will never do it, and the pattern you’re stuck in today will be the same pattern you’re stuck in in three weeks.
I would also recommend setting these up as recurring blocks. That makes your life easier, and you soon come to respect these time blocks.
This also makes planning the week simpler. Knowing that you’ve got a couple of hours each day protected for your productive work, you can assign dates to your work more confidently.
I know when I begin the week, that I will have time on Thursday to write this script. I have time protected for doing so.
So there you go, Tim. I hope that has helped.
Look at the work you do, calculate where your balance between being productive and responsive lies, and then reflect that in your calendar.
I mentioned two hours a day for focused work, but if you are in a role that requires you to be particularly responsive, you may only allow one hour a day. But that is far better than nothing.
Good luck, and thank you for your question.
Thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
If you’re listening to this, there’s a good chance you’re a human being. (Although the speed at which AI is developing may be not all of you… A big hello to Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT (As Boris Johnson would say it)
And, as a human being, you’re attacked every day by emotions, fatigue, viruses and micro-managing bosses and demanding colleagues.
You’re not going to be able to stay consistent with your productivity systems and processes. (And even AI gets confused from time to time)
You WILL fall off the wagon from time to time
As David Allen, of Getting Things Done (GTD), often emphasises, falling off the productivity "wagon" is normal and expected. His most famous quote on this topic is: “If you don't fall off the wagon regularly, you're not playing a big enough game.”
So, what can you do when you do fall off? How can you quickly get back on track? Well, that’s what we’re going to look at today.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Learn more and register for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop here.
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Subscribe to my Substack
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 416
Hello, and welcome to episode 416 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the most common questions I get is what to do when your systems become neglected following a particularly busy period, a holiday, or illness or even plain, good old-fashioned laziness.
It happens to everyone from time to time, and it certainly doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you.
Yet it can leave you feeling that there’s something lacking, that perhaps there’s something wrong with you.
Of course, simply not true. There’s nothing wrong with you at all. It’s another sign that you are a functioning human being. (That’s a good thing, by the way)
All that’s happened is you got very busy and attended to the most important work that needed doing in that moment, or that you’ve just got back from holiday (vacation), and there’s a lot of catching-up and cleaning up to do.
Both scenarios can leave you with some tidying up to do. That doesn’t mean everything has failed. It just means there’s some tidying up to do.
So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ernesto. Ernesto asks, Hi Carl, thank you for the Time Sector System. Finally, I have a system that works after many years of trying. My question is, what do you do when, for whatever reason, you fall off the wagon and let things slip? Is there a quick way to get back on track?
Hi Ernesto, thank you for your question.
Firstly, as I mentioned, this is perfectly normal. So many things can cause us to stop following our system, leaving us feeling anxious about everything that needs cleaning up.
The first place to start is by cleaning up your to-do list for today. This is what I call the business end of any task management system. Your today list.
With the exception of your inbox, all your other lists are just holding pens of tasks that you have processed and decided do not need doing today. Your inbox is where unprocessed tasks sit until you decide what to do with them.
So get your list of tasks for today cleaned up. Reschedule tasks that do not need to be done today, and delete or check off those that have been completed or are no longer needed.
This one step will clear the runway and give you a curated list of things that do need to be done today.
One of the tricks I have to help me here is to give myself a few minutes each evening to clear this list. Anything I have not completed that day is either checked off if done, rescheduled if not, or deleted if no longer needed.
Doing this every day ensures it takes only a few minutes, and by the start of the new day, my today list is curated, accurate, and focused.
I’m reminded here of a story I learned from friend of this podcast, Simon Jeffries, a former UK special Forces officer, who mentioned that when he joined the Royal Marines, from day 1, the training instructors began teaching a simple habit that all marines live by:
As Simon says, “the military doesn’t take civilians and turn them into soldiers overnight. It can't. Day one of training, the standard is simple...
Turn up on time. Keep your kit clean. Look after your rifle.
That's it. A few weeks in, the expectations layer. Month after month, the load increases. The standards compound until discipline is second nature — under fatigue, under pressure, under fire.
Centuries of trial and error went into that approach.
And the reason it works isn't complicated. You cannot expect discipline under fire unless it's second nature. And second nature requires progressive, consistent training.”
Now I’ve often talked about the standards you set for yourself. That could always end the day with a clear plan for the next. It could also be to clear your today’s to-do list so it’s reset and ready for tomorrow.
Being consistent and making it a non-negotiable, no matter how tired you are, will soon embed this habit so it just becomes second nature.
The next list to clean up is your inbox. There’s potential for something important and urgent to be missed here.
If you’re like most people, you will be throwing a lot of things in there throughout the day. By the time you get to the end of the day, a lot of what you added will have been forgotten about.
It’s this that makes keeping this list under control important.
The good news about your inbox is that while you will be adding important things in there, you’re also likely to be adding things that, in hindsight, you do not need to do. These can be deleted.
What remains can be processed using three simple questions:
What is it? A note, an event or a task. If it’s a note, copy and paste it into your notes. If it’s an event, such as an appointment, move it to your calendar.
For what remains, ask yourself:
What do I need to do with it? This is about making sure the task is written clearly, so it’s clear what you need to do.
And finally, ask, “When will I do it?” That will guide you where to put it now that you have processed it.
Is it something that needs to be done this week, or can it wait until next week, etc.?
If it needs to be done this week, you will again ask the question: when? When will you do it?
Beyond that, everything else can wait until your next weekly planning session.
One of the side benefits of the Time Sector System is that you will find many of the tasks you postpone to next week, this month, or next month will sort themselves out and can be deleted. This is one of my favourite aspects of the Time Sector System, the natural elimination of low-value tasks.
It’s worth mentioning a couple of tips David Allen, yes, the Getting Things Done David Allen, gave me when we met in Seoul a few years ago.
David had been travelling through Asia for around ten days, and I asked him how he stayed on top of everything while he was away on business trips.
He said that the most important thing to stay on top while travelling was communications. Emails will back up very fast if you’re not dedicating some time each day to clearing them.
Even if all you can find is 20 minutes in the morning before your day begins, take it. One missed day of managing this beast, and you’re going to have to find twice as much time tomorrow, and so on.
The second tip is to block off at least half a day when you return to catch up. Process your inbox and clear or reschedule any overdue tasks.
David Allen blocks a whole day if he’s been away for a week or more. Half a day if it’s less than a week.
Treat this day as an extra day of your trip. Nobody knows you’re back. You quietly get on and catch up with everything you have collected while you were away.
I adopted both these tips for all my travels, and they work.
If you don’t do this, you’ll be spending the next two to three weeks trying to catch up while getting on with your regular work.
Think of it this way: if your regular work naturally takes up your full working day, why do you think adding in a load of catching up will be easily absorbed? It won’t.
Make the time for it.
Think of the end of each day only happens when you have done a reset and got yourself ready for the new day.
I will add that I also have a closing-down routine that involves washing any remaining dishes, brushing my teeth, locking all the doors, and closing the terrace curtains. It takes less than five minutes, but it’s now something I automatically do before going to bed.
It doesn’t require any extra energy or thought. It just happens.
Doing the daily reset should also be automatic. I remember when I first entered the workplace as a young twenty-year-old and seeing how all my colleagues used to tidy up their desks before going home.
Nobody would ever dream of leaving papers, pens, pencils and files all over the place. They were tidied up, and that marked the end of the day.
Funnily enough, as I think about it, I still do that today. My work day is not complete until I have a tidy desk and my task list is reset and ready to go for tomorrow.
Less than five minutes, and all reset and ready to go.
That’s how you guard against falling off the wagon. Having a few small habits to ensure you clean up at the end of each day.
I know it’s human nature to overthink things, but if you stop and consider what’s really important, knowing where you need to be tomorrow morning and what your most important tasks are for the day is all you really need to get yourself back on track.
And one of those important tasks could be to catch up and clear your inboxes, if that is where many of your current issues are. You get to choose. But do make that choice. Don’t ignore it and make the excuse that you are tired.
It’s less than five minutes. Come on, you can do that.
Many of the concepts I’ve talked about here and much more will be a part of next week’s live Ultimate Productivity Workshop. 2 sessions, 2 hours each over two Fridays (or Saturdays if you are in Australia or Asia)
There are some places left if you want to join us.
This workshop has helped hundreds of people finally gain control of their time and build a system that prevents backlogs and keeps them from falling off the wagon.
And, given that it’s live, you have the chance to share your own experiences, learn from others and ask questions.
There are a lot of exciting lessons in this workshop. I do hope you can join me and let me help you finally make time for the things you want time for.
I will include the link where you can learn more and register for the show in the show notes.
Thank you, Ernesto, for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
What are your priorities today? What about tomorrow? Do you even know?
This week, I’m sharing a simple switch you can make that will make prioritising your work almost automatic… Almost.
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What is Time-Based Productivity?
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Script | 415
Hello, and welcome to episode 415 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
How do you decide what to do and when? Do you operate a FIFO methodology (First In, First Out) or is it something more nuanced than that?
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that almost everyone has too much to do and too little time to do it. That’s perhaps the reason you are listening to this podcast.
It’s further complicated by the scope of what we are asked to do. Today, we have Slack or Teams messages that somehow cut through our defences and turn into long, time-consuming “chats” about a minor issue on a project that isn’t due to be completed for another six months, preventing us from doing the rather more important work we had planned to do that day.
Then there is email, treated slightly less urgently than instant messages, but it can again destroy our focus, leaving us distracted and unable to finish the work we need or want to complete.
Every day is a challenge. What to do, what is the most urgent, and what is the most important thing you can do today? And if you can work on the most important thing, will you have enough time to do it? If not, would it be better to do something else?
Agh! It’s enough to drive anyone around the bend. And it’s not isolated. Every day we have to go through the same decision-making process. It’s exhausting and stressful (Is this the right thing to work on, or should I respond to that email I just received from my colleague?) and can lead to a prioritisation freeze and activity addiction, where looking busy is more important than doing work that matters.
This week’s question is about ideas for solving these challenges, so to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Benjamin. Benjamin asks, What are your thoughts on organising work into categorised FIFO-style lists, adjusted for priority, and then using time blocks to work through them without expecting every block to result in a fully completed task unless there’s a real deadline attached.
Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question.
I think you are on the right lines with your ideas there.
Let me give you an example of this working.
I teach a method called Inbox Zero 2.0 for managing emails. This method has two parts. The first is to clear the inbox. This is about speed, and all you are doing is filtering out the informational emails that don’t need any action, except to archive them and moving any actionable emails to a folder called “Action This Day”.
Later in the day, you go into that folder and try to clear it.
Now, the ‘secret sauce’ of this method is that the emails in your Action This Day folder are in reverse order. The oldest ones are at the top, and the newest ones are at the bottom of the list.
(You can do this from the folders’ settings in Outlook and Apple Mail. I’ve never been able to find a way to do this in Gmail)
This means, when you come to ‘clear’ the Action This Day folder, you start at the top and work your way down. You try to clear it every day, but often that’s not possible; sometimes there are too many in there.
However, because you start with the oldest, the remaining emails, the ones you were unable to get to, will likely have only recently come in, so the urgency is less than the ones you did respond to.
Now, occasionally, an email that recently came in needs to be responded to that day. Here, you would “adjust for priority”, as you aptly call it, Benjamin and respond to these out of their natural order.
It’s a system that has worked for years, never letting me down. Because I spend at least 20 minutes a day on my actionable emails, my emails rarely back up; my inbox is cleared every day, and nobody needs to wait more than 24 hours for a response.
Now, you mentioned doing as much work as you can within the time blocks you set. That is exactly how to do it.
This is also where many people go wrong with time blocking. Time blocking isn’t about squeezing in a specific amount of work within the time you have set. That’s never going to be possible.
You see, there are too many variables acting on us each day. The first is that you have no idea what emergencies will happen in the middle of a time block.
I’ve worked in offices where I settle down to write an important contract only to be interrupted by a fire alarm that took more than an hour to have the building declared safe. Rare, but does happen.
More common are the interruptions from our colleagues. We just do not know for sure that something more urgent will pop up when we are trying to complete a planned piece of work.
However, that does not mean time blocking doesn’t work. It does.
It does because it allows us to organise our days by what matters most.
For example, if you are a lawyer who needs time each day to prepare or review contracts, blocking two hours each day for this work ensures you always have time to do this important work.
Blocking time for it means no one in your office can steal that time from you. It’s like you have an appointment with yourself each day to do your most important work.
If you do not, for whatever reason, complete as much as you would have liked to, it’s okay, because you can pick it up again in your next blocked time slot.
This is more about consistency than time blocking. If you consistently turn up and do the work, you’re never going to be far behind and are unlikely to have any significant backlogs.
Yet if you don’t protect your time, it’ll be stolen.
Not blocking time for doing your most important work is like parking your car in a high-crime area and leaving your wallet on the passenger seat with the windows wide open. There’s a good chance your wallet won’t be there when you get back to your car.
Time blocking gets a bad reputation because people erroneously think it’s about blocking your entire day with activities. No. That’s not time blocking. That’s masochism.
Time blocking your whole day wouldn’t work anyway. A traffic jam, a distraught colleague, a micromanaging boss, or a fire alarm would ruin your day, and then you’d waste time trying to reschedule everything.
Time booking works when you use it lightly.
Look at it this way:
You build each day around a few critical blocks of time. For instance, two hours of deep solo work where you get on and write the reports, prepare the presentation, or sort out an issue that’s been dragging on for weeks.
Then there’s likely to be time required for responding to all the messages you get each day. I doubt anyone can escape that deluge, but ignoring it will just create bigger and bigger problems further down the line.
So perhaps you set aside an hour for dealing with your communications and any low-value admin. (Another area that can backlog pretty quickly if you’re not staying on top of it.)
That’s just two blocks, consisting of a total of three hours. Yet it’s three hours, which, if followed consistently, would keep you on top of your critical work and prevent backlogs in the areas most susceptible to them.
Three hours that would reduce your stress, lower your anxiety, and put you ahead of 97% of your colleagues.
This does not guarantee you will always be on top of your work. As Baz Luhrmann’s 1990s hit says:
“Sometimes you're ahead, sometimes you're behind… the race is long, and in the end, it's only with yourself.”
But what will guarantee you stay ahead is being consistent with it.
When you start each day, ask yourself: where’s my focus time and where’s my comms and admin time?
You mentioned categorising your tasks, and that’s a great idea too, Benjamin. Not all work is equal, and sometimes a deadline will need us to adjust our priorities.
Now, categorising your work can be a minefield if you are inclined to overcomplicate things. This should be avoided.
Think of it this way: When a pilot prepares for a trans-Pacific flight, there are just three categories. Pre-flight, in-flight and landing.
Each of those categories has distinct types of tasks to be completed.
For us, knowledge workers, it really comes down to a few simple categories. For example, there are four that almost everyone will have (including airline pilots):
Communications
Admin
Planning
And chores
Chores are always there. We all occasionally have to pick up a prescription, make a dentist’s or doctor’s appointment or take our kids to ballet, football or cricket practice.
Beyond these four, it will depend on the kind of work you do. A lecturer at a university may have student affairs, lectures and research as categories.
A salesperson may have prospecting, follow-ups and proposal writing.
My advice is to keep your categories to no more than eight and make them as general as possible.
For example, with the lecturer, student affairs could include grading papers, setting exams, writing references and arranging for one or more of your students to participate in a work experience programme.
Once you have your categories, you have a way to prioritise your work.
Again, this will depend on your work. For me, my most important priority each day is my content category. I create content every day. It could be this podcast, a blog post or a YouTube video.
For a salesperson, the most important category may be prospecting, because without a steady supply of potential customers, everything else will eventually dry up.
This now helps you with what you will do in your time blocks. For me, 9:30 am to 11:30 am is my content creation time. It is blocked on my calendar, and everyone knows not to disturb me during that time—including my wife!
The salesperson may choose 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm as their prospecting time, and that, again, would be protected as a time block on their calendar each day.
The idea is to match your most important categories with time blocks on your calendar.
This is how time-based productivity works. It works on the time available to do your work. Not everything has to be done today or even this week or month.
When you’re processing your work inbox, you decide what you need to do with something, then choose the best time to do it.
There will be other factors to take into account, such as the deadline, who’s asking you to do something and so on. But ultimately, you are deciding when to work on a particular category.
This is the opposite of the more traditional task-based systems that treat every task as individually important and as something that must be done ASAP.
That way is unsustainable, as I am sure many of you have found out. It creates huge lists of stuff that may or may not need to be done, which just overwhelms you. You cannot do everything at once or even this week.
If you want to learn more about time-based productivity, I have added a link to a blog post I wrote about it in the show notes.
And just a heads up. The next Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming soon. On Fridays the 15 and 22nd May, 2 sessions, 2 hours each over two weeks.
If your calendar is swamped with meetings and commitments, that leaves you with no room to do the work these meetings are generating. If you find your inboxes are overflowing with tasks and messages, and you cannot see a way out of it all, then this is the workshop for you
This workshop will teach you, in a live setting, how to move from an unsustainable, task-based system to a more sustainable, time-based one, along with many other lessons to help you get control of your calendar and all those inboxes.
I will put the details in the show notes so you can learn more about how this workshop will help you. (Oh, and a warning, be prepared for some homework if you join us)
I do hope you will be able to join me.
Thank you, Benjamin, for your question. I hope this has been helpful.
And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Podcast 414
"Organisation is what you do before you do something, so that when you do it, it is not all mixed up. But if you spend all your time organising, you never do the 'something'."
That’s a paraphrase of a quote from A. A. Milne and his book The House at Pooh Corner. And touches on the question I’m asking this week.
Let’s go,
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Take the Time Sector System Course
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Script | 414
Hello, and welcome to episode 414 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
How do you organise your work?
There was a trend a few years ago to organise our tasks in multiple different ways. There were the original Getting Things Done contexts: @office, @home, @phone, @computer, etc.
Some preferred to manage their tasks by project, creating long lists of projects and assigning tasks to them.
Most of these trends died out because, ultimately, they were just new ways of avoiding the work while still feeling that the work was getting done. A kind of modern-day equivalent of shuffling papers on your desk.
All these trends did was create a longer list of lists, full of spurious tasks that likely didn’t need to be done or had already been done but not checked off.
Then there is the idea that we can organise tasks by how much energy we estimate a task will consume. This one still persists, and I will explain shortly why this one doesn’t work.
Yet there is one way to manage your tasks that has been around for well over a hundred years and still works, one that almost all top-level executives use, but given that it is simple and we humans love to overcomplicate things, it never seems to get much coverage.
Anyway, this is what this week’s topic is all about, so to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ken. Ken asks, Hi Carl, what do you think is the best way to organise tasks? I’m thinking about using energy levels to keep my lists low. Have you had any experience with this method?
Hi Ken,
Thank you for your question.
I have to confess that over the years, I have jumped on every trend for organising my lists of tasks. And, except for two methods, pretty much all fail.
They fail for the reasons I alluded to a moment ago. They are too complicated and require far too much maintenance to keep organised.
You see, the methods that work are simple, and therefore, in today’s world, they are not sexy.
The simplest of them all is one I personally have gravitated back to in recent years. That is a simple daily list of tasks to be done today. These are taken from a master list, which is organised during the weekly planning session into the days you plan to do them on.
This method has a built-in safety valve. You can see how many tasks you have allocated to a specific day, and if it looks unrealistic, you can move them to other days to balance out your week.
Given that you are looking at this daily list every day during the Daily Planning Sequence, it can be adjusted for any unknowns that suddenly arise as the week progresses. (Which of course always happens)
To maintain this method, all you need is two to three minutes a day and around thirty minutes for your weekly planning.
Not exciting, sexy or newsworthy. It doesn’t require expensive apps or AI. You can operate this method using a simple $1.00 notebook or a text file on your computer.
But it works. It’s flexible, and as long as you are being sensible, you’re never going to feel overwhelmed.
This is where other methods go wrong. They often involve a lot of organising, and given that you are not always looking at the lists you are creating, you have no idea what kind of monster is growing.
Take organising by projects as an example. I don’t know where this comes from. It certainly doesn’t come from David Allen’s Getting Things Done. GTD, as it is called, organises lists by what David Allen calls “Contexts”.
Contexts are created around tools, places or people. For instance, if a task requires a computer to complete it, you would assign it to the @Computer list. If you need to talk to your partner about something, you would add it to your @Partner list, and if you can only complete the task at home, you would add it to your @Home list.
The danger with this kind of organising is twofold. First, some of your lists will become enormous. So big that you don’t want to look at them, as they become scary and leave you feeling anxious.
And second, some tasks could theoretically fall into two or more lists. For example, if you need to book flights for a trip with your partner, you could allocate it to your @computer list or your @Partner list, and, as you will likely do this at home with your partner, it could conceivably be placed in your @Home list.
So where do you put it?
So you create a Project called “Family trip to Jamaica” and place the book flights task in there. Excellent. Next, you may add “Book hotel” and then maybe add a packing list and places to visit. Soon, a simple “project” has an array of tasks, some of which need to be done before you go and others when you get there.
That isn’t really the problem. The problem is you don’t have a single project like that. You may end up with projects like buying a new car, redecorating your living room, and, not to mention, all the various projects you will have at work.
Soon, that project list is out of control.
Just maintaining it and reviewing what needs to be done next takes hours.
And let’s be honest here, how many of you are willing to consistently spend two or three hours of your weekend reviewing all your projects?
For something like your trip, it would be far easier to create a note in your notes app. Here you can keep your flight tickets, hotel reservation confirmation, packing list and places to visit in one place and have a master checklist for everything you need to do.
In your task manager, all you need now is a single task reminding you to book your flights, or simply to look at what needs doing next on your checklist.
Now you mentioned managing your list by energy levels, Ken.
On the surface, this sounds like a great idea. After all, why would you tackle a task that will require a lot of energy when you are not feeling energetic?
And when you are feeling low on energy, you can clear off some of those low-energy tasks.
Hmmm, but does it work?
Well, no.
For one thing, your energy levels are not consistent. Some days you feel on fire, and others you feel like you’ve been hit by a bus and dragged through a hedge backwards.
The trouble is, when you go to bed, you have no idea how you will feel the next day.
Then there is the issue of deadlines. Whether you feel like doing a task or not, if the deadline is 12 pm today, you’ve got to finish it, no matter how energetic you feel.
Then there’s the human factor. We are wired to be lazy. This comes from the days when we lived on the Savannah. Food was scarce, and we needed to conserve our energy for hunting food.
Then there were the winters when finding food was even harder. Only fatter people would survive winters because we needed to live largely on our fat deposits when we were unable to find food.
This is why it’s easy to gain weight and much harder to lose it. Our body wants to store fat. It does not want to let it go.
While we consciously know food is not scarce for most of us today, our lizard brain doesn’t know that. And our lizard brain controls our survival instincts, so it will override our conscious intelligence.
This means when we are feeling low on energy, the last thing we will do is open up our task managers and pick something to do.
Instead, we’ll crash on the sofa or take a nap.
And so your low-energy list will keep growing.
Then there comes the question of how to define a medium-energy task. What does that mean?
It’s likely you will define those tasks differently depending on how you feel on the day you process them.
The second way to organise your tasks that actually works is to go by when a task needs to be done.
Let’s go back to the flight example. If you are planning your trip for September and want to get everything booked by the end of June, the window to complete that task is from now through to the end of June.
Given that you want to do this with your partner, it’s likely you will do this task when you are with your partner.
If you are away on a ten-day business trip this week and next, you cannot do the task then, so don’t put it on your list for this week or next.
As we are about to start May, I would add this task to my Next Month list. I don’t need to do it now, but it will need to be on my list in June.
Hopefully, you are familiar with the Time Sector System. This organises your lists by when you will do them.
The only list in play each week is your This Week list. This contains all the tasks you have decided need to be done this week. Everything else is in either your Next Week, This Month, Next Month or long-term and on-hold lists.
Each week, you look at these lists and decide what to bring forward to your This Week list.
The simplicity of this method is that when you process your inbox, you are asking three simple questions:
What is it? - Is it a task, an event, or a note?
What do I need to do to complete it?
And, when will I do it?
In a very short time, you get super fast at processing your tasks, and with the exception of your long-term and on-hold list, none of your lists will grow out of control. Well, not if you give yourself about 30 minutes each week to maintain and update your lists.
Given that you are working from a single list, your This Week list, once again, you have the built-in safety valve because you can see how many tasks are on your list before the week begins and can adjust it to be more realistic if it becomes too large.
The purpose of your long-term and on-hold list is to eliminate, not accumulate. In other words, every month or so, you go in there and delete tasks you no longer want or need to do.
To learn more about the Time Sector System, I have a course that will teach you how to use it as well as a comprehensive blog post explaining why this method works so well in today’s world.
I will put links to both in the show notes for you.
So there you go, Ken.
There are always new, exciting ways to organise your tasks, but ultimately it comes down to what needs to be done today. That’s all that matters at the work level of managing our tasks.
Things that don’t need to be done today should never be on your daily list.
Your energy levels will fluctuate throughout the day; it’s not something you can control. Energy levels can be affected by the quality and quantity of your sleep, what you ate for lunch and whether you are coming down with a cold or the flu.
What you can control is what you do right now. You could take a nap, go for a walk or sit down and attack that list of prospects that you’ve been meaning to contact for the last three weeks.
My advice would be to work with what you have direct control over, and that ultimately comes down to when you will do something.
I hope that has helped Ken. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
“I have the most ill-regulated memory. It does those things which it ought not to do and leaves undone the things it ought to have done. But it has not yet gone on strike altogether.”
I’ve been reading Dorothy L Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Set in the 1920s and 30s, the stories feature an aristocratic private detective in a style similar to Sherlock Holmes. And that quote comes from Lord Peter Wimsey himself.
In this week’s episode, I share some of the productivity methods these fictional characters followed, as well as some from the biographies of these authors.
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Script | 413
Hello, and welcome to episode 413 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
1920s and 30s England was an interesting time. The country was changing. The First World War broke down many of the class barriers that existed before the war, and while many manual labour jobs remained brutal, conditions were slowly improving.
The way people lived their lives was also changing. There was more leisure time, and cars were becoming more common, giving people more freedom to travel, certainly at weekends.
And yet, with all these changes, there were still some customs and habits people followed that gave them structure and balance. They also used nature far more than we do today. Lives were much simpler; heart attacks and cancer were rare; there was little waste; and recycling was part of life.
It could be asked, what went wrong?
I began this episode with a quote from the character Lord Peter Wimsey.
Lord Peter was very much in the style of Sherlock Holmes, and throughout the novels, many of Lord Peter’s friends would often accuse him of being “Sherlockian”.
What I noticed about these characters was that in the 1920s and 30s, some customs helped people avoid procrastination.
You can also see these in play in the Downton Abbey and Jeeves and Wooster TV series as well.
The first productivity method you will see is that days were structured around meal times.
Breakfast was informal, and people ate when they were ready. However, lunch was always a proper meal, not a quick snack taken at a desk. It would have been unthinkable not to take the one-hour lunch break.
Even manual workers would stop for lunch and eat together.
Taking a proper lunch break can do wonders for your productivity. First, it gives you a break from doing tasks, and it should always be eaten with other people.
But the biggest impact on your productivity was having a natural deadline. Because you were dining with others, you had to stop at the right time. No, “I’ll just finish this and take a quick lunch break”.
It was down your tools and go out.
This gave you a hard deadline to finish what needed to be finished before lunch. And when you have a hard deadline, Parkinson’s law comes in. This is “work fills the time available”
If you have two hours to finish a task, it will take you two hours. If you only have an hour, it will take you an hour.
What happens is that you enter a deeper state of focus when you are under time pressure. That’s how Parkinson’s law works. But it can have the reverse effect.
If an email would normally take you 30 minutes to respond to, but you have an hour before your next appointment, that email will take you the full hour to write.
This is why procrastination is now a thing; in the 1920s and 30s, it was rare. The natural mealtime deadlines prevented a lot of procrastination. Today, those mealtimes are woolly and ill-defined, removing a natural deadline, causing you to procrastinate.
What people ate also had an impact. It was largely fish or meat with vegetables. No HPFs (highly processed foods) or low-value carbs. It was foods that didn’t mess with your blood sugar, which leads to the afternoon slump.
Alcohol was often also included. How on earth deep focused work got done in the afternoons, I don’t know.
Dinner was an altogether different affair. The time was set, and you dressed for dinner too. The ladies wore evening gowns, and the gentlemen wore dinner suits (tuxedo for those of you living on the other side of the Atlantic).
This meant if you did have a job and were not of “independent means”, you had to leave work on time to be home in time to dress for dinner.
After dinner was interesting. The ladies would gather together in the drawing room for music and conversation. The gentlemen would retire to the smoking room for brandy, coffee and cigars. There, the day’s business was often discussed.
This was the aristocracy, not the middle or working classes. Although even the lower classes treated dinner more formally than we do today. It was the family meal of the day, and everyone was expected to be there.
After that, people often wrote letters, read books, or, in the case of people like Winston Churchill, went back to their studies and did some more work.
And that was something I have noticed. Because there were no fixed working hours for the upper classes, work occurred at all hours of the day. A lot of work happened after dinner, rarely in the early hours of the day.
This gave a lot more flexibility for things like admin and communications. Most letter writing was done late in the day.
The founder of the British Intelligence Service (MI6), Sir Mansfield Cumming, would retire to his study after dinner to read through all the papers he’d received that day and send out letters to his agents around the world, often until 2 in the morning.
Yet Cumming was famous for two to three-hour lunches and late starts to the day.
The problems we have today are caused by on-demand entertainment. There’s always something to watch on YouTube or Netflix. And our sofas are very tempting after a nice dinner.
Once there, it’s a real challenge to get up. Take those temptations away, and what else will you do?
If you think about that for a moment. If a family had dinner together at 7:00 pm, discussed the day, and afterwards joined in an activity, they would be spending quality time together every day.
Then at 9:00 pm, you could go back and clean up your messages, clear any admin tasks for an hour or so and still have time for reading or a hobby.
It’s often our fixation with work-life balance that puts unnecessary barriers in our day. No personal stuff during office hours and no work stuff in our personal time.
And yet, what do we do in our personal time? Spend hours in front of a screen, not talking with our family or friends, instead sending WhatsApp messages and commenting on social media posts.
Cal Newport and Tim Ferriss write their books late in the evening. In Cal Newport’s case, he spends time with his young family until they go to bed, and then goes to his home office and writes for two or three hours.
Cal Newport is a good example because he’s completely rejected social media, so he has time to write after his kids have gone to bed.
Rest was taken very seriously in the 1920s and 30s. A lot of it was social. Parties and weekend getaways.
I’ve spoken about Ian Fleming’s work habits before, particularly when he was in Jamaica writing the next James Bond book. But when he was back in London, he still worked in very much the same way.
Mornings were intensely focused work, followed by a long lunch, then letters, and then home for dinner, or out with a friend. Afterwards, he would go to his study and edit a manuscript or read through the papers he’d received from his foreign correspondents around the world. (He was the foreign news editor at The Sunday Times Newspaper)
The most noticeable thing I learned from this era has been to structure your days around meal times. I now do intense creative work in the mornings, followed by more leisurely afternoons, and then, after dinner, go back to doing some work for an hour or two.
I still work for around eight to ten hours a day, but I find that my energy levels remain strong whenever I am working. There are plenty of breaks throughout the day where I can socialise, spend time with my family and still get a lot of work done.
And then there was movement. A lot of movement.
The 1920s and 30s were a lot less convenient than they are today. This meant we had to walk a lot more than we do now.
Weirdly, people have become obsessed with their step count today. They struggle to get even 8,000 steps in. And gyms are everywhere.
There were no gyms, and nobody was counting steps back then. They didn’t have to. It was natural to walk 10,000+ steps every day. If you wanted food, you had to prepare it; there was no app to order it.
Although the upper classes did have servants who could produce it for them when necessary. But given that refrigerators and microwaves were not a thing then, a sudden order of food would have resulted in a cold meat salad and not much else.
As an aside, just do a search for 1950s New York or London and look at the images. There’s a significant difference between the size of people then and people today. Yet, no gyms, no smartwatches calculating steps, sleep cycles, or anything else.
It was purely natural. Real food, not processed rubbish, plenty of natural movement, and no gyms.
If you want to be more productive every day, move more. This is really what balance is all about. The so-called work-life balance is a modern concept, but what really matters at life level is the movement-rest balance.
With the right movement-rest balance, your productivity will naturally increase. You will be a lot less mentally tired, and when you do move, you can map out what you will do next.
I find that the biggest benefit of working from home has been that I can get up between work sessions to do the laundry or take Louis out for his walk. It gives me a natural mental break, and I do something physical. That refreshes my brain, and I can come back and do some more mental work feeling energised.
I know it will be impossible to turn back the clock and go back to living the way people did in the 1920s. Technology and cultural changes would make that impossible.
However, there are things we can do, as people did back then, that will naturally increase our productivity.
First, focus on the rest-movement balance. If you’re mentally tired, do something physical instead of collapsing on the sofa. If you’re physically tired, do something mental.
And move more than you currently do. We have become alarmingly sedate today. Dance while you’re cooking or making tea or coffee (I do that hahaha)
Eat real food, not processed rubbish, and take proper lunch breaks. Get out, move and socialise if you can. Treat them as a non-negotiable.
Be relaxed about work-life balance. It’s not natural. There will be times when the best thing you can do is to clear some backlogs in the evening, and equally, there are times when the best thing you can do at 3:00 pm is go out for a walk or hang out the washing.
Another aside. The worst invention has been the tumble dryer. Before we had them, we had to hang out the washing. This involved bending down to pick up clothes from the washing basket and then reaching up to hang them on the line. Possible one of the best workouts you would ever get.
I know today’s episode has been different. I hope you’ve found it interesting. It’s well worth reading some of these older novels to learn how people used to live their lives.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very active, yet productive week.
Podcast 412
Continuing my series on designing the “perfect” retirement, this week, I share some insights on one of the most common fears of retirement, that of losing your purpose.
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Script | 411
Hello, and welcome to episode 412 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Throughout our lives, there is usually some goal or purpose we are attempting to achieve.
When at school, it’s to pass our exams so we can go on to university or to get a job in a specific field. When we begin our careers, we are often driven to work hard to get promoted. Or at least that’s how the theory goes.
The trouble is, if you step back from these “goals”, they seem to be pushed onto us by our parents, society and our peers.
It’s rare for anyone to step away from this blueprinted path and set their own course. In the past, people who did not follow the well-worn path would have been politely described as “eccentric”, or impolitely “weird”.
I remember back in 2002, when I quit law and flew to Korea to teach English, my friends and colleagues could not understand why I would give up a career in law to teach English.
Yet, my heart was not in law. It always felt wrong. If I am being honest, I believe my motivation for studying law and working in a law firm was purely about status and about living a life that other people wanted me to live.
Coming to Korea turned out to be the best thing I’ve ever done. I discovered my purpose: to help other people, and I found the medium through which I could do that: teaching.
It’s what I still do today. I help people through teaching.
In our working lives, it’s easy to have a purpose. It might not be our true purpose, but climbing the promotion ladder does seem to give us a purpose. How high up the ladder can we climb?
Yet, chasing the next promotion is never going to be a life’s purpose. It might be a career goal, but ultimately, it will end at some point, and that ending point will unlikely be within your control.
I’m reminded of one of England’s top lawyers, Lord Jonathan Sumption.
Lord Sumption was a celebrated barrister, rising to the top of the legal profession when he became a judge at the Supreme Court.
The mandatory retirement age for Supreme Court judges in England is 70, so when Lord Sumption turned 70, he retired from the legal profession.
However, his real passion was never for law. That was his career, and he was very good at it. His real passion was for medieval history, and today Lord Sumption is regarded as one of the leading historians of that era. He continues to write books and talk on the subject.
Tony Robbins talks about the six human needs in his brilliant Unleash the Power Within seminar. These human needs are:
The need for: Certainty - the certainty that you can avoid pain and gain pleasure, and the need for uncertainty and variety - the need for the unknown and new stimuli.
The need for significance - the feeling of being unique, important, special or needed and then the need for connection and love - a strong feeling of closeness to someone or something
And then there are the two areas that when we are young, we often dismiss, largely because we are so caught up in our own lives. They are the need to contribute and the need to grow.
When I first did the associated exercise related to these needs, I did just that. My top two were the need for certainty and the need for significance. (Typical for someone who creates content, funnily enough)
I dismissed the needs to contribute and grow. Yet now, I see that these two needs are the source of our purpose.
All living beings need to grow. When we stop growing, we start dying. Just look at what happens to muscles when we stop using them. They weaken and whither. That’s your body doing its job. It wants to conserve energy, and if you’re not using an energy-expensive muscle, it will weaken the muscle.
That is just another reason it’s important to make sure you do your resistance training every day. (Or at least three to four times a week).
Yet growth is not just about the physical; it’s also about the mental. The need to be continuously learning.
This is where our hobbies come in. Hobbies such as learning languages, geology, car mechanics, medieval history, and problem-solving keep our brains active. Our brains continue to grow as we learn.
A good reason not to try to figure everything out by using customer service or Chat GPT. Use your problem-solving skills to figure it out.
And the contribution is where we get our sense of fulfilment. Passing on our knowledge and what we have learned from our life experiences by teaching others.
When I worked in law, it always felt like it was just about billable time. How much could we charge the client? I tried to convince myself that I was helping people, but my bosses were not interested in that part. They just wanted to know how much I had billed that week.
When I began teaching English to adults in Korea, that changed. It did not matter how many students I had in my classes. I got paid the same. Now I felt I was contributing to someone’s success.
Something changed in me, too. I felt excited to go to work every morning. I’d never felt that before, and it took me a while to figure out what that was. It was because each day I got the chance to help people improve their lives and career prospects, and it was a joy to see their progress.
If you were to build a retirement around growth and contribution, you would soon find that your purpose becomes clear.
For most of us, our purpose is unlikely to be as grand as bringing world peace or finding a solution to global warming. For some, maybe, but for most of us, not likely.
Purpose is often much smaller than that. It could be to raise and support your children so they can navigate through their worlds with positivity and pragmatism. For others, it could be, like me, to teach as many people as I can to be better organised and less stressed.
The late Prince Philip, who died five years ago, told his daughter, Princess Anne, that to find your purpose, you should find something that you feel you can make an impact on.
For Prince Philip, that meant conserving and protecting the planet, as well as helping young people be active through his Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme.
He was talking about conservation and climate change in the 1950s, well before it became fashionable to do so. He was a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, wrote multiple books on the subject, and was active in climate science.
For Princess Anne, it has been, and remains so today, saving children in war-torn environments, animal welfare and hearing dogs for the deaf.
Which then leads us to the second problem here.
When we retire, it can be very tempting to fill our calendars with all sorts of work in the name of good causes. Don’t do that.
You are not going to be able to have an impact on everything. Instead, you want to look at what you are genuinely interested in.
Prince Philip gave a 19-year-old Princess Anne some sage advice when she asked him what she should get involved in. He told her that she would be inundated with offers to be a patron of this or that. He advised her that she could never be a patron of everything, so she should choose those in which she had a genuine interest.
Ron Dennis, the former owner of the McLaren Formula 1 team, retired from Formula 1 in 2017 and dedicated his retirement to helping young people achieve their aspirations and to become role models for future generations.
His experience of working with people like Ayrton Senna, Alain Prost and Kimi Räikkönen gave him the knowledge and experience to help young sportsmen and women achieve their dreams.
There’s likely to be something that you have an interest in. If that can be coupled with your knowledge and experience, then you have something you can contribute, and that, in turn, will give you a sense of purpose.
In many ways, the challenge is not about finding purpose; it is narrowing it down to the one or two things that we feel we can have an impact on.
The same challenge we faced when in the corporate world is still there in retirement: overcommitting. This is why it’s important not to rush into things when you transition. Explore, think, test, and experience by all means, but set a deadline for refining your activities into something more manageable.
One of the wonderful things about the world we live in today is that we can share our ideas and experiences by writing a blog, recording a podcast, or even starting a YouTube channel.
The great thing about these avenues is that they need consistency to grow. A weekly podcast does far better than a podcast that rarely adds episodes. This helps you to bring structure into your weeks. You can set aside a day or two each week for your content production.
As your blog, podcast, or YouTube channel grows, that in itself gives you a sense of purpose, particularly if it is contributing to making an impact on something you have an interest in.
So, if you are struggling to find your purpose, first, don’t overthink it. It’s rarely about solving the world’s problems; it’s more about helping people to better themselves, and as someone with the experience you have, you are in a very strong position to be able to help.
Make sure it is something you are interested in, something you enjoy reading about and something you like talking to other people about. If you wake up excited about doing something related to this, then you’ve found your purpose.
One of the most inspiring stories I heard about was about two Canadian gentlemen who loved skiing. Each year, they would go skiing together with their families.
When they retired, they both decided to take their ski instructor certification and become ski instructors. And that is what they do today. They are both qualified ski instructors, and each winter they spend their days teaching people to ski.
This keeps them fit and strong and brings an incredible social experience.
I hope this has helped. If you have any questions around your retirement or impending retirement, let me know. I’m happy to answer your questions in this podcast.
And don’t forget, I have recently launched a brand new programme called Designing the Perfect Retirement. This programme sets out a blueprint for you to create a retirement you find fulfilling and inspiring, and that keeps you fit, healthy and active.
In addition, this programme gives you access to a community where you can share experiences and advice. I will put the details for this programme in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish all a very, very productive week.
Podcast 411
Last July, I had a conversation with my father-in-law. He was scared and worried. He was due to retire at the end of 2026 (now only a few months away), and he had no idea what to do.
It was that conversation that inspired me to dig deep into what it takes to build a solid, meaningful and joyful retirement. That’s what we’re going to look into today.
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Script | 411
Hello, and welcome to episode 411 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I’m in my mid-fifties now, a time when many people start to think about what they will do when they walk out of their workplace for the last time and enter the next chapter of their lives.
It’s a scary time for many people. Yes, there’s a lot to look forward to: being able to design your own days and go on trips whenever you want, without needing to submit a holiday request form. But there’s an underlying sense of anxiety, will I be bored? Will I lose my health? Will I be lonely?
This is why giving some thought to your retirement before you retire can bring you a sense of relief and purpose.
But what do you want to do?
As the productivity saying goes, “You can do anything but not everything”.
So one of the first things to do when you begin thinking about your retirement is ask that question: What do I want to do?
And this is important.
My grandfather was a farmer all his working life. He had a dairy farm, and each morning at 5:00 am, he would wake up, bring the cows into the dairy and start the milking for the day.
He did this for over forty years, seven days a week. Farming is not so much work; it’s a way of life. When my grandfather was not milking, he was repairing machines and fences, and doing all the other odd jobs that needed to be done.
At the age of 60, he retired.
His plan was to travel, something he’s never been able to do, enjoy a little gardening and take life easy.
That didn’t happen. For someone who had been active all his life, not having to get up early in the morning, come rain or shine, and now being able to stay in bed and have a leisurely morning reading the newspapers was a temptation that was hard to resist.
And so he stopped. He didn’t do very much, and within two years, he was dead.
He was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, and while the operation to remove the cancer was successful, he developed complications and passed away a few weeks after the operation.
I was only 12 years old when he died, and it was the first family death I experienced. It was a horrible experience. I was close to my grandfather. He was a lovely person.
It woke me up to the frailties of a human life at an early age. Aunties and uncles often said he died because he retired. I was too young to understand that at the time, but I remember a friend of my mother’s later once telling me that the biggest killer is your armchair.
That person was the famous international show jumper, Harvey Smith.
Harvey is 87 years old now. When he retired from show jumping in 1990, he didn’t sit around in his armchair. His dream was to build a horse racing stable. And together with his wife, Sue, that is what they did.
In 2013, Harvey and Sue trained the horse Auroras Encore, which won the prestigious Grand National horse race at Aintree in Liverpool that year.
I know many of my non-British listeners may not have heard of the Grand National, but anyone in the UK will know it is one of the biggest races on the horse racing calendar.
But not only that, Harvey’s written at least four books, and he still doesn’t spend much time in his armchair.
If you want to hear Harvey’s words of wisdom, there is a superb YouTube video in which he and Sue are interviewed. I’ll put that video link in the show notes. Harvey is a true Yorkshireman with the wonderful Yorkshire wit.
Retirement is not the end. It’s the start of a new chapter in your life. You have built up a wealth of knowledge and experience and likely collected quite a few interests along the way. Retirement is your time to use that knowledge and work on the things that interest you.
So what interests you?
I’ve had a love of bonsai trees since I was in my twenties. I was probably inspired by the film The Karate Kid.
While I have a couple of trees now, I don’t have the time to properly learn to nurture and grow them. However, when the time comes for me to slow down and retire, one thing I will do is spend a couple of weeks in Japan learning from the masters.
When I was researching retirement for my father-in-law, I came to see that there are three pillars you need to ensure are built into any plans you may have.
The first is mental. This does not mean mental health as it is discussed today; it is about learning.
Learning something new.
That could be a foreign language, art history, or how to train racehorses. It doesn’t matter so much what you learn; it is about learning something challenging. Something to get your brain around. Something that will make you think.
The dangers today are AI and the loss of critical thinking. In retirement, you do not want to lose the ability to think critically.
Go out and buy the textbooks, enrol in courses, listen to podcasts and do the hard work of learning. Keep your brain active.
It’s this that will keep you sharp and cognitive. As the saying goes, “if you don’t use it, you lose it.”
The second pillar is physical. After we reach 30, we start to lose muscle mass. Again, it’s the “if you don’t use it, you lose it” problem.
Unfortunately, for most of us, around thirty, we get chained to a desk and a computer, and we use our arms to help us get out of a chair. We stop using most of our muscles.
This weakens our strength, and it is gradual. Hardly noticeable. So we don’t see the damage we are doing to ourselves.
When we reach our mid-fifties, that muscle loss accelerates. We can lose as much as 10% of our muscle mass over five years. It’s scary.
The consequence of this is that the risk of falling rises, and one of the biggest killers of older Adults is the complications of dealing with the injuries caused by falling. Broken hips, legs and shoulders. Not at all nice.
By adding in a daily exercise session that focuses on your core strength—stomach, legs and ankles, and doing some cardio such as walking up hills to the point where you become out of breath, is all you need.
Thirty minutes a day. That’s it.
If you add in some stretching exercises later in the day, you are building a natural defence against one of the biggest underlying killers among older people.
Your muscles are your natural defence against many lifestyle-related diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and gout! Yes, gout is making a comeback. A disease prevalent in the 16th and 17th centuries is making a comeback because of how we live today.
Build in some exercise every day.
If you want a simple exercise programme, the one that the late Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, used every day from his time in the Royal Navy, then look up the 5BX. Look for the original Royal Canadian Air Force instructional video on YouTube. It’s brilliant and very quaint.
If you want to know how effective this exercise programme is, look at Prince Philip at his final public engagement. He was 97 years old then, and you can see from the way he walked just how fit he was.
The final pillar is social.
When we are at work, there is a natural connection with our coworkers. There’s a camaraderie and a social aspect to working with other people.
We may not like our coworkers, but there’s still the connection.
When we retire, that disappears, and it’s important to replace it with new connections.
However, there’s a danger here. It can be tempting to replace all those meetings on our work calendars with volunteer work in retirement. Don’t do this.
Go back to asking yourself what you want to do. Hopefully, what you want to do excites you. If you are replacing those work connections with volunteer work you do not find interesting, you will soon find yourself swamped.
Not what retirement is all about.
Be very strict about what you will get involved in. Be clear about what you want out of this chapter of your life.
Perhaps some of the hobbies you try will bring with them exciting connections. Imagine how many new people Harvey Smith has met through horse racing.
But do not rush into it. Take your time. This period of your life is about you and what you want from it.
If you are worried about retirement, or are retired and have found yourself overwhelmed by all the activities you have embarked on, I have just launched a brand-new programme to help you.
Ever since I started writing about time management and productivity ten years ago, I have had many people ask me to put together something for retirees.
It was my conversation with my father-in-law last year that started my research. And that research uncovered some of the most inspiring stories of people I have come across.
There was Jack Weber, a retired dentist who wrote a memoir of his life and published it on Amazon at the age of 100.
And then there was the gentleman who inspired me when I was fifteen years old.
I was a competitive track and field athlete back then, and this gentleman was in his 80s. He would be one of the first people to turn up to training every Tuesday and Thursday evening.
When he was younger, he was a sprinter. Now, in his 80s, he ran marathons. Although he was in his 80s, he looked about 65.
I remember saying to myself that when I am 80, I want to be doing that. And that has been and still is a huge motivation for me. I’ve never stopped running and exercising for an extended period. I have tried to keep myself reasonably fit throughout my working life so that when I do finally retire, I will have the strength to run those marathons.
Watch out, London, New York, Tokyo and Paris. I’m going to be running your streets in twenty-five years’ time!
If you are interested in this programme, I will put the details in the show notes. This programme will teach you about the three pillars, the pitfalls to avoid, and how to manage your calendar so you are not overwhelming yourself.
In addition, by joining, you get free access to a community of like-minded people where you can share your experiences and learn from others who are enjoying this fantastic chapter of your life.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Have you ever wondered how those in highly demanding jobs that require almost 24/7 attention to the job manage to do it? Well, I’ve been researching and found a few common habits that may help you get more out of your day.
Let’s begin…
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Script | 410
Hello, and welcome to episode 410 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
It seems everyone feels under pressure with increasing workloads and demands on their time. And research is backing this up.
Instead of reducing the workloads of the typical knowledge worker, AI is increasing it. In one study published last month in the Harvard Business Review, 83% of knowledge workers reported an increase in their workloads after adopting AI tools.
Yet even in the age before AI, smartphones, and desktop computers, there were jobs that required an intensity few people could or would endure for very long.
For example, if you were to look at the daily schedules of Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, you would see an official workday beginning around 6:30 am and ending well after 7:00 pm, 7 days a week.
Just look at pictures of President Carter on his inauguration day and compare them to pictures of him on President Reagan’s inauguration day; you can see the toll the presidency had on Carter. It seemed to have aged him 20 years, and yet it was only four.
If we were to look at President Obama’s schedule. While he did not typically start work until around 9:00 am, he would work well into the night, catching up on briefing documents and other background reading. In total, he was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week.
Yet each of these leaders used techniques that helped maintain some calm amid otherwise chaotic days. They were well-tested, proven techniques that so many people seem afraid to use today.
This week’s question is about these techniques and how you might adopt some of them to manage your workload while still having time for rest and family.
Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Aaron. Aaron asks. Hi Carl, what advice would you give to someone who cannot get on top of their work, no matter how many “time blocks” they put on their calendar?
Hi Aaron, thank you for your question.
Now, you didn’t specify what kind of work you do, but I can answer based on what I’ve learned from former world leaders and CEOs and how they managed their days when facing global challenges.
I know not all of us are running a major country, but lessons from people like Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy and Ford may help you see that there are ways to take control of your time, do the things you want to do, and get a lot done.
The first approach almost all highly effective people do is to protect time for quiet work. This might not necessarily be deep focused work; it could be reading reports or, in the case of presidents and prime ministers, briefing documents prepared for them by their staff.
Of the people I have read about and studied, all of them protected some time during the day. Mostly, this was early in the morning or late at night.
John F Kennedy, for instance, would read the newspapers at 6:30 am, before he met anyone in his office. This gave him a heads-up on emerging world events and often meant he knew more about a subject than any of his aides did.
One interesting note about Kennedy and his brother, Bobby, was that they both took a speed-reading course when they were younger, and it is reported that John Kennedy could read 1,200 words in one minute.
Imagine that. That’s going to save you a lot of time. That’s being able to read one of my longer blog posts in a single minute!
As a side note, it is reported that Theodore Roosevelt would read a book a day, sometimes two, as well as all his briefing documents.
Now, I suspect that in the early to mid 20th century, with no computers, people read far more than we do today. If you are reading thousands of words a day, you’re naturally going to become a faster reader.
Presidents Nixon, Kennedy and Johnson would read briefing documents late into the night. In the case of Presidents Johnson and Nixon, this was often until 2:00 am in the morning.
President Obama also read late into the evening, from around 8:30 pm, after spending some time with his family, he would go to a quiet room and read until midnight or 1 am.
The advantage of doing their reading late at night was that they were unlikely to be disturbed, and it was quiet.
One thing you could do is set aside time somewhere in your day for undisturbed quiet work. Whether that is reading, working on a project or simply replying to your emails and messages.
Just this one change in your day will relieve some of the pressure you may be feeling. It will give you time to work on the non-urgent things that, if you ignore, will soon become urgent and add to the stress and anxiety that working reactively inevitably causes.
Now let’s talk about structuring your day.
This is something that, if you’re not doing, you’ll find yourself getting pulled all over the place with no chance of getting on with anything important.
Structuring your day means planning out what you will do and when. When will you do your most important tasks of the day? When and where are your meetings? When will you take time to rest and relax with your family?
If you begin any day not knowing this, your day will run away with you.
Again, let me give you an example of a US president.
Jimmy Carter would disappear into the living quarters of the While House at precisely 6:30 pm every evening to have dinner with his family.
No matter what was going on in the world. Whether it was a Middle Eastern oil crisis, spiralling inflation or some other world crisis (sound familiar?), Carter would never miss his family’s dinner hour. It was sacred.
During that time, nobody from his office was allowed to interrupt him, no matter what was going on in the world. That could wait an hour. Spending some quality time with his family could not. His daughter was young at that time, and she would go to bed around 8 or 9 pm.
Could you do that? Could you “disappear between 12 pm and 1 pm, cut off from the outside world; no phone or computer for one hour, so you could stop and enjoy lunch with your family or friends?
It’s easy to believe that we have to be “available” all the time. No, you do not.
Not even the leader of the Western world needed to be available every hour and minute of the day.
You’re not dealing with a world crisis where people’s lives are at stake. You’re likely dealing with more mundane issues, like a customer who is frustrated because their ordered electric window motor hasn’t arrived as promised. Or a boss who suddenly becomes agitated because sales dropped 12% last month.
Gee whizz! What can you do right now? Probably nothing. You’re not going to be able to miraculously produce an electric window motor in a few seconds, nor can you change last month’s sales figures.
These things can wait an hour or two. They really can!
This is why, when I get clients to do the “perfect week” exercise, I ask them to do their personal life first. This is the one area most people will sacrifice for their work.
When will you spend time with your family? When will you exercise? When will you spend time on your hobby?
These should be your non-negotiables every day.
President Eisenhower would stop work at 3:30 pm every day to spend an hour or two practising his golf on the White House putting green.
President Johnson would go for his daily swim at 2:00 pm every day.
And Gerald Ford would start his day with an hour on his custom-built static bicycle and finish off with 50 push-ups. Every day!
It did not matter what was going on in the world; these presidents knew that exercise was important for them to function, and they made sure they were clear-headed enough to make the right decisions on some of the world’s biggest and most urgent problems.
Your customer’s missing electric window motor or your boss fretting about a 12% drop in sales is nothing compared to what these presidents had to deal with every day.
Make sure that what is important to you is prioritised, time protected and non-negotiable.
Urgent events will pass, and your being unavailable for an hour or two is not going to significantly affect the result one way or the other.
Another part of all these presidents’ days was taken straight out of Winston Churchill’s daily routine.
The daily nap.
When you are tired, stressed, anxious, and worn down by the constant noise and decision-making, you will no longer be able to make good, rational decisions. It’s as if your brain tightens up and can no longer access your creative thinking.
Winston Churchill discovered this while serving in the army in India in the early 1900s. India is very hot during the day, and it was customary among the officer class to take naps during the warmest part of the day.
Churchill discovered that by taking a proper nap mid to late afternoon, you could do high-quality work well into the evening. And so, when he returned to the UK, he continued to take naps.
As Churchill said, "Nature has not intended mankind to work from eight in the morning until midnight without that refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts twenty minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.”
Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Carter all took daily naps. Ranging from 30 to 60 minutes. It was their way of shutting out the noise of presidential work and giving their brains time to re-energise and refresh.
I remember when I first came to Korea and discovered that many of the office workers I was teaching were working 18-hour days and surviving on only 3 to 4 hours of sleep.
I asked them how they managed to do that six days a week, and they replied that they took a nap when they returned from lunch.
Korean office workers are legendary for eating a full lunch in less than fifteen minutes. That left them with forty-five minutes to an hour for a nap.
Not so common today, working hours in Korea have reduced over the last ten years or so, but back in the early 2000s, work hours here were gruelling.
So there you go, Aaron. There are ways of managing our workloads. It may mean you need to consider redesigning your work hours. The 9-to-5 concept is a relatively recent one. Before the 1980s, people in positions of authority would take longer lunches, and these were often social; and they would do much of their focused work either early in the morning or late at night (Tim Cook still does this)
But whatever you do, put your life first. Work is fleeting. Yes, it’s a part of your life and an important one, but it is only a part of your life. Your personal life matters too.
Put your family and friends and health, both physical and mental, first. Then decide how you will structure your days so that the important things get done.
I hope that has helped. And don’t forget that my Spring sale ends on Tuesday, 31 March (two days left). If you want to pick up my recent Time-Based Productivity course (which includes free access to the Time Sector System course) for just $99.00, you have about 48 hours left to get it.
Plus, you can save $50 on my 2-session coaching programme. A great way for me to help you personally get control of your system so you are more focused and clear-headed about what needs to be done and when.
I will put all the details in the show notes.
Thank you, Aaron, for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Email, Teams, Slack and other instant messaging systems are great, until they clog up our day and we find we spend more time responding to messages than we do doing any meaningful work.
What can we do? Well, that’s what I’m answering in this week’s episode.
Links:
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The Hybrid Productivity Course
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Script | 409
Hello, and welcome to episode 409 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Last week was a workshop week for me. I finished off the Ultimate Productivity Workshop and held an in-company session.
During both sessions, a similar question was raised. How to manage your time when you are compelled to respond to your messages instantly or at the very least within a few minutes.
The problem with this situation is that it’s an uncontrollable one. You have no idea when or how many messages will come in on any given day. This makes it practically impossible to do any work.
You will not be able to focus on anything if you have to be checking your messages inbox all the time.
Now, I should caveat this: if you are employed to respond to client messages, then being responsive is part of your core work, and therefore it is something you would prioritise.
However, in these situations, you’ll likely be working as part of a team, and most of your client queries will be handled in real time. Those that cannot be dealt with would be escalated to another person or department.
The issue of response times arises when you are expected to do work that requires quiet, focused time to complete. In this situation, you will need to find time during the day to do that work. If not, all you will be doing is building unsustainable backlogs.
To get to a place where you can complete your work and respond to messages in a timely manner, something will have to change.
The first thing I would address here is response times. What is the expected response time for the work that you do? Is it realistic?
Now, you have the data. You know how much time you need to do your work. Perhaps you need two hours a day to complete it. This means you have a degree of flexibility each day.
In this situation, I would recommend you look at the times when most of your messages come in.
For me, most of my messages come in through the night. I may go to bed around midnight with an empty inbox, but when I wake up, come through to the office and open my email, there will be between 100 and 150 emails sitting there waiting for me.
The first step is to clear those emails and sort the ones I need to act on from the ones that can be deleted or archived. That gives me a heads-up for my day and calms my anxious mind, knowing there are no fires to deal with.
Later in the day, I will set aside 40 to 60 minutes to clear the actionable emails.
Now, I am fortunate in that when I wake up, Europe is asleep, the east coast of the US is going to bed, and the west coast is finishing the working day. In the morning, there is no rush for me to respond.
If I were living in the UK, I would adjust my response time to better align with the time zones I work with.
This is working with the data I have.
But let me illustrate a different type of work and how to deal with it.
Imagine you were responsible for writing proposals for your sales team. On a typical day, you would receive six to eight new proposals and four or five adjustments to make to proposals you have already done.
If it takes you an average of twenty minutes to write a new proposal and ten minutes to make an adjustment, that will take up around four hours of your day just focused on writing proposals.
That does not take into account having to request any further information you may need to complete a proposal.
Now here’s where things get interesting. Not all proposals are equal. If you were asked to write proposals for a $10 million project and a $1,000 one, the $10 million project would likely take priority.
I’m also pretty sure the person asking for the $10 million project proposal will be chasing you to get it done faster.
If you already have a two-day turnaround on proposals, moving that project up would delay one of the other proposals. What do you do?
The problem here is that while you are fielding messages from the people wanting their proposal done today, you are not writing proposals. Everything is getting delayed.
Now, I’ve worked at companies with strict processes for these situations. Salespeople had to follow the process and inform their customers when to expect proposals or invoices. They were not allowed to contact the sales admin team to chase proposals unless they were overdue.
I’ve also worked in companies where there were no such processes. In those companies, nothing ever seemed to get done on time.
There needs to be time for things to get done, and in order to ensure they do get done on time, a process should be put in place.
For example, if your proposal turnaround is within 24 hours, then there needs to be a cutoff time. If you want your proposal done by tomorrow at 4:00 pm, it needs to be in by 4:30 pm today.
This puts the responsibility onto the person asking for the proposal. If they do not get the proposal in on time, the delay will be entirely their own problem.
When you do not have these processes in place, you risk running into a company that plays the blame game.
I remember working for an English Language training company here in Korea, and I wanted to launch a new Business English Programme in August.
We had a meeting at the head office and the CEO told me that if we wanted to launch on 1st August, then I would need to get the curriculum and artwork to the marketing team by the 15th June.
Brilliant! As long as we got the necessary work over to the Marketing Department by 15th June, then the responsibility for the marketing was on the marketing team.
They delivered, and we had a fantastic launch. From my perspective, handing over the materials to the marketing team before the 15th took a huge weight off my shoulders.
It was a superb team where both parties respected each other’s boundaries and, more importantly, timelines. Everyone involved knew each other’s deadlines, and these were respected.
Another way to deal with communications is to set some rules. A sort of “if this then that” rule.
For example, I have a rule that any message relating to lost passwords or money, I will deal with the moment I see it.
Fortunately, I do not get many of these, but I do get around three or four a month. When I see them, I act on them immediately. They don’t take long to deal with, but I know how frustrating it is to wait a long time to access a course or get a refund.
Another rule I have is that if I get a student question, I will respond within 24 hours.
With AI, it can be tempting to set up an AI system to respond to these for me, but I have a red line I will not cross. That is, I will personally respond to all questions within 24 hours and never farm them out to a chatbot.
That goes to my professional integrity. I would feel awful knowing that I am not communicating directly with my students. It would feel like I am cheating.
However, by far the most effective way to deal with the interruptions messages can cause, whether they are emails or messages, is to set your own communication response times.
For example, mine are:
Email within 24 hours, instant messages (Teams, Slack, etc.) within four hours and phone calls within an hour if I cannot answer immediately.
Those response times have worked for over ten years now. I’ve never received any pushback, and most of the time I get a “thank you for your quick response”,—which suggests people are really back at responding to emails.
If you do decide to set your own response times, communicate them with your colleagues and customers. This way, you can be held accountable for your standards. That’s a great motivator.
Let’s get back to checking messages.
If you do need time to do work that requires your focus, then, when you are doing that work, you do not check your messages. Period.
Turn off notifications when you are doing that work, close down your email, Teams or Slack and any other messaging system.
Your phone can be set up to allow only a vetted number of people through. For instance, when I put my phone or computer on “focus time”, only my wife and mother can get through. Only my mother or my wife would call me with a genuine emergency.
Most people can only do real focused work for around ninety minutes. At that point, you can check your messages.
According to neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, we work in 90-minute cycles. (We also sleep in 90-minute cycles). This means our brain begins to run low on energy after we have been intently focused on something for more than 90 minutes, and we need to change our focus.
I use this time to quickly check my messages and do some chores. Most of the time, I process my inbox, then respond to my team’s messages on my phone while I am doing the chores.
The reality is you cannot be constantly checking your messages and doing meaningful work at the same time. Something has to give.
If you are in a position where others cannot do their work until you have authorised it, you are the bottleneck, and that needs to change.
Working in a law office, we needed to get cheques signed by a partner in the firm. Normally, I would go to the partner in charge of my department, but if he were away or in a meeting, I would need to go to another floor and ask another partner to sign it. My boss knew there was a risk that he could be a bottleneck and took steps to prevent others from doing their work.
I know I have given you a lot of ideas in this episode. What I would suggest is that if interruptions from messages are causing you problems, look at where the main problem is.
If it’s because you feel you must respond instantly to messages from certain people (your boss or customers), that may indicate you need to have a conversation with them to set some boundaries.
I know that conversation may be uncomfortable, but not being able to do your work to the high standard you want is a much bigger problem. That’s going to affect your promotion chances, and eventually, you will start to believe that there’s something wrong with you.
There’s nothing wrong with you. All it requires is some processes and a boundary you can work within. Surely that’s not much to ask of anyone.
Thank you for listening, and thank you to all of you who have asked questions about this subject.
If you want a system that will help you to regain control of your emails and messages, then my Email Mastery course will show you how to build it. I will include the course details in the show notes for you.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
"The key is not to prioritise what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities."
Ah, Stephen Covey got it right. If you don’t know what your priorities are, whatever’s on your calendar will be prioritised, which often means low-value meetings and other people’s urgencies. Not a great way to work if you want to be more productive and better at managing your time.
This week, we’re looking at identifying your core work and eliminating the non-essential.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Hybrid Productivity Course
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Subscribe to my Substack
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 408
Hello, and welcome to episode 408 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Something that came up in last weekend’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop was around identifying your core work. The work you are employed to do or what you do to put food on your table.
In the past, this was easy to do. Job descriptions were simple, and job titles included things like salesperson, accountant, lawyer, administrator, receptionist, lifeguard, and office manager. It was very clear what your responsibilities were, and defining your core work was simple.
Today, hmmm, something’s gone disastrously wrong. Now we have job titles such as Empathy Engineer (a software designer), Scrum Master (a project manager of sorts from the twenty-teens Agile trend) or Digital Overlord (a website or systems manager). These are unclear and ill-defined, and figuring out what these jobs entail is challenging, to say the least, but not impossible with some thought.
Then there are jobs such as the “C” roles: CEO, CFO, COO, etc. These are notoriously difficult to define because they are intentionally vague and depend on the company’s size, its goals and often the state of the company when a person starts the role.
When Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, he took over a company on the up. When Satya Nadalla took over Microsoft, Microsoft was struggling in the rapidly growing mobile market. Same job titles, but entirely different roles given the state each company was in when they took over.
In today’s episode, we’re looking at core work and, more importantly, how to define your role so you can pull out the tasks you need to do consistently to perform well and make it easier to prioritise the things important to you.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Chris. Chris asks, hi Carl, I am really struggling to define my core work. I am a sales manager in a medium-sized car dealership. I manage a team of 12 salespeople, and I report directly to the General Manager. The part I am struggling with is what my tasks should be each week. Could you help?
Hi Chris, thank you for your question.
For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of core work, your core work is the work you are employed to do. It’s how you are evaluated and the reason you were employed.
The issue with core work is that over time, the scope of your work can expand to a point where you have so many competing priorities that it becomes practically impossible to decide what needs your attention. And that’s when backlogs of important work start to grow uncontrollably.
This can be caused by our innate human need to please people, so we say “yes” to too many things without considering whether we have the time to do the work we ‘volunteered’ to do.
The problem here is that once you have said yes to the work outside your core work, you own it. It is now your responsibility to get the job done. Do this too often, and the line between what you are responsible for and what you volunteered to do becomes blurred.
A few years ago, I worked with a client who was a product manager in a pharmaceutical company. Her core work was to ensure that her product’s labelling, literature, and local branding were accurate and up to date. She was also responsible for three sales campaigns each year.
Unfortunately, Sam was a people pleaser. She couldn’t say no to anyone. She volunteered to be on the Annual kick-off event committee (each year the company had an off-site retreat to motivate the team for the new year), she volunteered to be the lead of a breast cancer awareness campaign her company wanted to run, and if a sales manager asked her to do a presentation to their sales people, she’d always say yes.
But her people pleasing was not confined to her professional life. She volunteered to help organise events at her church, committed to watching her husband play football every weekend and would help her friends out at the drop of a hat.
When I began working with Sam, she was a mess. Her weight had ballooned because she had no time for any physical movement or to watch what she ate; she wasn’t able to sleep properly, and she was suffering quite badly from eczema, brought on by stress and a lack of sleep.
The first thing I did was get Sam to write down her original core work. I remember her having to pull out her job description to remind her what that was.
When she looked at it, she began to cry. She confessed that what she did at work was nothing like what was written on those sheets of paper.
So that’s where we started.
I also got her to talk to her boss about stepping down from all the volunteer roles she’d accepted so she could focus on the work she was employed to do.
Her boss was brilliant. She helped Sam remove herself from the volunteer roles so she could focus on what mattered.
Within six months, Sam’s product was the top-selling product in the company. She’d lost 20 pounds in weight, she was sleeping well, and her eczema had all but disappeared.
She was focused on what mattered and did that brilliantly. So much so that she was promoted after a further year.
I tell that story because it demonstrates why defining your core work is so important. If you are not clear about what you are employed to do, in an effort to look busy and not upset anyone, you will keep accepting more and more roles outside the scope of the job you were employed to do.
This does not mean that you should never accept voluntary roles or help out your colleagues from time to time. It means you should never lose sight of what you are employed to do. And to do that, you first need to identify what it is, then take it to the next level.
That level identifies what doing your core work looks like at the task level. In other words, what do you actually do to perform your core work?
So, returning to your role, Chris, as a sales manager, a part of your role will be to support your sales team. What does that look like at a doing level?
Does that mean you need to schedule weekly one-to-ones with your team? Maybe you are also responsible for ensuring that the sales data is correct and up to date.
Scheduling weekly one-to-ones is relatively straightforward. You may choose to dedicate a day to doing this, so your focus is on supporting your team and, in doing so, removing a weekly decision.
For example, if you choose to hold your meetings on Mondays, you can block your calendar on those days and get them all done in one day.
Maintaining your sales admin may involve 30 minutes a day of updating your company’s internal reporting system. If so, when will you do that?
You may also be responsible for the training of your team. I know many managers are. If so, what does that involve, and what do you need to do personally to ensure it happens?
So what you are doing is looking at the type of work you do and then asking yourself what that looks like at a doing level.
Many medical doctors I speak with tell me their work is more than just seeing patients. Some of their additional roles include renewing prescriptions, completing insurance claims, and sorting out referrals to specialists.
This means being a general practitioner is not as simple as walking into their clinic, going to their office and examining patients all day. They need to find time to do the additional work, which is often an extra 2 hours or more each day.
Once you have identified your core work and pulled out what that looks like at the task level, the next step is to calculate how much time you will need to complete those tasks each week.
In theory, this is easy. After all, if you have done something before, you should be able to figure out how long it will take you to do the same task in the future.
Hahaha, not so easy. We are not machines, and some days we are not at our best. We might be tired, distracted or feeling ill.
And those distractions may not even be of our own choosing. Other people interrupt you, ask you questions, or you are prevented from doing one of your critical tasks because a colleague has not given you the information you need.
I remember talking with a gentleman who ran a car servicing business, and he told me that the biggest issue he had each day was something called “back orders”. This is where a part for a customer’s car was out of stock and on order.
Nobody knew when the part would be back in stock, so they could not tell the customer when to bring their car in for the repair, or, worse, the customer could not come in to pick up their repaired car.
In these situations, all you can do is work on the averages.
I’ve been writing a weekly blog post of around 1,000 words each week for over ten years. You would have thought I would know how long writing a blog post would take by now, after doing it over 500 times. Not a chance.
Some weeks it can take me forty minutes; other weeks, as much as two hours, to write the first draft.
It’s the same for these podcasts. This week’s episode is number 408, which means I’ve written 407 scripts, and yet some weeks it takes two hours; others, four. And the worst thing is, I have no idea when I sit down to write the script how long it will take.
In these situations, all you can do is work on averages. I allow two hours for writing these scripts. Most weeks, I can do it in that time; other weeks, I need to find additional time later in the week to finish them.
Same with my blog posts. I have two hours each week protected for writing the posts. Most weeks, I finish well within that time; other weeks, I need the whole time.
I’m working on averages, which ensures the bulk of what needs to be done gets done every week.
And this brings us to the main reason for identifying your core work:
Once you know what your core work is and what you need to do at a task level, you know how much time you need to protect for this work each week. That information alone will tell you how many meetings and voluntary work you can accept each week.
Not knowing what your core work looks like at a task level risks putting yourself in Sam’s shoes. And if Sam were here with me, I know she’d be telling you never to let that happen to you. It destroys your health and leaves you feeling rotten every day.
There you go, Chris. Thank you for your question, and thank you to all of you who attended the Ultimate Productivity Workshop over the last two weeks. It’s always a joy to help you, and it helps me see where you are struggling with productivity and time management.
Thank you for listening, and it’s time for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
“By far, the greatest danger of AI is that people conclude too early that they understand it” —Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI researcher
AI is everywhere today, and there are many exciting claims about what it can do to help us be more productive. But, is this just hype, or are there aspects of AI that can improve our productivity?
That’s the question I am answering today.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Hybrid Productivity Course
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Subscribe to my Substack
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 407
Hello, and welcome to episode 407 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
You may have noticed AI is everywhere. Our favourite apps seem to be adding more and more AI capability with each new update. And then there’s almost every video and article on productivity warning us that if we don’t get on board with this, we’ll be left behind on the scrap heap.
It’s also an exciting time, and there’s no doubt that things are changing, and people are finding new ways to use AI to help us do our work.
But beyond the hype, how are current AI models really helping with productivity, and what will this mean for us as we try to manage our time in the future?
That’s what I am looking at this week, and to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Chris. Chris asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI in your videos or articles. How do you see AI helping us with our time management and productivity in the future?
Hi Chris, thank you for your question.
The reason I have not written or spoken much about AI is that I am waiting to see where it settles down.
Currently, it’s hard to work out what is true and what is pure hype. I saw a lot of noise about OpenClaw—an AI-type personal assistant that, if you give it access to your computer, can do a lot of things, such as make appointments for you, book flights, sort and reply to your emails and much more.
That was certainly interesting, but once I discovered that I would need to hand over all my passwords and credit card numbers to OpenClaw, I lost interest.
Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not comfortable giving up my passwords, credit card and banking details to a third party. Certainly not one that could be hacked very easily.
Last year, I read Dominic Sandbrook’s series of books on British history from 1956 to 1982. That period covered some very interesting developments in technology, from the dawn of the nuclear power age to the introduction of the personal computer.
In the late 1950s, it was predicted that we would all be driving around in nuclear-powered cars and that our homes would have their own nuclear power generators that would only need recharging every 10 to 20 years by the end of the century.
Hmm how did that work out?
To better answer your question, Chris, I stepped back and looked at how I am using AI today.
My main use of AI is searching for specific information. In a way, AI has replaced how I search the internet. I use Google’s Gemini, and it is fantastic at collecting the information I want.
No longer do I have to open multiple websites to try to find the information. This has significantly reduced the time I spend going down rabbit holes looking for something specific and being pulled down holes I never intended to go.
I also use AI to generate subtitles and timestamps for my YouTube videos. Without AI, these jobs would take hours. AI can do it in minutes.
I use Grammarly to spell-check my writing, and I believe it uses AI in the background to suggest how sentences are written.
I rarely accept Grammarly’s sentence suggestions. It seems to destroy my voice and turn sentences into bland perfections that lack resonance or feeling.
Beyond that, I am not knowingly using AI for anything else.
I asked my wife how she is using it. My wife’s a full-time student, studying physical therapy, so she’s learning a lot about human anatomy and medical terms.
She’s using AI to simplify complex concepts. She also occasionally uses Google’s Nano Banana to generate graphics for her presentations.
So, if I look at how AI might help us with time management and productivity in the future, it does look like there will be some aspects of our work that AI can significantly speed up. In my case, generating subtitles and time stamps for videos is a great example.
However, when it comes to managing our calendars and task lists, I’m not sure you would want AI getting involved.
One thing I’ve always been acutely aware of is that much of what makes us feel overwhelmed is the sense that we have no control over how we spend our time.
We have calendars full of meetings, and sometimes we find ourselves double and even triple-booked. And then we have long lists of to-dos in our task managers with no sense of when or even how we will ever get that work done.
At best, AI may be able to break down those tasks into what it thinks are manageable chunks, but that won’t take into consideration how you are feeling physically, whether you slept well last night or had a rather heavy lunch with an important customer.
AI can certainly suggest ways to manage your tasks and calendar, but you will still need to show up to those meetings and do that work.
Yet that will inevitably leave you feeling less in control of your time. Particularly if you use one of those AI-enabled calendars that suggest when you should be doing something.
What happens if you disagree with the suggestion, or you cannot make it? You feel guilty, or you start to think something is wrong with you.
Yet, there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re human, and you are going to feel tired sometimes or not in the mood to do that type of work.
The one area I would say you want to avoid AI getting involved in is how you manage your time. That should always be your responsibility and choice.
The idea that a computer tells you what to do and where to be is scary. Deciding what you do right now is what makes you human. You’ve chosen to listen to this podcast at this time. AI would likely tell you that, rather than listening to this podcast, you should be finishing that report you’ve been trying to finish all week.
I also read about the excitement over the idea that AI could reply to your emails for you. Hmm, for me, that is a red line I will not cross.
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe that if someone has taken the time to write to me, I have an obligation to reply personally. That is just basic integrity.
Now, it is true I don’t reply to all emails. I don’t respond to spam emails; for example, I simply delete them if they get through. How hard is that?
I’m fortunate that I’m old enough to remember several technological advancements. It started with the Internet, then email, the smartphone and cloud computing.
I cannot remember a technology being forced upon us, but it feels like AI is being forced on us, whether we like it or not.
And then there are the frightening ads that claim if you are not on board with using AI, you will be left on the career scrap heap by the end of the year. Nobody needed to do that with smartphones or email.
Companies, focused on making the technology user-friendly in such a way that we all wanted to adopt it eventually. The fear-mongering I see around AI makes me deeply suspicious of it. Why do they need to do that?
Perhaps that question is for people better qualified than I am.
Anyway, AI is here, and it’s not going to go away.
Where I think AI will be a huge help to us is in repetitive, mundane work. I mentioned that I use AI to create subtitles and timestamps for my YouTube videos. That’s been a huge time saver for me.
But if you follow my email processing system, you will find that you are faster than AI. I can clear 80 emails in my inbox in less than 10 minutes. It’s also important that I do this, as I want to get a heads-up on my day. To know if there are any emergencies, what I want to read later and what I can delete.
What AI would do is categorise your emails between what it thinks is important and what is not. Trust me, you will do a far better Job of that than AI will.
The problem here is that you will not trust AI 100%, so you will still go through the emails it thinks are not important, just to check that it got it right.
And that’s a big problem with AI today, although I accept that in time this may change; people don’t trust it, which is a good thing, as AI can hallucinate and give you incorrect information. This means you spend time coming up with the right prompt, get the answer, and then have to check that it’s correct.
The question then is: did it really save you time?
I am monitoring AI carefully. I know that in time, it will bring us some productivity benefits, new technologies always do. But there are a few areas where I won’t use AI personally.
Writing emails and answering user comments. That’s a personal integrity thing to me. Your principles should tell you that.
Managing my calendar. That’s another personal thing, and giving control to any outside influence would always be problematic at a human level.
Creating content. If you’ve read an AI-generated blog post or watched an AI-created YouTube video, you can tell. Large Language Models will always default to the average, not just in the content, but in the words used. It’s horrible, and nothing unique will ever come from it.
And finally, deciding what I will do at a task level and when. That’s another one that, as a human, I will retain control. I had scheduled to write this podcast script at 11:30 today, but I had a cancellation at 8:00 am, so I switched things around.
I could have gone back to bed, but I felt great, so I decided to get on with this podcast script. My choice, made in the moment.
Thank you, Chris, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Steve Jobs once said, “Deciding what NOT to do is as important as deciding what TO do”, and that quote has been, and still is, a cornerstone of my whole time management and productivity philosophy.
Today, I answer a question about dealing with all the little things that pop up each day while staying focused on what is important.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Ultimate Productivity Workshop
The Hybrid Productivity Course
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Subscribe to my Substack
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 406
Hello, and welcome to the real episode 406 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. (Apologies for the incorrect numbering last week) A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
What happens when your productivity system collapses? Do you go looking for new apps, or do you give up and just think you’re not the organised type or lack self-discipline?
People react in many different ways when their systems become backlogged and overwhelmed, yet this is a state that will happen to all of us from time to time.
Life has a bad habit of getting in the way. It throws up all sorts of problems to test us. No one week or even a day will ever be the same.
Only five minutes ago, my plan to take Louis out for our walk at 2:00 pm was changed by my wife asking if we could go at 12:30. That way, I could pick her up from her dance class and then go to the reservoir for his walk.
And that was a small change.
These little things are hitting us every day and disrupting our systems, yet that doesn’t mean our systems are broken. It just means we need to ensure that we have sufficient buffer and flexibility built in.
This week’s question is all about what to do when, for whatever reason, your system begins to collapse, and you have backlogs of work, emails, messages and commitments, and you have no idea how to regain control.
Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, just a heads up to say if you are considering joining next week’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop, there are only seven days left before the first session.
The workbook will be going out next week, and I would love for you to join me. This is your opportunity to get to grips with the COD and Time Sector Systems, where you can ask questions and come away with not only the knowledge, but with a rock solid system that is flexible, automatic and leaves you with enough time for the things you want to do.
PLUS, you also get, for free, four of my courses to help you go deeper in your own time.
I will put the details in the show notes, and I hope to see you next Sunday.
Now, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Nick. Nick asks, “ Hi Carl, all my professional life I have tried to be organised and focused, but every time I feel I have found the solution, something happens either at work or at home that destroys my plans. How do you suggest someone go about dealing with disruptions all the time?
Great question, Nick, and thank you for sending it in.
Much of what causes us these issues has little to do with our systems. It’s just life getting in the way.
Yet, what we are aiming to do is turn managing our time into a routine. Something we just do.
For instance, I would feel uncomfortable going to bed not knowing what my appointments and important tasks are for the next day. It doesn’t take long—five minutes tops —but most days it’s likely less than two minutes.
This is why I cannot get my head around it when people tell me they are too exhausted to plan the next day. It’s no more than five minutes! You only need to know when and where your appointments are and what your one or two most important tasks are. It takes a minuscule amount of energy to do it.
Those two minutes have a profound effect on my day.
Last night, I went to bed knowing that I had six hours of meetings today and one critical task to do. I knew if I was diligent, I would be able to complete my meetings and that one task.
The fact that my wife has already changed my plan has not caused me to drop the task. My original plan to do it after my morning calls finished has changed. I will now do it when I get back from taking Louis for his walk.
What matters is that when I finish today, I can look back knowing I have what matters done.
This all begins with respecting the basics. Those basics are contained in COD. Collect, Organise and Do.
You need a way to collect everything that comes your way throughout the day. This needs to be something you trust. That could be a task manager or a daybook (a notebook you use to manage your day).
Then, at some point in the day, you process and organise what you collected. That could be the first thing in the morning or the last thing you do before you finish your workday. If you’re doing it every day, you won’t need a lot of time for this part of the process.
If you’re inconsistent with it, you will need more time. This is why I suggested you turn these things into routines—things you just do every day. Like brushing your teeth when you wake up, or washing the dishes before you go to bed.
Finally, the daily planning, where you decide which tasks you must do that day and review your calendar for the next day’s appointments. These steps give you a clear plan for doing the work.
The great thing is that none of these steps takes a lot of time. Perhaps the processing and organising will take about 10 minutes. However, I find that this step is calming. It allows me to ensure I am not trying to do too much or limiting my flexibility.
So, step one, Nick, is to make following the principles of COD a non-negotiable part of your day.
For those of you who have not discovered COD yet, I have a free 45-minute course that walks you through the process and shows you the tools and formulas to build this into your day. I will leave the link in the show notes.
The next consideration is how you are organising your work.
There are some things that need to be done every day. Responding to your actionable messages (email, Slack, Teams, etc.) and any daily admin, for example. Salespeople often need to record their daily activities. Now you could do this once a week or do it daily. I find that doing it daily keeps the time required to a minimum.
Then there are your tasks. Now, some of these may need to be done today or before the end of the week. Others may not be quite as urgent, so you can push them out of sight until next week or even next month.
This is why I recommend you organise your task manager by when you will do something. Anything that needs to be done this week goes into a folder called “this week”. This means you are not being distracted by tasks that don’t need to be done this week, and it helps to keep your task list to a minimum. This prevents your lists from becoming overwhelming.
The other good thing about this approach is that the 40% of the tasks you think you will need to do that never actually need to be done can be deleted during your weekly planning. (That’s one of my favourite parts of doing the weekly planning)
This is the essence of the Time Sector System. It’s not about how much you have to do; we all have far more to do than the time available to do it. It’s about when you will do it.
There are two sides to the time management equation. Time and stuff to do. The time side of the equation is fixed. You cannot change that. There are 24 hours a day and 168 hours a week, and that’s it.
The only variable you have is stuff to do. That’s what the Time Sector System focuses on. Getting you to decide what you will do and when.
I can now give you an update on my changing day.
When I started today, I had three meetings between 8:00 and 11:30 am.
It’s now 10:30 am, as I write this, and my 8:00 am meeting went ahead as usual, but my 9:30 and 10:30 meetings have both cancelled.
When I planned my day yesterday, I accounted for all my meetings going ahead, and I would write this script before taking Louis for his walk. I would start the script between 8:00 am and 9:30 am, and then finish it after all my meetings ended.
I’ve been given 90 minutes back, so this script will be finished before I pick my wife up from her dance class. It also means I can work on an important project this afternoon, which I thought I wouldn’t have much time for.
Some days you win, others you have to fight for. Today’s a win.
On the days you have to fight for it’s important to stand your ground as much as you can. For example, had all my meetings gone ahead as expected today, I would still have had time this afternoon to write this script.
The consequences of not protecting time to write this script would be squeezing my day tomorrow, and I would likely have to work on Saturday just to catch up.
I’ve played that game too often in the past, and it’s not worth it.
It would be tempting to blame my system, but ultimately, my decisions would have caused the problem.
So, as you can see, Nick, life will always get in the way. You can only work with the information in front of you.
But if you are consistent with your daily and weekly planning, you are putting yourself in a position to be clear about what matters each day.
Yet, your daily and weekly planning only works if you are collecting everything that needs to be collected. Appointments are on your calendar, and tasks are in a task manager. That way, you will have all the information you need to plan your days so that the important things get done, and the lower-value ones can be eliminated.
And finally, you can avoid many issues by building buffer time into your calendar. Trying to squeeze in as many meetings as you can without allowing at least 15 minutes between them is storing up problems for you later.
I try to set aside 2 hours for focused work each day and 2 hours of buffer time for the unexpected. I’ve found over the years that on most days, that’s enough to give me the flexibility to deal with whatever comes my way.
So Nick, it comes down to following the principles of COD. Collect everything that needs to be collected. Allow yourself ten to fifteen minutes each day to process and organise what you collected. Decide when you will do the tasks, and use your daily and weekly planning sessions to map out your days so you are getting the right things done at the right time.
I hope that helps.
Now, don’t forget, if you want to learn how to put all this together, have me show you how to manage your calendar and task manager and stay of top of your communications, then my Ultimate Productivity Workshop will do that for you.
And don’t worry if you cannot attend all the sessions (there are only two). Both sessions will be recorded, and the video and audio files will be available shortly after the end of each session.
I hope you can join me. Details for this fantastic workshop are in the show notes.
Thank you, Nick, for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
“If everything’s important, then nothing is important”. You’ve probably heard that many times. Yet, are you guilty of ignoring it?
In today’s episode, I share with you a few ideas on how to best prioritise your days.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin
The Ultimate Productivity Workshop
The Hybrid Productivity Course
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Subscribe to my Substack
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 405
Hello, and welcome to the real episode 405 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. (Apologies for the incorrect numbering last week) A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
How many overdue flagged tasks do you have in your task manager? If you’re like most people, you will have quite a few.
The question is: why are they overdue?
You made a conscious decision that these tasks were important, but then did not do them when you wanted to do them.
This is something I struggled with for years. I would add flags to anything I felt was important, then completely ignore them throughout my day. It wasn’t until I realised I was making a mistake and diminishing the power that flags give me, that I changed my approach.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve seen this coming up in a lot of my coaching sessions, where I notice overdue flagged tasks cluttering things up and becoming a distraction to the user.
The other issue here is that overdue flagged tasks cause an increase in anxiety. You flagged them because they were important or urgent, and now you have a long list of such tasks. Where do you start to get them under control?
Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question, if you’ve been waiting for the 2026 Ultimate Productivity Workshop, then the wait’s over. Coming on the 8th and 15th of March, join me live for a festival of productivity. Featuring the COD foundation, the Time Sector System, and how to get on top of your backlogs and so much more, including the DPS (daily Planning Sequence and the WPM (weekly Planning Matrix).
Places are limited, so get yourself registered today. Full details are in the show notes.
And now it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.
This week’s question comes from Caroline. Caroline asks, “ Hi Carl, I’ve recently cleaned up my Todoist, and as I was doing so, I found a lot of flagged tasks that I had ignored. These are important tasks, and I don’t want to remove the flag. But it’s become so overwhelming. What’s the best way to use flags, in your opinion?
Hi Caroline, thank you for your question.
As a Todoist user, you have many options for your flags. There are technically four flags. P1 (red), P2 (orange), P3 (blue) and P4 (white). The P4 flag isn’t really a flag, since all tasks default to it.
With these flags, there are many ways you can organise them. However, you do need one of them to be your priority flag.
When I say “priority flag,” this is the one you use when a task absolutely must be done on the day it was assigned.
Logically, you would use the P1 red flag for that.
Now, this is where many people go wrong.
It’s very tempting to add a flag to a task long before it is due. The feeling is that if the task is important, it will still be important on the day you plan to do it.
Not true.
Priorities change.
You plan to finish a proposal for your most important client on Thursday, but that morning, your daughter has a serious asthma attack, and you are now in the emergency room of your local hospital. Where’s your priority now?
Okay, I know that example is a little extreme, but those things happen.
Priorities also change throughout the week. That important client may tell you the proposal is on hold for a few months, so there is no urgency. But new priorities will come along, don’t you worry.
This is why adding your flags should be done at a daily planning level.
Now I will caveat that.
There are times when I know something will be the priority for the day. The script for this podcast, for instance, is today’s priority. I knew that when I planned the week, and I flagged it. It doesn’t matter what other things pop up through the week; when it comes to writing this script, it’s the priority for the day.
Your core work will always be a priority. This is why I have people spend time working out what their core work is. After all, your core work is the reason you are employed. If you didn’t do your core work consistently, you would not have a job for very long.
Even retired people need to consider what their core activities will be each day.
I’m reminded of this following a conversation I had with my father-in-law over the weekend. We’ve just had the lunar New Year here in Korea, and my parents-in-law stayed with us over the holiday.
During that time, my father-in-law mentioned he planned to hang up his silicone gun and tiling trowel at the end of the year. He fits bathrooms and was thinking about what he would do when he no longer needs to wake up at 5:00 am each morning.
The first thing I said was that he needs to prioritise exercise. His job ensures he’s getting plenty of exercise. Walking up and down stairs carrying sinks, shower kits and tiles is hard physical work. His job currently ensures he’s getting his exercise.
The moment he stops doing that five days a week, he will need to find a replacement activity to prevent muscle loss.
Losing his muscle mass will lead to him losing his independence very quickly.
We all have priorities that recur. Those tasks can be pre-flagged. They are critical, whether you are working or retired. Having a few tasks already prioritised helps you plan the day, since you can decide whether they will be the priority or not.
Let me explain.
All of us are limited by the same thing each day. Time. It’s the one thing none of us can change. Writing this podcast script takes about 2 to 2.5 hours. That eats a big chunk of my work time each week.
At the same time, we all have to deal with communications, meetings, admin and other day-to-day tasks. I need to include an hour each day for taking Louis for his walk, and next week, he also has a grooming appointment, which will take time out of my week.
Looking at next week’s calendar today, I can see where my appointments are and already guess which tasks will be a priority. When I do my weekly planning, I pre-flag what I think will be the priority for each day, but I am aware that when I do daily planning, I may need to change it. There has to be a degree of flexibility.
It could be that I get an email on Monday asking for a proposal to work with a company and design a workshop for them. That would become a priority for that week.
I would add a task, “Begin work on company workshop”, and schedule it. Yet, I would not flag it then. When the day comes, and I do my daily planning, I then get to see the real landscape of my day.
It could be that I have five hours of meetings that day and two or three pre-planned, prioritised tasks. Now I have to make a decision. What is my REAL priority that day?
If I have promised to get the workshop outline to the client by the end of the week, that will be my red-flagged task that day. I made a promise, and I will deliver on that promise.
Given that I have five hours of meetings and need two hours to put together the outline and proposal, there’s not going to be much time left for anything else that day. I need to re-prioritise my day.
So I add the flag to the workshop’s proposal and decide on what needs to be rescheduled.
It’s likely that, in that given scenario, I would not flag anything else. I know I don’t have time to do much else.
This is why daily and weekly planning complement each other. The weekly plan is about setting yourself objectives. The daily plan is about ensuring you prioritise your day so you work towards meeting those objectives—given the new information, ie, new tasks that will inevitably come in.
Now I know many of you will add a flag to a task because you keep rescheduling it and just do not want to spend the time doing it. The thinking goes that if you flag it, you will do the task. Hmmm, how often does that work?
This is often the reason many flagged tasks become overdue. The only change is that the task now has a flag. Yet you still don’t want to spend the time doing it.
When you use your daily planning time to prioritise your day, you’re using real, up-to-date information to guide you. You can remove flags from tasks you thought were important but are no longer, and add a flag to the tasks that are important that day.
I mentioned that you can pre-prioritise your week by flagging tasks at the weekly planning session. When you do the daily planning, you decide if your priorities have changed and, if so, remove flags or reschedule those tasks.
What I like about this approach is that it feels like your task manager is supporting you rather than the other way around. You retain control over what you will and will not do each day.
This works particularly well if you find yourself behind on something or have a backlog that needs dealing with. When you plan the day, you get to decide what to place on your task list and in what order.
Now, how many flags should you allow each day?
Several years ago, I decided to find out how many tasks I could consistently do each day for a week. I began with fifteen and soon discovered that if I wanted to be consistent, then that number was ten.
This number does not include routine tasks such as cleaning my actionable email, my daily admin tasks and the usual things we all have to do at work each day.
When it came to flagged tasks, I soon discovered that I could consistently do two important tasks a day. When I tried three or more, I frequently was unable to do one of them. I just ran out of time.
And so, my 2+8 Prioritisation Method was born.
This method forces you to realistically prioritise your day. You can choose only two must-do tasks for the day. These are flagged. The remaining eight are not flagged, and you will do what you can to clear that list each day.
This method works because it introduces constraints into your system.
Given that it’s human nature to want to do more than we can realistically do each day, adding this constraint of no more than ten tasks per day ensures you are picking the genuinely important tasks.
No, that interesting YouTube video is not important. You can watch that any time. But renewing your father’s prescription for him is.
Checking your car’s tyre pressures before you head out on a long road trip this afternoon will be a priority over reading that article your colleague sent you.
I have my Todoist set up so I can see my red-flagged tasks each day using a filter. That filter is “today & P1”.
Each morning, before I begin my day, that’s the first place I go. I review my flagged tasks and remove any excess.
This has taught me to become ruthlessly competent at prioritising.
Strangely, this goes back to something I learned in my teenage years. In Hyrum Smith’s Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management, he writes about establishing your governing values. Today. I think of these as my Areas of Focus.
These governing values are the predetermined priorities in your life. Often, family will be at the top of that list. The idea is that your governing values have a natural prioritised list. For example, if your family’s well-being is above your career, if your family needs you to do something, that will be prioritised over your work commitments.
For me, my health and fitness is above my work in my list of areas of focus. This means I will not schedule meetings at 4:30 pm. That’s my exercise time. I will not do any work at that time either. At 4:30 pm, I exercise.
So there you go, Caroline. I hope that has helped. The key is to prioritise your day during your daily planning and use that time to reset your flags so nothing is ever overdue.
And above all, respect your flags. If you know you will not be doing a flagged task on any given day. Either reschedule the task or remove the flag.
Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Podcast 405
"Pen and paper will solve almost anything. Or at least start the process."
- Nicholas Bate
This week, I have a special episode for you about what I have discovered over the last two years from bringing pens and paper back into my productivity system. It’s certainly been an eye-opener for me.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin
The Hybrid Productivity Course
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Subscribe to my Substack
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 405
Hello, and welcome to episode 405 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
A week ago, I launched a brand new course called the Hybrid Productivity Course. The purpose of this course was to help those who have found that a digital-only approach has led to a loss of focus on what’s important and a sense of extreme overwhelm and distraction.
As in most areas of life, a one-size-fits-all methodology rarely works. All humans are unique. We think differently, have different life experiences, grow up differently and experience life through many different cultures.
It stands to reason that none of us will have exactly the same needs as everyone else.
We saw this during the pandemic. Around 50% of people loved working from home. They thrived and became much more productive. The other 50% struggled, found it hard to do their work, and lost their enthusiasm and energy for it.
This highlighted the difference between extroverts and introverts. Extroverts bounce off the energy of other people. They need the bustling office environment to operate. Take that away, and they slump.
Introverts, on the other hand, thrive in the opposite conditions. Quiet spaces and solo environments are where they thrive.
I always struggled in an office environment. I found it difficult to concentrate and focus. When I began working from home in 2015, my productivity went through the roof. I suddenly had the freedom to work when I liked, where I liked and in the quiet solitude of my front living room.
One advantage of an all-digital system is that you can easily add many features to your digital tools without much thought.
I noticed this while testing Todoist’s new feature, Ramble. Ramble lets you have a conversation with Todoist, and it pulls out all the things you indicate need to be done. Sounds great in theory, until you test it out.
Just a two-minute “conversation” with Ramble led to 15 tasks!
When I went back into my inbox to sort them out, I realised that the majority of those tasks were low-value, would-be-nice-to-do tasks, but realistically, there was no way I would have the time to do them.
I edited down that list of 15 to 6 tasks.
The problem is that most people will not edit these lists. It’s time-consuming, and you have to think it through. Two things that are out of fashion these days, it seems.
This is where I found bringing a pen and notebook back into my system really helped. It forced me to edit down my list of tasks for the day. It also made me smarter when writing my lists.
If I had five people to call today, in the digital system, I would write out all five calls independently. It didn’t take long, and most of those would already be in the digital system. All I had to do was add a date.
In a paper system, it would mean writing out all those calls individually. You soon find that rather than doing that, you would write “do my calls”. Writing those three words strangely reinforced the action. All you then needed to do was to ensure that any communication tasks were correctly labelled in your digital system.
This is where the seeds of a hybrid system began to take shape.
If it were easier to collect using digital tools, then why stop doing it that way?
If you were more focused when writing out a daily to-do list than using a digital to-do list, why stop doing that?
My idea was to marry the two.
This led to the development of what I call my Day Book. However, before I got there, I went back to my roots and used the Franklin Planner for eighteen months.
The strength of the Franklin Planner is in the way the daily pages are laid out. You have your daily prioritised task list on the left, your calendar for the day next to it, and, on the right page, a place to keep notes and ideas.
This means that once you have written your appointments, you can see how much time you have available to do tasks. It forces you to be realistic.
If you had seven hours of meetings and began writing out a long list of tasks, you would instantly see that you were creating an impossible day.
If you were to consider meeting overruns, the “urgent” messages and “quick questions” that will inevitably come your way that day, it’s likely you won’t be doing any tasks.
Yet the digital system won’t show you that. All it shows you are the tasks you have dated for today.
And let’s be honest, most people are adding dates to tasks, not because they need to be done that day, but because they are afraid they will forget about them or they will get lost in the system.
That’s not how a to-do list is meant to work. It’s meant to give you a clear indication of what needs to be done. On a day-to-day basis, that means what needs to be done today.
The act of writing down on a piece of paper the tasks that need to be done today forces you to be realistic.
When it comes to storage, though, paper is not so great. It’s here where digital tools shine. You can easily store files and documents. You can keep meeting notes together in one place and create a master project note for all your projects, so everything is kept together in one convenient place.
And of course, digital’s piece de resistance, search.
If you were to keep all your notes in notebooks, you would soon have notebooks all over the place, and notes would be difficult to find unless you carefully indexed every notebook you used. Perhaps not the best use of your time.
Instead, you can keep all your notes in a notes app, and allow it to use keywords, date ranges or titles to find what you need when you need it.
However, I have discovered that paper is a great planning medium. This is where I always used to struggle.
When I first began teaching, there were no such things as Evernote or Apple Notes. They didn’t come along until five years after I began teaching. I therefore used my old counsel notebooks. These were what would be described as foolscap in size, slightly taller than A4, and had a royal blue cover.
Given that throughout my school and university days, I would always plan out my essays on paper, it was perfectly natural for me to make notes on paper when planning my lessons.
Then we had the digital explosion. Smartphones became a thing, followed shortly afterwards by apps. I began using Evernote in 2009, and I started planning digitally.
It was certainly convenient, but I did notice I rarely went into any depth. I tried using mind-mapping software, but it didn’t help.
I thought there must be something wrong with me.
Then, a couple of years ago, I began seeing studies about how our brains work differently between digital and physical tools.
The most striking studies found that when you write on paper (or a whiteboard), you activate the same areas that artists activate when creating art. This is the creative centre of your brain.
When you tap on a keyboard, you don’t. Tapping is formulaic and monotonous.
If you think about this, it makes perfect sense. When you handwrite, you are forming shapes. Letters are shapes. When you write via keyboard, all you are doing is tapping. There’s nothing artistic about that.
This was when the penny finally dropped for me. There was nothing wrong with me! It was science.
Now, I would never consider opening up my phone or laptop to sketch out an idea. I would open a notebook.
One of my favourite ways of doing this is to grab a notebook, a few pens and a pencil and head off to a local cafe for an hour or two. I can sit in a corner and brainstorm ideas for new courses, YouTube videos and blog posts.
Since I began doing this, my productivity has improved significantly. It helped because I have fewer re-edits to do. When I sit down at the computer to write, I now have a fully planned-out structure and well-thought-through points, and I am writing the first draft much faster.
It seems that planning works best on paper, yet storage and output are best digital. Again, leading to the conclusion that there is a place for both digital and analogue tools in a solid productivity system.
I saw this all in action recently. I was watching a UK Supreme Court session, where a barrister (a lawyer who speaks before a judge, not someone who makes coffee) had an iPad in front of him containing all the case files and documents. Yet his speaking notes were on paper. As he made his arguments before the judge, he marked off the points with a pencil and added notes.
The opposing barrister was also using the same tools. Her case files were on an iPad, yet as she listened to her opposite number, she was taking notes in a notebook and appeared to be adding revisions to her own speaking notes.
What’s more, if we’re being honest, stationery is much more fun than digital tools. Digital fonts, screens and keyboards are not really all that exciting.
But the many different types of pens, pencils, notebooks, and pencil cases at all different price ranges give you the ultimate way to make your tools truly personal.
I’m sure you already know I love fountain pens. I’ve been writing with them since middle school and just love the way the nib feels on a quality sheet of paper.
I remember being excited when Apple brought out the Apple Pencil. When I got one, and tried it out I was horrified. It was the worst writing experience I’d ever had. I’ve tried Paperlike and tested a Remarkable. Yuk! None of them comes close to the experience you get from a real pen and paper.
And so, after two years of testing, playing and refining, I came up with what I would describe as the “perfect” system. A method that marries the power of digital with analogue tools.
Digital for storage and output, paper for planning and thinking.
It works. I tested it with some of my coaching clients, and even my wife has started using it for her university studies.
What’s more, it works superbly with the Time Sector System. You keep all your tasks in your digital task manager, and only when you decide to do them, you put them on paper.
What you will discover immediately is that you are no longer staring at an almost infinite list of things you could do, and instead, you see a list of genuine tasks that need to be done today. No more overwhelm, just a focused list and a realistic day.
If you are interested in learning more about this course, I will put a link in the show notes. Currently, you can get the course with the early-bird discount for just $49.95.
But if you’re not interested, try using a notebook for your planning and daily task list this week. Watch what happens to your productivity.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Peter Drucker once said “Until we can manage time, we can manage nothing else”
How is your management of time?
Links:
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The Time-Based Productivity Course
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
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Script | 403
Hello, and welcome to episode 403 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Are you in danger of boxing yourself in with too many processes and too much structure?
Now, it’s important to stress that having some structure to your day is important. But too much can lead to boxing yourself in and losing flexibility.
Let me give you an example I often come across. Protecting time for doing your focused work. Having this protected on your calendar so the time cannot be stolen by others is important.
If you protected 2 hours and finished in 90 minutes, that doesn’t mean you have to continue for another 30 minutes. Take a break. You’re done.
But this works the other way, too. If you have two hours protected for a project task but cannot finish it in that time. It’s okay. You turned up. You did the work, but you miscalculated how long it would take.
This happens to all of us. Some days we’re on fire and can plough through a lot of work. Other days, a lot less so.
The problem is that when you begin your day, you really don’t know what kind of day you’re going to have. There are too many variables. How you slept, whether you’re catching a cold or simply something else is on your mind.
Your life is not measured by what you do in one day; everyone has bad days.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alex. Alex asks, hi Carl, this year I’m trying to be better at time blocking, but I am really struggling to stay consistent with my blocks. What advice do you have to help stay true to your calendar?
Hi Alex, thank you for your question.
Something I have always taught is that of all your productivity tools, one of them needs to be sacred. One of your tools must be the “truth” about what you are going to do that day.
Task managers are generally not good at this because we throw a lot of things into them. That’s a good thing. Yet, the issue is that most people never curate what they throw in. This creates overwhelming lists of low-value, ill-thought-out items that will never get done. They just cripple your task manager’s effectiveness.
The best tool for acting as your sacred base is your calendar. It’s never going to lie to you. It shows you the 24 hours you have each day and where you need to be, with whom, and when.
You cannot overload yourself without it being plainly obvious that you are trying to do too much.
And let’s be perfectly clear, an agreed appointment with someone will always take priority over an email or proposal you need to write. If not, you cancel the appointment.
I hope, at a basic, civilised human being level, you get that.
I’ve called off face-to-face meetings in the past if the person I am meeting cannot put their phones down and actually talk to me. It is rude, disrespectful, and no person with an ounce of integrity would ever do that.
One of the striking things I’ve noticed about the highly successful people I work with is that they never have a phone. Tablet or laptop near them when they are in meetings. A notebook and a pen are all they have.
That’s focus, professionalism, and demonstrates to the person you are meeting that you are focused on them in that moment.
When you make your calendar your primary productivity tool, you gain clarity about how much time you have available for the things you want to do.
It’s visual, it’s staring at you, and there’s no escape from reality.
If you work 9 hours a day and today you have 7 hours of meetings, you only have 2 hours to do solo work. That’s it.
If you need three hours to get your critical, must-do work done, then you have two choices. You either cancel a meeting or you accept that you will need to work an extra hour.
It’s strange how so many people waste so much time trying find other solutions. That’s time they could have spent on getting started on the work.
The solution is to time-block slots for doing the work that matters.
- The best salespeople block time every day to prospect and follow up with their customers. That’s why they are the top salespeople.
- The best CEOs block time every day for working on their top priority task. That’s why they are the best at what they do.
- Best-selling authors block time for writing every day. That’s why they sell a lot of books.
Now, as I eluded to at the beginning, there will be some days when things don’t go according to plan. You might be sick, had an argument with a loved one or just be distracted for whatever reason.
Or there could be a good old-fashioned emergency that needs your attention.
It happens. That’s life.
However, it’s not really about what you do or not to do in one day. The purpose of time blocks is to get you to show up and do the work. It’s not about volume.
Spending twenty minutes on your actionable email is better than spending zero minutes. It’s surprising how much you can get done when the pressure of time is on you. You don’t dilly-dally around. (Wow! That’s a phrase I haven’t used for a long time!)
Ultimately, the measure is how well you did against your plan for the week, not necessarily an individual day.
Let me give you an example.
I have two blog posts, two newsletters, this podcast and a YouTube video to produce each week. They are my measurables. Six pieces of content.
I know I need about 12 hours a week to produce that content. I also have 15 hours of coaching appointments. So, in total, I need 27 hours protected before I begin my week to complete my professional work.
It’s doable, and based on my completion rates, I complete this work around 87% of the time over 12 months. I’ll take that. (I measure it at the end of every year)
I work with one highly successful CEO who writes a LinkedIn Newsletter every week. Her company has over 50,000 employees in six different countries. She protects two hours every week to write that newsletter. One hour for the first draft and one hour later in the week to edit it.
Last year, she didn’t miss one newsletter. She had a 100% completion rate. And that was her goal.
How did she do it? She protected her writing time every week. She would protect Monday mornings when in the office, and when travelling, she would take advantage of jet lag and write when she was wide awake in the early morning or late at night.
She time-blocked the time. She knew the only way to achieve a 100% completion rate was to make sure each week she had protected the time to do the work.
However, time blocking only works if you are planning your week. Not planning your week leaves you open to other people hijacking your calendar, and as I am sure you are aware, other people are often very persuasive… or demanding.
When you sit down to plan the week, you first look at what meetings and appointments you have scheduled. How much time does that leave you?
That will tell you what you could realistically get done that week.
If you’re away at a conference for three days, you really only have two days to work with. However, one of those days will probably be needed for catching up, so realistically, you’ve got one solid work day.
But let’s look at a typical week when you are at your usual place of work.
How much time do you need to do the work you are employed to do each week? A journalist may be expected to write an article a week. How long does it typically take to write the article, excluding the research and interviews? That would be their starting point.
Doctors I work with often need 2 hours or more after seeing patients to handle paperwork. If they want to get home at 7:00 pm each evening, then that will affect the time they need to stop seeing patients and do paperwork.
Salespeople are focused on seeing clients most of the day, but they also often have paperwork and follow-ups to do. Where can they fit the time they need for paperwork and follow-ups?
Knowing what you are expected to do as part of your job and ensuring you have sufficient time to do it each week is what I call protecting time for your core work, and it goes back to the birth of humankind.
Our ancestors on the Savannahs knew their core work. To hunt for food. If they’d had a big kill one day, they may have been able to take a day off, but when they started their day, they knew their job was to go out and find food. It was a non-negotiable part of their day.
That’s what time blocking does for you. It gives you clarity on what you need to do that day. All you need to do is show up.
One tip I can give you about time-blocking is to keep your time blocks general. For instance, the CEO I mentioned a moment ago calls her newsletter writing time simply “writing time”. That gives her some flexibility.
If she needs to write a report for the board and is up against a tight deadline, then that is what she will write in that time. She will then find another space for the newsletter writing.
I do something similar. I have writing time and audio/visual time protected on my calendar. I can then choose what I write or record on the day as part of my daily planning routine.
If you’re in sales or a client-facing role, the time you spend working for your clients can be called “client” or “customer” time.
I would also highly recommend that you set aside time every day to deal with messages, emails, and admin. These tasks will creep up on you if you’re not dealing with them every day. Even if you can only find thirty minutes, take it.
Whenever I am on a business trip, whether domestic or international, I make sure to set aside time during the day to address my actionable messages. The most challenging ones are domestic, as I generally drive to the appointment or event. The easier ones are international as there is a lot of time hanging around in airport lounges.
Another tip I would give is not to go crazy here. Time blocking is not about blocking every minute of the day. It’s about protecting time only for the important work you need to do.
When I look at my calendar, there are only three hours a day protected for solo work. On days when I have a lot of meetings, I usually reduce that time to one hour.
So there you go, Alex. I hope that has helped.
You are going to have good and bad days. That’s perfectly normal. But, you have complete control of your calendar, so you can move things around, change your blocks if necessary. But, and this is the important but, once you’ve locked them in for the day, you stick with them.
Remember, it’s not about how much you do in the time, it’s about turning up and doing the work.
And if you want to transform your time management and adopt a sustainable time-based productivity system, my newest course, the Time-Based Productivity course, will do that for you.
It will teach you how to time-block effectively and organise your work so you are doing the right things at the right time. PLUS… by joining the course, you get free access to my recently updated Time Sector System course and my Time Blocking Course.
If I were to recommend one course for 2026, that’s the one I would recommend.
Thank you for your question, Alex and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
You’ve probably heard of something called AI. It seems everyone is talking about it. The question is: how will this affect our productivity, and what can we do to ensure we are ready for the likely changes this year?
That’s what I’m answering this week.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Fac ebook | Website | Linkedin
Take the Time Sector System Course
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Subscribe to my Substack
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 402
Hello, and welcome to episode 402 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Unless you’ve had the fortune to avoid seeing the news over the last few years, you may have come across something called AI. It seems to be everywhere today.
Just yesterday, I got a big update to Evernote, and it was all about AI. Todoist, my task manager of choice, is also on board with AI with their dictation tool called “Ramble”.
All great tools, all giving us the potential to collect and organise more.
I use AI a lot myself. It helps me brainstorm ideas, create subtitles for my YouTube videos, and write the video descriptions, which I hated doing myself.
And it is a phenomenal research tool. I can import my analytics from my blog, this podcast or my YouTube videos and ask it to tell me what is resonating with my community. Then that helps me to decide what the next best content will be.
Yet, with all this, there are some downsides. One of which is that I noticed last year that many of my coaching clients were seeing an increase in the number of tasks they had in their task managers.
It wasn’t until recently that I realised where many of these tasks were coming from.
Many companies are rolling out AI-supported meeting summaries. AI is particularly good at this. It listens in to the meeting and, at the end, produces a summary of what was discussed and a list of action steps to be taken following the meeting. Some of the more sophisticated versions of this will break down by who is responsible for which task.
Superb! Or is it?
What I’ve discovered is that AI is like that annoying new recruit who wants to impress by doing far more work than is necessary. It will turn a 10-bullet-pointed summary into a 20-page report, only for the recipient to return it to a bullet-pointed summary.
It reminds me of that wonderful quote from Winston Churchill:
“This report, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.”
Yet, from a productivity perspective, what AI is doing is creating a lot of tasks. So much so that it has now been given its own term:
“AI-generated work bloat”, or a less friendly version: “AI-generated Work slop”.
So, what can we do to “defend” ourselves from this AI-generated work bloat? Well, there are a few things we can do that will allow us to take advantage of AI’s incredible abilities, yet still keep our workloads within limits without it slowly becoming overwhelmed with a lot of “work slop”.
That nicely brings me on to this week’s question, and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question:
This week’s question comes from Robert. Robert asks, Hi Carl, I haven’t heard you talk much about AI. Do you have any thoughts on how to get the most out of the new AI tools without them becoming overwhelming?
Hi Robert, thank you for your question.
AI is certainly causing some issues in the time management and productivity space. Yet, it is also helping many people to get better organised.
It is like all new technology. There is an initial period in which we try everything to determine where the new technology can help us most. I remember when email became a thing. There was a lot of nervousness about it initially.
I was working in a law firm at the time, and the legal profession in the UK was reluctant to adopt email, even though its benefits over snail mail were obvious.
There were fears over privacy and client confidentiality. Eventually, we adopted it, and when we did, it rapidly became an instant messaging portal. Clients who sent an email began expecting an instant reply and quickly called us if they did not receive one within a few minutes.
Fortunately, we had not at that stage entered the smartphone era and were able to explain to clients that when we were out of the office, we were unable to check our emails.
However, email became the new way of communicating, and it soon created a cascade of stuff for us to process and organise, eating up more valuable time—time we didn’t have then, let alone today.
I see the same thing happening with AI today. We are trying to adopt AI in so many ways. Some will stick, others will fall by the wayside in time.
It doesn’t mean we should reject these new ways immediately. We are in the experimentation stage. It’s the fun stage. Testing new ideas, playing with tools and seeing what works for us and what doesn’t.
However, some fundamentals remain in play.
The first, and the one that will never go away, is that we only have twenty-four hours a day. We are human. We need to sleep, eat and bathe. All of which takes time out of those 24 hours.
The second is that we can only focus on one thing at a time. We have the freedom to choose what we focus on, but we can only focus on one thing.
So the question is, what will you focus on and when?
We may not be able to stop all this AI-generated work, but we can choose when to work on it. This is where categorising your work helps you choose the right things to work on.
For example, pretty much all of us will have to deal with communications, and it’s a great example.
What happens if you don’t respond to your emails and messages for a day? Perhaps you’re travelling, or are caught up in meetings. That’s right, you create a backlog.
The problem with emails and messages is that they never stop coming in, and unless you have a process and time to deal with them, you will miss deadlines and opportunities, and probably upset a lot of people. There are consequences for ignoring your messages.
The solution is to set aside time each day to deal with them. How much time will depend on how much time you have and perhaps the volume of messages that require your attention.
If all you have is twenty minutes between some meetings, take it. You’re not going to get much else done. So take advantage of those twenty minutes and clear some of those messages. You may not be able to clear them all, but one is always greater than zero.
If the AI tools you use include suggestions for responses, take advantage of them for the shorter replies.
But, be careful of the longer replies that require your knowledgeable input. AI can respond to some of these, but its responses often sound a little inhuman or, worse, give the wrong information.
Always check the AI-generated responses.
AI can also organise your calendar for you. Personally, I’ve not had much luck with this, as it doesn’t have enough variable information about me to be accurate. What I find AI does is look at what I like to do at certain times of the day and suggests I do that every day, and then fills in everything else around that.
The last time I played with this AI, it recommended I get up at 6:00 am and do my workout. Pu ha ha! I am not going to get up at 6:00 to do any exercise. I hate exercising in the morning.
To get my AI calendar to be reasonably useful, I had to spend far too much time telling it what I wanted, and I realised in the end the fastest way was for me to do it manually.
Going back to the categorisation of your work, if you categorise it by the types of work you do, you can then match your calendar to your categories.
For instance, if you were a doctor, seeing patients would largely take up most of your workday. But you will also need time to complete your prescriptions, update patient notes, respond to messages, deal with any health insurance claims, and so on.
If you don’t want to be working late into the night, you will need to be disciplined with your calendar and protect time for the admin and communication tasks.
If you find AI is recommending a lot of tasks for you, from, say, meeting summaries, I recommend you first audit the list, then allocate a category to the work suggested.
Why audit the list?
Well, as I mentioned, AI is like that new recruit trying impress the boss by suggesting more work than is necessary. It will create a lot of tasks.
Your experience will tell you that a lot of those tasks will not need to be done. It’s these that need to be removed.
I recently did an experiment. I asked Google’s Gemini to give me a list of tasks, spread over four weeks, to start a blog.
This prompt resulted in 29 tasks! And the task of actually writing a first draft was not suggested until the start of week four.
While many of the tasks listed, such as choosing a domain to host the blog and your niche, do need to be done, in the real world, most people who want to start a blog will already know this. It’s part of the thought processes that lead to deciding to start a blog.
When I audited the list, I reduced it from 29 tasks down to 12. I also found I needed to move some tasks around because they weren’t in a logical sequence.
I’m sure over time, AI will get better at this, but always remember that your experience about doing your job will still be better at predicting what needs to be done than AI will.
If you’re using the Time Sector System, you will find that your processing naturally fits with AI’s method of breaking tasks down into when you “should” be doing them.
My blog experiment allowed me, once I’d audited the list, to quickly move the tasks into the correct sector. Tasks that should be done in the first week were moved to my This Week folder; those for the second week were moved to my Next Week folder; and everything else was moved to my This Month folder.
One of the benefits of using the Time Sector System with AI-generated tasks is that as you are simultaneously deciding when you will do the tasks. You retain the all-important human agency, deciding what is done and when.
But there’s one more benefit of the Time Sector System that will help you. That is your weekly limit.
If you have taken the course, you may remember the lesson on capping your weekly tasks to your known limit.
This is where you find the maximum number of tasks you can realistically do in any one week. This number does not include your routines or other recurring low-value tasks. Just the important ones. But we all have a limit.
For me, that number is thirty. If my This Week folder is higher than 30 at the start of the week, I know I am going to struggle to complete my tasks that week. I either need to go back into my This Week folder and remove some of the less urgent tasks or cancel some of my meetings.
This teaches you the vital skills of auditing and prioritisation. Skills you will need in the AI world. It is what will separate us from the AI tools being used.
However, one good thing about AI-generated meeting summaries is that you have a record of the meeting that can be placed inside your meeting notes for projects and teams without any editing.
The workflow I use with these is to use Todoist’s brilliant copy/paste feature. Here you can copy a list of tasks and paste them all into your inbox in a single click.
However, if there are a lot of them, I create a temporary project folder for them first, and then, before I move the tasks to their rightful place, I audit the list. Remove tasks that are not relevant, or that I don’t need to do, and then move them to the right time sector.
If you don’t use Todoist, you can do this with the original meeting summary. Audit, remove and then move the tasks you need to do into the correct time sector.
(A quick heads-up, I have a YouTube video coming out next week that demonstrates this.)
So there you go, Robert. It’s still early days, and we are very much in the experimentation period with AI. We’re testing ways to see how it can help us with our work. This is consequently creating a lot of tasks.
As long as you are auditing these tasks, following the principles of COD, and using the Time Sector System to manage your work, you will be fine. Things will remain manageable and exciting at the same time.
We don’t know what the future holds, but your experience and skills will see you through, I can promise you.
Thank you, Robert, for your question.
And if you haven’t taken the Time Sector System course yet, the all-new edition is now available and can be taken in less than two hours. Look at taking that course as your antidote to the AI-generated work bloat we are all beginning to experience.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Albert Einstein once said, “Organised people are just too lazy to go looking for what they want.” And I think he makes a very good point.
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Script | 401
Hello, and welcome to episode 401 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Last week’s episode on what to keep in your notes sparked a lot of follow-up questions around the concept of how to organise notes and digital files.
In many ways, this has been one of the disadvantages of the digital explosion. Back in the day, important documents were kept inside filing cabinets and were organised alphabetically. Photos were mostly kept in photo books, which were then thrown into boxes and hidden under beds or in the attic.
The best ones were put in frames and displayed on tables and mantelpieces—something we rarely do today.
And notebooks, if kept, were put at the bottom of bookshelves or in boxes.
The limiting factor was physical space. This meant we regularly curated our files and threw out expired documents.
The trouble today is that digital documents don’t take up visible physical space, so as long as you have enough digital storage either on your computer’s hard drive or in the cloud, you can keep thousands of documents there without the need to curate and keep them updated.
Eventually, it becomes practically impossible to know what we have, where it is, or even how to start finding it if we do know what we want to find.
So, before I continue, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Julia. Julia asks, “ Hi Carl, I listened to your recent podcast episode on what to keep in your notes, and it got me thinking. How would someone go about organising years of digital stuff that has accumulated all over the place?
Hi Julia, thank you for your question.
A couple of years ago, I became fascinated with how the National Archives in Kew, London, handles archiving millions of government documents each year.
Compared to us individuals, this would be extreme, but they have hundreds of years of experience in this matter, and my thinking was that if anyone knew how to manage documents, they would know.
What surprised me was that they maintained a relatively simple system. That system was based on years and the department from which the documents originated.
So, for example, anything that came from the Prime Minister’s office last year would be bundled together under 2025. It would then be given the prefix PREM.
(They do use a code for the years to help with cataloguing, as the National Archives will be keeping documents from different centuries)
Upon further investigation, the reason they do it this way is that older documents are most likely searched for by year.
Let’s say I was writing a book on British disasters in the 20th century, and I wanted to learn more about the Aberfan Disaster, where a coal slag heap collapsed, crushing the village of Aberfan in Wales.
All I would need to know would be the year, and a simple Google search would give me that. From there, I could search the National Archives for HOME 1966. That search would indicate the Home Office files for 1966. (The year the disaster happened)
I would also know that the disaster happened in October, so I could refine my search to October dates.
If we were to use a system similar to the one the National Archives uses to organise its documents, we would create parent folders by year.
You can then go through your documents wherever they are and, using your computer’s ability to detect when a document was created, have it show your list of files by when they were created. That way, all you need to do is select all files from a given year and move them into their appropriate year folder.
Now, when I do this, I notice that I have files going back to 2015.
The next step would be to allocate time each week to review your year folders and organise the documents into topic folders.
For example, anything related to insurance can be placed in an insurance folder.
How deep you go after that will depend on you. I don’t go any further than that. I have three insurance documents. Car, health and home insurance. And given that these are now organised by year, if, in the unlikely event, I need to retrieve my 2019 health insurance documents, it would be very easy to find them.
I would suggest starting at the current year and working backwards. The chances of you needing to find a document from ten years ago are slim. The need to find a 2025 document would be much higher.
So start with your 2025 folder and work backwards.
Don’t be tempted to pre-set up your year folders with subfolders by topic. No one year will be the same.
In 2016, I was teaching English to executives in Korea—something I no longer do. I have a lot of teaching materials; I don’t want to throw away those, and they go up to 2020, so I have folders for those years related to my English teaching activities. After 2020, those folders are no longer in my files.
Once you have the year folders set up, it’s relatively quick and easy to get things organised. The important thing is not overthink this or to develop an overly complex folder structure.
My advice is two levels and no more. The year folder and the subject material. For example, 2024 > Electric bills.
Now, there is a category of documents that you need access to across multiple years.
For example, my car’s manual is something I will need to keep for as long as I have my current car.
For these types of documents, you can create a folder called “current” or “active” (you decide the best name for it) and keep these in there.
So, in my current folder, I have my company registration documents, my car’s manual and registration documents, current insurance certificates, and other miscellaneous files I need access to regularly. This folder is pinned to the top of my file folders (you can do this by adding a 00 before the word Current, then setting the list to organise by name).
Now for your work documents.
This one is more challenging, as you’re likely to be collaborating with others.
There may also be legal requirements regarding document storage and archiving. When I worked in a law office, there were strict rules about how files were organised and stored, and for how long they were kept.
However, that was not my concern. There were procedures that my colleagues and I followed for each file, and they were then sent to the archivist, who made sure that everything was stored in the correct way.
My advice here would be to follow your company’s procedures; if there are none, use the system I described above for your personal files.
Another challenge we face today is that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are encouraging us to keep files within their app containers.
For instance, if you create a Word document, Microsoft wants you to save that file within your OneDrive’s Word folder.
That makes sense, and for the current documents I am creating, I use that system.
However, once I’ve sent feedback to my coaching clients, I save the original Pages file in that client’s folder (I work in the Apple ecosystem).
These folders are not year-specific. Many of my clients have been with me for years, and many of them come back from time to time.
That is why, with work-related files, using years to organise your documents doesn’t always work—particularly with ongoing projects, campaigns and clients.
Given that most work related files and documents are shared with others and are kept within the company’s own file storage system, the best solution is to ensure that the title you give to these files is something you would naturally search for.
Think how you would find this document in twelve or twenty-four months time.
For example, each year I write a workbook for my Ultimate Productivity Workshop. The title of that document is “2026 Ultimate Productivity Workbook”.
I put the year first because if I were to search for “workbook”, within the results, I would find that the Productivity workshop’s workbooks would all be grouped together by year, making it easy for me to select the right one.
And that neatly leads me to another facet of working with digital files.
Your computer is built for search. It’s the biggest advantage computers have over your own brain. If it’s within your computer’s search scope it will find it within a split second.
Really the only thing you need to do is ensure that you have given the document a title you will be able to search for.
One of my favourite features of this computerised search is to use the “recents” smart list. This shows you all the documents you have worked on recently.
The chances are something you are looking for at work will be something you have worked on recently. You might be writing a report or a proposal in Word, then in the Word app those documents will be at the top of the list.
You may need to change the search setting in the list to last modified, not date created to see this, but it’s a phenomenal way to find a document you need quickly.
What about your notes?
Last weekend, I watched a documentary on the beloved British comedian Sir Ken Dodd. A brilliant comedian and a man who left millions of people in laughter and happiness.
Doddy, for that is what we called him, was in the habit of writing notes after each performance into a notebook. He would write how he felt the performance went, what jokes worked and didn’t work, and what he could do to improve his performance next time.
After his death in 2018, his wife set about saving his immense archive of props, costumes and puppets for the nation.
When it came to his notebooks, there were thousands of them, dating from the 1950s to his death.
His wife asked an archivist to come in to help organise these notebooks into something that could be searched by future comedians. The archivist decided to most logical way would be to organise them by year, and then add a tag for each theatre and city he performed in.
This meant that if someone wanted to search for a specific note, they could type in the year and the name of the city or theatre, and a list of notes for that search would pop up.
Simple, logical and minimised the amount of work required to get them in order.
When it comes to your notes, keeping the structure simple makes sense. With your digital notes, you are organising them for quick search and retrieval.
You don’t need to worry about the date; all decent note-taking apps will date-stamp the creation of a note for you automatically. All you need to do is focus on creating a title for the note that makes sense to you so you can retrieve it years later.
The key to getting your digital files organised is to keep things simple and let your computer do the hard work.
The year folders you create can be reviewed over time. It’s the kind of thing you can do while sitting on the sofa in the evening. Pick a year and categorise the documents you have collected for that year. If you do this over a couple of weeks, you will have all your digital files organised and searchable.
I can assure you it’s a wonderful feeling.
Receipts can be organised into a Receipts folder, and within that folder, you can organise them by month. If you need to separate your personal and professional receipts, create a work and personal folder within that month’s receipt folder.
I know that adds a lot of levels, but you are only setting this up once a month, and it won’t take you much more than a minute. Yet, that minute will save you hours later when you need to submit your expenses.
I hope that has helped, Julia. Thank you for your question.
I have a course called Mastering Digital Notes Organisation that shows you a simple yet effective way to get your notes organised so they are searchable and easy to find. I’ll leave a link to that in the show notes.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
WOW! We’ve reached the 400th episode of this podcast. I’d like to thank all of you for being here with me on this incredible journey.
And now, let us begin.
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Script | 399
Hello, and welcome to episode 400 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
15 years ago, I remember being excited to find Ian Fleming's explanation of how to write a thriller. I saved the text of that article from the Internet directly into Evernote. As I look back, I think that is probably my favourite piece of text that I've saved in my notes over the years.
This morning I did a little experiment. I asked Gemini what Ian Fleming‘s advice is for writing a thriller. Within seconds, Gemini gave me not only the original text but also a summary and bullet points of the main points.
Does this mean that many of the things we have traditionally saved in our digital notes today are no longer needed? I’m not so sure.
It’s this and many similar uses of our digital note-taking applications that may no longer be necessary
And that nicely brings me on to this week’s topic, and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ricardo. Ricardo asks, Could you discuss more about note-taking in your podcast, as I have difficulties regarding how to collect and store what’s important?
Hi Ricardo. Thank you for your question.
When digital note-taking apps began appearing on our mobile phones around 2009, they were a revelation.
Prior to this innovation, we carried around notebooks and collected our thoughts, meeting notes and plans in them.
Yet, given our human frailties, most of these notebooks were lost, and even if they were not, it was difficult to find the right notebook with the right notes.
Some people were good at storing these. Many journalists and scientists were excellent at keeping these records organised. As were many artists.
And we are very lucky that they did because many years later, those notebooks are still available to us. You can see Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s notebooks today. Many of which are kept at the Athenaeum Club in London, and others are in museums around the world.
It was important in the days before the Internet to keep these notebooks safe. They contained original thoughts, scientific processes and information that, as in Charles Darwin’s and Isaac Newton’s case, would later form part of a massive scientific breakthrough.
Darwin’s journey on HMS Beagle was a defining moment in scientific history. It provided the raw data and observations that would eventually lead to his theory of evolution by natural selection.
That was published some twenty years after his journey in his book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection.
During Darwin’s five-year journey around the world, he filled 15 field notebooks with observations and sketches—these were roughly the same size as the iconic Field Notes pocket notebooks you can buy today.
Additionally, he kept several Geological Specimen Notebooks. These were slightly larger than his field notes notebooks. He used these primarily to catalogue the fossils and rocks he collected
Darwin also kept a large journal during his travels, which he used to record data and incidents.
These were all original thoughts and observations.
Today, all that information is freely available on the internet and, of course, in books.
What’s more, with AI tools such as Gemini and ChatGPT, finding this information today is easy. I, like many people today, rarely use internet searches for information. I simply ask Gemini.
This means there’s no point in saving this information in my digital notes. All my searches are saved within the Gemini app, as they are in ChatGPT and Claude.
But your original thoughts, ideas and project notes are unique. It’s these you want to keep in your digital notes.
Much like Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton wrote down their thoughts and observations, your thoughts, observations and ideas should be collected and stored.
When Darwin travelled on the Beagle, he was 22 years old. When he published The Origin of Species, he was 45.
And perhaps, like Darwin, not all your ideas today will have an immediate practical purpose. But if you don’t keep them, they never will. This is why it’s important to keep them where you can find them later.
And that’s where our digital tools today are so much better than the paper notebooks we kept. We can find anything, any time, from any digital device we have on hand.
I remember reading Leonardo Da Vinci’s biography, and he often travelled to other parts of Italy. If he needed to reference a note he had made—and he made copious notes—and he did not have the right notebook with him on his travels, it would have taken him days to retrieve the information.
We don’t have that problem today.
So, when it comes to collecting, be ruthless in what you keep.
I have a notebook in my notes app called “Suppliers”. This is where I store the names of the companies I regularly buy things from.
For example, I get my clothing from several preferred retailers. I buy my woollen jumpers (sweaters) from Cordings of Piccadilly. In the note I have for Cordings, are my sizes and the website address.
This makes it easy for me to find what I am looking for and order. I use Apple’s Password app to store my login details, so once I have found what I want, I can order it very quickly.
Amazon makes this even easier with a “Buy It Again” section, so if I am running low on Yorkshire Tea, I go to Amazon, click Buy It Again, and within a few seconds, I see Yorkshire Tea and can order straight away.
Ten years ago, I kept all that information in my notes. Today, I don’t bother as it’s faster to go directly to Amazon.
Another use I have for my digital notes is to keep all my client meeting notes. Each week, I will have around fifteen to twenty calls with clients, and I keep notes for each call as I write feedback, which I send to the client after the call.
These are unique notes, and each one will be different, so using the Darwin/Newton principle—keeping thoughts, ideas and observations in your notes—they will be kept in my notes in a notebook called “clients”.
What’s great about this is I have over eight years’ worth of client notes in Evernote, which feed ideas for future content as they’re directly relatable to real experiences and difficulties.
Another useful note to have in your notes is something called an “Anchor Note”. This is a note where you keep critical information you may need at any particular time.
For example, I keep all the subscriber links to my various websites there, which can be quickly copied and pasted whenever needed.
I also have the Korean Immigration office website there, since it’s not easy to find, and I only need it every 3 or 4 years.
Depending on how security-conscious you are, you can also keep your Social Security and driving license numbers there, too.
How you organise your notes depends on you and how your brain works. However, the more complex your organisational system, the slower you will be at finding what you need.
Now this is where computers come into their own. Whether you use Apple, Google or Microsoft, all these companies have built incredible search functionality into the core of their systems.
This means as long as you give your note a title that means something to you, you will be able to find it in five or ten years’ time.
I remember once my wife asked me for a password to a Korean website I had not used in ten years or more. I couldn’t remember it, and I didn’t have the password stored in my old password manager, 1Password.
As a long shot, I typed the name of the website into Evernote—the note-taking app I’ve been using for almost fifteen years—and within a second, the website with my login details was on my screen.
If I’d tried to find that information by going through my notebooks and tags, I would never have found it. I let Evernote handle the hard work, and it did so superbly.
However, that said, there is something about having some basic structure to your notes. I use a structure I call GAPRA. GAPRA stands for Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive. It’s loosely based on Tiago Forte’s PARA method.
I find having separate places for my goals, areas of focus and projects makes it easier for me to navigate things when I am creating a note.
My goals section is for tracking data. For instance, if I were losing weight, I would record my weight each week there.
My areas of focus notebook is where I keep my definitions of my areas and what they mean to me, and it gives me a single place to review these every six months.
My project notebook is where I keep all my notes for my current projects.
The biggest notebook I have, though, is my resources notebook. This is a catch-all for everything else. My supplier’s notebook is there, as is information about different cities I travel to or may travel to in the future. As I look at that notebook now, Paris is the note that has the most information. (Although Osaka in Japan is getting close to it)
I also have places to visit in Korea that I keep for when my mother visits—which she does every year—so I can build a different itinerary for her each year.
The archive is for old notes. I’m not by nature a hoarder, but I do find it reassuring that anything I have created is still there and still searchable.
And that’s it, Ricardo.
You don’t need to keep anything that is findable on the internet or in AI; that’s duplication. But what I would highly recommend you keep are your original ideas, thoughts, and meeting notes (even if they are being summarised by AI. How AI interprets what’s been said is not always what was meant)
And if, like me, you prefer to take handwritten notes, you can scan them into your digital notes app so you have a quick reference even if you don’t have your paper notebook with you.
I hope that helps, and thank you for your question, Ricardo. And thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
“Most people overestimate what they can achieve in twelve months and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.”
I first heard that quote from Tony Robbins, and it completely changed my approach to yearly goals. I stopped setting ‘New Year’s resolutions’ and began looking further ahead to see what I could do over the next twelve months that would move me closer to my longer-term dreams and goals.
In this week’s special episode, I will share with you why smaller steps over the next twelve months will do so much more for you than trying to do something big and scary that you ultimately fail at.
Let’s go.
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Script | 399
Hello, and welcome to episode 399 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
What are the mistakes most people make when it comes to goals and resolutions for the New Year?
Well, the simple answer is that they overcomplicate things and try to do too much in one year.
Let me explain. Like most people, I used to set New Year’s resolutions when I was growing up. At various times in my life, they included losing weight and getting fit, quitting smoking, saving money and many more.
And, again, like most people, I failed miserably every time.
What Tony Robbins’ quote made me realise is that I was failing because none of these resolutions were connected to my long-term goals or vision.
I was in my twenties, and I believed I was immortal. It wasn’t until I reached my early thirties that three-day hangovers convinced me that I wasn’t immortal after all.
It wasn’t until I’d settled down, married and begun to see a life ahead of me that I started to wonder if I could control that life and the direction it would go in.
And yes, I could. And so can you. But you do need to know what kind of life you want to be living in ten or twenty years.
Hope is not a good strategy. It’s no good carrying on as you are and “hoping” you will one day reach the goals and the life you’ve always wanted to live.
To achieve that, you will need to take action.
To give you an example of what I mean.
I want to be active well into my eighties and nineties. I long admired Prince Philip, the late Duke of Edinburgh. He died in 2021, just a couple of months short of his 100th birthday. And yet he remained active throughout his eighties and nineties, being one of the hardest-working members of the Royal family.
The Queen allowed him to retire at 97.
How did Prince Philip maintain his strength and endurance?
He did something called the 5BX every morning for eleven minutes.
5BX is a series of body-weight exercises you can do anywhere that was developed by the Royal Canadian Air Force in the 1940s to keep their servicemen fit, healthy and strong.
I highly recommend you search for the original Royal Canadian Air Force instructional video on YouTube and watch it. It seems so quaint by today’s standards.
He also walked miles and miles every day, ate small portions of food based on a traditional balanced diet, limited his alcohol intake, and went to bed and woke up at the same time each day.
If we were to break that down into daily activities, it was simple and doable. Because he was able to do it every day—even when he was travelling—it meant there were few excuses he could use not to do it.
You wake up, and after a few minutes, do your 5BX session, shower, have a small, healthy breakfast, and get on with your day, taking every opportunity to walk. And you do it every day.
Tie that to going to bed and waking up at the same time each day, and you would be setting yourself up for a long, healthy, active life.
And in that, there is nothing complicated or time-consuming.
There are also no goals involved. It’s just a shift in your daily routine, so these activities become part of your daily routine.
Although I would suggest you use January as a “test”. Often, we read or listen to something, think it’s a good idea and then find that because of our circumstances, we struggle to make it work.
That doesn’t mean it cannot work. It means we need to rethink the routine and make a few changes so it works for us.
I remember reading Robin Sharma’s The 5 AM Club and thought it was a good idea. And it was a good idea in 2016. I could get to bed at a reasonable time.
Then I started my productivity work and coaching programme, and it became challenging to get to bed before midnight. Something had to change.
I realised that the power of the 5 AM Club was not in getting up at 5 AM. It was what you did when you woke up. So, the only thing I needed to change was my wake-up time. And ten years later, I still follow the morning routine I developed after reading that book.
Another example would be with your personal finances. Davie Ramsey’s book, The Total Money Makeover, gives a simple step-by-step approach to getting your personal finances in order.
The first is to build a starter emergency fund—usually around $1,000 to $5,000. Then pay off all non-mortgage debts as quickly as you can.
The third step is to build a longer-term emergency fund. That would be three to six months of living expenses.
And then to invest in your retirement and live on less than you earn.
Within that framework, there would be a few key things you could do. For example, try to save the starter emergency fund in 2026 and pay down some of your shorter-term debts.
Around those areas, you could set some goals in 2026.
The bigger principle in The Total Money Makeover is to pay off all debts, including mortgages. That’s unlikely to be possible for most people in one year, but over ten years? It could be possible.
The good thing about something like this is that you can plan five or ten years ahead and set a goal to be completely debt-free by 2036.
Whether it’s health or finances, what you are doing is setting standards for how you live your life. You eat healthy, do some exercise each day, and live within your means.
And really, that’s what a new year should be all about. Not resolutions or goals, but reaffirming your standards. The standards you live your life by.
Standards don’t need motivation; they are just the way you live your life.
However, when setting your standards, you will likely need some help from motivation and self-discipline initially. There will be days when you forget to do something or cannot do it. That’s perfectly normal.
It’s not about hitting everything 100% of the time. That would be impossible anyway. I would suggest a monthly target of 80%+
A good example of this is when I travel to visit my parents. The trip from our home in Korea to where my parents live on the West Coast of Ireland takes about 26 hours door-to-door.
During that time, I am not able to go out for a run or to the gym. If my goal were to exercise every day, I would be setting myself up for failure before I begin. I travel to visit my parents at least once a year.
And if I were determined to do it, why put myself through that extra stress? Travelling is stressful enough.
Then there would be those occasions when I am ill or delayed when travelling domestically.
However, if my target was an 80% success rate, I’m in with a chance, and on those days when I’m exhausted or an emergency comes up, I wouldn’t be destroying my standards.
If you want to discover what is important to you in your life, I suggest you download my free Areas of Focus workbook. That workbook will take you through each of the eight areas of life we all share, help you define each one and then set some actionable steps you can take to keep your areas in balance.
It’s a great way to kick off a new year, as it will help you focus on what matters to you and identify areas where you can establish habits and standards that will be meaningful to you.
A new year is a wonderful opportunity to review how things are going in our lives and reflect on what we could change to get our lives back on the right track, living the life we want.
If you’re entirely new to this approach to a new year, don’t really know what your longer-term vision is, or aren’t clear on what is important to you in life, and you’re ready to make changes, I would recommend my Time and Life Mastery online course.
This is a complete package that will help you explore what is important to you. Once you have established those, I then show you how to build your standards into your daily life.
Plus, you get my complete mini-course library for free when you join. And if you act now, you can save 50% with my End of Year Sale offer using the coupon code “codisgreat” (all lowercase, and one word).
I’ll leave the details in the show notes for you.
Thank you for listening, and let me wish you an amazing 2026.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
"The first ritual you do during the day is the highest leveraged ritual, by far, because it has the effect of setting the mind and setting the context for the rest of your day."
— Naval Ravikant or was it Eben Pagan? I don’t know, but it’s a great quote to begin today’s episode.
Links:
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Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here.
Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off.
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The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary
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Script | 398
Hello, and welcome to episode 398 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Your morning routine is one of the best ways to create a productive day.
If you were to wake up at the very last moment, rush around your home getting ready while trying to sip your hot coffee, and rush out the door to catch the train to work, you’ve started the day in a stressed state, and you’re likely to stay stressed all day.
It’s not a great way to begin the day.
If you were to start the day with a set of routines that you follow every day, two things would happen.
The first is that you have no decisions to make, which preserves your decision-making powers—powers that diminish throughout the day. And the second is that the routine itself allows you to slow down.
However, as with all things good for us, we can take it to extremes, which can create stress in itself.
I remember in 2017, I began doing Robin Sharma’s 5 AM Club. This is where you wake up at 5:00 AM, do twenty minutes of sweaty exercise, twenty minutes of planning, and twenty minutes of learning.
It’s a great routine, but unfortunately for me, in 2018, I began coaching, which meant I was doing calls late at night, significantly reducing the sleep I was getting.
I found myself walking around all day like a zombie.
I decided to stop doing the 5 AM Club routine and develop my own, which I’ve stuck with for seven years now, and I still love my mornings.
And with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Teagan. Teagan asks, In my morning routine, I take care of my pets, check my home budgeting app, then have breakfast and coffee while doing my email sort. My daily planning is done the night before. The problem is that I don't want to transition to getting dressed and starting work after doing this routine. It takes me 3 hours or more to get going. I'd like to do some physical activity, but this would make the morning even longer. Do you have any tips on moving more efficiently through the morning?
Hi Teagan, thank you for your question.
I think the simple answer would be to include getting dressed as part of your morning routine. However, before you get there, I think there may be an issue in your routine.
Three hours is too long for a morning routine.
Let me explain. Imagine you had a flight to catch at 7:00 AM. It takes you 90 minutes to get to the airport, and you need to allow 2 hours for check-in and getting to your gate.
That would mean you need to leave your house at 3:30 AM.
If your morning routine takes three hours, you would need to start your day at 12:30 AM. Therefore, dangerously reducing your sleep time.
Most people think of doing their morning routines when everything is normal. Unfortunately, “normal” is not a consistent state of affairs for most of us. It may happen 90% of the time, but when we develop our morning routines, we need to consider the 10% of days when it doesn’t and how we will start the day on those days.
The “perfect” morning routine is a routine you do 100% of the time.
This would be your starting point.
I’ve found that a morning routine of around 45 minutes is realistic. This means that even on days when you need to start your day earlier than usual, there are few excuses you can use not to do your routine.
Although hopefully you won’t need “excuses” for not doing it.
Your morning routine should be something you look forward to doing. It gives you a reason to jump out of bed, not crawl out.
It should be built around things you enjoy doing. To give you an example, my morning routine is:
- Wake up and put the kettle on.
- Drink a glass of lemon juice water while the kettle is boiling.
- Make a pot of Yorkshire Tea.
- Wash my face and brush my teeth.
- Then, sit down at my desk, with my mug of tea, open my journal and begin writing.
- Finally, open my email and clear my inbox.
In total, that takes me about 40 to 50 minutes. It depends on how much I write in my journal.
As I know my routine won’t take any longer than 50 minutes, I can confidently decide when to set my wake-up time.
For example, on a Monday, I have a call at 7:00 am; therefore, I wake up at 6:00 am. Other days, I can wake up at my preferred time of 8:00 am.
Last summer, we needed to leave for the airport at 5:00 am. This meant on that day, I woke up at 4:00 am and was ready to go at 5:00 am.
I don’t include getting dressed in my morning routine. I get dressed as my tea is brewing after I’ve washed my face and brushed my teeth.
The purpose of your morning routine is to mentally prepare you for the day ahead. It’s not to create more stress.
I love writing my journal and that first cup of tea of the day. When my alarm goes off in the morning, it’s often the first thing I think about, and I do jump out of bed—much to Louis’s annoyance—he’s not a morning dog.
Robin Sharma recently posted his “new” four-hour morning routine on YouTube. It’s a superb, inspiring and motivational routine, yet completely impractical for most people.
You don’t need a four-hour morning routine to get the benefits of the morning routine.
Some people love exercise in the morning, others don’t. That doesn’t mean that those who don’t like exercise in the morning miss out.
For a morning routine that works for you, start with what you love doing.
You mentioned your pets. If your pets like to go out in the morning, and it’s something you enjoy doing, then you can build that into your morning routine. However, if it’s just refilling water bowls and giving them breakfast, you could use that as the trigger to start your routine.
The trigger is the first thing you do in the morning.
For me, that’s putting the kettle on; for others, it could be a visit to the bathroom or letting their dog out.
The trigger should be something you automatically do without thinking. This is similar to what James Clear calls “habit stacking”. It’s the first in a series of activities that start the stack.
So how do you transition from your morning routines to the start of your day?
This will depend on whether you work from home or go to an office.
If you work from home, the last activity of your morning routine should automatically transition you.
For example, clearing my email inbox is the last activity of my routine, and it smoothly transitions me into my first task of the day.
Today, that was to write this script.
Now, why do I clear my email first? I protect the first 30 minutes of my day for emergencies or urgent requests. So, today I began at 8:00 am and started writing this script at 9:30 am. 9:30 am is usually when my focus time starts.
If there’s an email that requires an urgent response, I have time to deal with it without it distracting me while I am focusing on my most important work of the day. It clears my head and reassures me there’s nothing more important than doing that first task.
If you work in an office, the last activity in your routine should be leaving for work. You know when you need to leave for work, so you have a reference point you can use to decide when you should be waking up.
The definition of a routine is something that you do consistently, often without thinking. I’ve been doing my morning routines for seven years, and I frequently find myself sitting at my desk writing in my journal, wondering how I got there.
I know I’ve followed my routines. I have a cup of hot tea next to me, and I am dressed. These routines are ingrained into how I begin each day.
One thing I do, though, that may help you, Teagan, is I lay out my clothes before I go to bed. When I wake up, my clothes are there right in front of me—no decision to make. Just put them on and start my day.
Having your clothes laid out ready for you in the morning may mean that you need a small end-of-day routine.
While you may not have a formalised closing-down routine, one thing you can do as you get ready for bed is to lay out your clothes for tomorrow morning after you’ve brushed your teeth.
Then, in the morning, you’ve reduced the resistance to getting dressed and starting the day.
So there you go, Teagan. I would first suggest you look at your morning routines and see where you could reduce them so they don’t last more than an hour. Think about those days when you may need to wake up early—could you still complete your morning routines?
Make sure what you have in your routines are things you love doing. If you don’t love doing them, your morning routines will become a chore. Not the best way to start your day.
And for getting dressed, set out your clothes the evening before so you reduce the resistance when you wake up.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Teagan, and thank you to you too for listening.
This podcast will be on a break next week, so let me wish you a very merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive end to 2025.
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."
That was President John Kennedy in 1961, speaking at the Joint Session of Congress. It is possibly the best example of a project statement ever made.
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Script | 397
Hello, and welcome to episode 397 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Starting projects. It can be tough. Where do you start? Where will you find the time? And what do you need to do?
These are just some of the questions you will find yourself asking.
Yet the biggest obstacle to completing a project on time is overthinking and over-planning. Thinking about and planning a project are not the same as working on one. Working on a project is doing something that moves it forward.
Decorating your bedroom will require paint and brushes. The only pre-project decision you need to make is what colour.
The first two steps, therefore, are:
- Decide what colour to paint the bedroom
- Buy paint and brushes
I would add a third decision: when. When will you do it?
Once you’ve done those three things, you’re ready to go—no more planning, no more thinking. Just get on and start.
Yet, that’s not how most projects go, is it? There’s thinking, planning, then creating tasks in your task manager, and if it’s a work project, a meeting, then perhaps another meeting.
Often, by the time a project is conceived, 80% of the time required to complete it gets spent on thinking, planning, and meetings.
And that brings us nicely to this week’s question—a question about finding ways to reduce the thinking and planning time.
So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Phil. Phil asks, “Hi Carl, how do you work on complex projects?” I find I spend a lot of time planning a project, end up with a long list of things to do, and when it comes to starting, I freeze. It’s as if I don’t know where to start. Do you have any tips on handling this type of problem?
Hi Phil, thank you for your question.
“Project freeze” is a common problem for many people. I suspect this stems from the belief that every aspect of a project needs to be planned before starting. Yet, for many projects, this would be impossible.
Imagine you were part of NASA in May 1961, and you’d just heard President Kennedy’s speech at the joint session of Congress about why the US should put a man on the moon and bring him back safely to earth before the end of the decade.
At that time, NASA was struggling to get even the smallest of rockets into space—the idea of sending astronauts to the moon and back was a pipe dream.
Yet a group of incredible people at NASA in 1961 took on the challenge. Instead of planning every single step they thought would be needed to complete the project, they looked at what they already knew, the obstacles they would need to overcome, and the first steps.
That gave birth to the Mercury space mission. The Mercury programme was not to put a man on the moon; its objectives were to orbit a crewed spacecraft around Earth, study the human ability to function in space, and ensure the safe recovery of both the astronaut and the spacecraft.
Before they could reach the moon, they needed to understand how humans cope in space. So the project’s objective was to send a man into Earth’s orbit.
The key was to get started, and they did this by listing out the obstacles they needed to overcome first. They then worked out how to remove those obstacles.
Now, I know our projects are unlikely to be as big as sending someone to the moon and back, but we can adopt the same approach that NASA used to work on our projects.
Even small projects can adopt this approach. Let’s say you were asked to do a presentation on the likely effects of AI on your company’s business over the next five years. Where would you start?
For something like this, there would be several phases.
The first would be to research and gather information. For this, the task would likely be to find out who to ask or what to read.
Okay, when will you do this?
Here’s the key point. It’s no good just deciding what needs to be done first. You need to make it intentional, and to do that, you will need to set aside time to do it.
Perhaps you decide to give yourself an afternoon to research this.
Research is a challenge in itself. We can go down rabbit holes that bring no meaningful insights into what we are trying to do. Yet, we can also underestimate how much time is required for research. So the first step is to do an initial session of research to help you develop some boundaries.
You might be lucky and find that the first research session gives you everything you need to start the presentation. However, if not, and you discover you need to do more research, then when will you do that?
One thing you can do with creating a presentation is to set up your PowerPoint or Keynote file. Create the document, do the first slide and perhaps set the theme colours.
Having a document started makes it much easier to get into creating the presentation.
The danger of listing out all the things you think you need to do to complete the project is that 80% of what you think needs to be done doesn’t, and you will find that 80% of what ends up being done were things you never thought of in the first place.
All you really need is a starting point.
I recently did a video on how to write a book. The number one reason people who want to write but never do write a book is that they overthink and plan it.
Thinking and planning do not produce a book.
The best way to write a book is to get the first draft written as fast as you can. All that is required is a few ideas about what you want to write about. From there, you start writing the first draft.
The first draft will be the worst state your book will ever be in. It’s meant to be messy, unstructured and occasionally unreadable.
But, once you have a first draft, you have around 80,000 words you can manipulate, craft and organise into a best seller. Without that first draft, you have nothing but a few ideas.
How do you write a first draft? Set aside time each day to write. An hour or two every day for eight weeks will give you your first draft.
As you write, new ideas will form, and you can make a note of those along the way. That will make your editing easier.
The common denominator with any project is to get started. Everything has a starting point. Wherever that is, start there.
It’s as you are working on the project that your next steps reveal themselves.
When I first began creating online courses, I had no idea what I was doing. But what I did have was fifteen years of teaching experience, and I knew how to create a lesson plan.
I also knew what I wanted to create an online course on. So I could create a lesson plan and a topic. That was where I started.
Once I had a lesson plan, I realised I needed a storyboard of sorts to help me break the course down into lessons. That evolved into the outline I have written for every course I have created since.
Now, after eight years of creating courses, I have a process I follow. All I need is a topic and time to plan, outline, record, edit and post. (Five steps)
On big projects, many tasks are completed before the project ends. Yet, if you were to try to predict what needs to be done at the start, you will find you are wasting a lot of time.
NASA had no idea whether a human being could survive in space. What they did know was that they needed to develop a reliable rocket to get them into space. So, they began with that. Without the rocket, it didn’t matter whether a human could survive in space or not. There would have been no way of getting them there.
In 1962, NASA didn’t know that they would need software to keep the spacecraft on the right trajectory. There was no way they could have planned for that at that point. It was only when they began working on the Gemini programme that they realised software would be needed.
Without paint and brushes, it wouldn’t matter what colour you wanted to paint your bedroom.
In many ways, when you’re working on a large, complex project, you’re solving problems as you go along. Yet, there’s always going to be a starting point.
Another thing about bigger projects is setting a deadline.
Because we are not sure how long a large project will take to complete, it can be tempting to set an unrealistic deadline. Three months to complete a project that realistically would take twelve.
This is why setting up the project’s stages will help you.
What’s the first stage? Give yourself a realistic time frame to complete that first stage. The information you gather during that first stage will guide you with the deadlines for the next stage.
I would also take another leaf from NASA’s book. President Kennedy said, “before the decade is out”. Given that he made this speech in 1961, NASA had around 9 years to complete the project. Yet it was not absolute.
Theoretically, the deadline was 31 December 1969, but the actual deadline was a grey area until NASA got closer to achieving the goal.
Deadlines are good as they bring energy to the project. Yet, unrealistic deadlines bring nothing but stress to a project.
I know an online course will take me about 6 weeks to complete. I know the process, and I’ve learned from experience that the whole process takes six weeks.
If I were to stop doing all my other work, close my calendar to appointments and work solidly for fourteen hours a day for two weeks, I might be able to complete the course in two weeks, but all I would have is a lot of stress. Not pleasant.
Six weeks gives me time to bring the course to life, check things, and make sure everything fits together.
And the final part of developing any project is to be clear about your outcomes.
I refer you back to the opening quotation from President Kennedy:
"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."
A perfect project outcome statement. It’s clear about the objective, and there is a timeline. There was nothing else for NASA to know.
President Kennedy didn’t have the skills or knowledge to do this himself; that was for the scientists and engineers to work out.
Something they did with magnificent effort on the 20th July 1969.
Thank you, Phil, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
"In an age of speed, I began to think, nothing could be more invigorating than going slow. In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention." — Pico Iyer
How do you feel when you have nothing to do but enjoy your surroundings? Where nothing is urgent, and you can enjoy the moment you are in?
Never felt it? Maybe that’s a problem you need to fix. Today’s world makes us feel that everything must be done now, yet it doesn’t. If you were to slow down, step back from time to time to think, you’d get a lot more important things done and eliminate much of what is unnecessary.
Links:
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Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here.
Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off.
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Script | 396
Hello, and welcome to episode 396 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Slow down. There, I’ve said it.
If there were one distinguishing characteristic of those who control how they spend their time and when, it would be that they are slow.
Not in a negative way, more in an intentional way. They meet their deadlines, are never late for appointments and have clearly had time to read through the meeting preparation notes.
Even in one of the most stressful occupations, that of being a special forces soldier, they are trained to slow down. The US Navy SEALs have the expression “slow is smooth. Smooth is fast”, and I know from talking with former members of the UK Special Forces that a large part of their training is focused on slowing down and being deliberate with their actions.
Of course, the problem here is that when you’re faced with twelve urgent Teams messages, you have five missed calls from an important customer, and your next appointment is about to start, the last thing your instincts will tell you to do is to slow down.
Yet it is precisely in those situations that slowing down and being intentional about what you do next is what you do.
Slowing down calms your over-anxious mind, and when your mind is calm, you make better, more rational decisions.
And slowing down is what this week’s question is all about. So, to kick us off, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Hanna. Hanna asks, Hi Carl, I work in a very busy Pharmaceutical company, and from the moment I step through the door at work, it feels like chaos. My phone never seems to stop ringing, and my Teams feed looks like it’s alive. It’s always moving! The day’s a blur. What can I do to slow things down and regain some control?
Hi Hanna. Thank you for your question.
One of the things I’ve learned is that we do have control over the speed of the day. I know often it feels like we don’t, but we do.
The reason is that we always have choices, even when it often feels like we don’t.
You can choose to answer your phone or let it run to voicemail. You can choose to answer those urgent Teams messages immediately or not, and you can choose to go to the staff rest area and make yourself a nice cup of tea.
Unfortunately, it’s natural for us to head straight into the storm of those phone calls and messages. And when we do that, we start conditioning ourselves to do it consistently.
Yet maybe the best thing you can do is pause, make that cup of tea, and strategically plan your approach.
This is often what I call the tactical retreat. Step back, pause, and look at what’s currently on your plate and your most important tasks for the day.
However, you will only be able to do that if you can move from being a firefighter to becoming a fire prevention officer.
Firefighters charge straight into every issue with only one intention: putting the fire out. Fire prevention officers: pause, look at the bigger picture, and seek ways to prevent the fires from starting in the first place.
In all companies, you need both types of people. You’re not going to prevent every crisis or urgent issue. Yet many can be prevented.
I gave one example in last week’s episode.
If you have ten equally urgent messages to reply to, you’re going to have to choose which one to respond to first.
If you don’t have a process or a strategy for handling that situation, you will panic. Panicking slows you down because the act of panicking creates a lot of activity, yet nothing happens to deal with the messages.
The strategy I suggested was to use the first-in-first-out approach. Deal with the oldest first. This way, even if the last message you received is from your angry boss, at least you won’t have to deal with eight angry customers as well.
And let’s be honest, if you were to give yourself fifteen minutes to deal with these messages, nobody would be waiting more than fifteen minutes for your response.
There is one trick you can use every day that will help you slow things down. That is to protect the first thirty minutes of the day to get a handle on the day.
Hopefully, you won’t have a crisis every day, but those first thirty minutes give you a chance to review your Teams messages, emails, and your plan for the day. You can also speak with your colleagues to see what’s happening and deal with anything urgent that popped up at the start of the day.
More often than not, you won’t need the full thirty minutes, but you have it protected, and on the days you don’t need it, you can make yourself that lovely cup of tea.
Another trick is to give yourself a proper screen break between work sessions.
Now, this will depend on the kind of work you do. If you were a graphic designer, an accountant or a journalist, a lot of your work would be spent sitting in front of a computer screen.
If you were to stop after ninety minutes, get up, and walk somewhere for ten minutes without a screen, that screen break would give you time to stop and think.
That thinking might be what element you can add or remove from the design you are creating, or where to place a particular paragraph in the article you are currently writing.
Getting away from your screen allows your brain to relax. It’s when your brain is relaxed that you make better, more rational decisions.
Yet, when we are under deadline pressure, stepping away for ten minutes is often the last thing we feel we should do.
When you return, allow yourself 20 minutes to address any messages that may have come in while you were locked away doing focused work.
Sometimes I find it helpful to look at the messages before I take the ten-minute break. That way, I can think about the responses while I’m relaxed.
If you’ve found yourself reacting without thinking all the time, and from the moment you wake up, it feels like you’re go-go-go, that may be a sign you need to retrain your brain to slow down.
The best way to do this is to set aside 30 to 45 minutes each morning. This time must be focused on you. Not your partner or kids. It’s time dedicated to yourself.
You could write a journal or develop a slow, deliberate morning coffee ritual. Perhaps you could add some light stretching or go out for a morning walk.
As long as it’s focused on you and the things you enjoy doing, you’ll find that this morning routine helps to rewire your brain to slow down.
Now for an unusual one.
Avoid unnecessary conveniences.
Part of the Reason we all feel rushed today is the speed at which things can be done. We can order home-delivered food, have our laundry picked up and delivered clean and ironed, order our weekly supermarket shop online, and have it delivered straight to our door later that day or the next.
Convenient, yes. Good for us, no.
I recently saw a video about why people in the UK began gaining weight alarmingly from around the late 1970s onwards.
Yes, there was a shift in our diet. In 1979, Marks and Spencer introduced their first ready meal. It was their famous chicken Kiev, and it sparked a revolution in how families cooked.
The M&S chicken Kiev was introduced at around the same time microwave ovens began taking off, and suddenly people were eating ready-made meals.
No more “real” cooking. Boiling vegetables, cooking meat, it was pre-packaged and additive-riddled food that could be cooked in less than ten minutes.
Then there were more and more convenient ways to travel. People stopped walking to the shops. People working in offices would walk the two metres to their car in the morning, drive to their office, park in the underground carpark, and walk the five metres to the lift (elevator) to arrive at their office, having walked no more than ten metres.
Then to spend the rest of the day sitting behind a desk.
All in the name of convenience.
Yet, this convenience is causing us to speed up.
Walking is one of the best ways for us to slow down. It’s one reason why studies show owning a dog can reduce stress and improve health. Dogs need walking. For me, walking Louis is one of my favourite times of the day. I get to think without a screen, get some fresh air and relax.
And given that Louis will stop and investigate every tree and lamp post, it’s a slow walk.
And the final tip is to plan your day before you finish the day.
In other words, give yourself ten to fifteen minutes before you close out the day to review your appointments for tomorrow, curate your task list for the day based on how much time you have between meetings, and allow for the unknowns—there are some.
Then pick your two must-do tasks, make sure they are highlighted and stop.
You cannot do everything in one day, but doing a little often moves things forward, and soon things you thought would take hours are almost complete.
Yet, in my experience, the most significant cause of our feeling that we have no control over our day or time is the way many people are chained to a screen.
The current statistics indicate that over 7 hours a day are spent in front of a screen (and that does not include TVs).
The problem here is that messages, emails, news alerts and much more are a constant stream. The more time you spend looking at your screen, the more anxiety you feel that you are falling behind with everything. When this happens, you are no longer in control; instead, your devices are controlling you.
Yet if you were to go out for a twenty-minute walk after lunch, or do your own grocery shopping each week, you would find yourself slowing down naturally.
Add that to perhaps reading a real book in the evening and spending 30 to 40 minutes in the morning doing yoga, meditation, or journaling. You’ll find that much of the speed anxiety many of you feel will start to disappear.
As for walking into your workplace and getting caught up in the rush of things, take a deep breath, make sure you know what your two most important items of work for that day are, and between sessions of work, get up, move around, make yourself some tea or coffee and think about what one thing you need to do next.
I hope that helps, Hanna. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
"The mind is like water. When it's turbulent, it's hard to see. When it's calm, everything becomes clear." — Kobe Bryant
Kobe Bryant was definitely onto something when he spoke those words. If you’re not in control of your commitments and have no idea what needs to be done next, you’re going to be stressed. And stress, like turbulent water, makes it hard to see where you should be spending your time.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Join the Time And Life Mastery Programme here.
Use the coupon code: codisgreat to get 50% off.
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Subscribe to my Substack
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 395
Hello, and welcome to episode 395 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
What’s the point of learning how to be more productive and to be better at managing our time? Are we not just shuffling work around—work that will need to be done at some point anyway?
Well, yes and no.
Historically, people went to work, often in factories, where they performed repetitive manual labour. When their workday finished, they “downed tools”, clocked out and went home. As there were no TVs or smartphones, people often played cards or board games with their families, read books or went to the pub.
It was easy to leave work at work. It was easy to manage our time. There was personal time and work time, and the two did not mix.
Today, it’s very different. Most of you listening to this podcast will likely be working in what is commonly called “knowledge work’ jobs. You’re not hired for your muscles. You’re hired for your brain.
And this causes us a problem. Manual labour meant you did a hard day’s work, and when you went home, you could forget about work. In knowledge work, it’s not so easy to stop your brain from thinking about a work problem.
I remember when I worked in a law firm, I caught the bus home and often spent most of the journey thinking about an issue with a client and trying to figure out the simplest way to solve the problem. In the past, people would have looked forward to getting home to their families.
When you’re mentally distracted in that way, it’s hard for you to switch off and enjoy that time with your family and friends.
Today, it also means there’s no barrier—except our own willpower—to sending an email or a Teams message at any time of the day or night.
In the past, the factory gates were locked, or someone else was doing your job on the night shift. It wasn’t possible to work beyond your regular working hours.
Time management was much easier. Not so today.
And that nicely leads us to this week’s question. And that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.
This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, Hi Carl, I’ve spent years struggling with time management, and it’s got to the point where I think there’s no point. As hard as I try, there’s always something that needs to be done, and I never get a chance to finish anything and end up with everything being urgent. Is there any point to all this time management and productivity stuff?
Hi Michael, thank you for your question.
In many respects, you might be right that managing time, or at least trying to, is a waste of time. (I think there might be a pun there)
As I alluded to, with knowledge work and the explosion of communication tools over the last few years, things that could have waited a day or two now seem to have to be dealt with immediately.
It’s not that the task is suddenly urgent; it’s a combination of people’s expectations and the delivery system.
The problem here is that no matter how fast the delivery system becomes—or other people’s expectations— we are human. We can still only do one thing at a time. That is not going to change in our lifetime.
And that’s where to start—understanding that you, as an individual, can only work on one thing at a time.
In other words, if you have ten equally urgent messages to reply to, you’re going to have to choose which one to respond to first.
Now, you could come up with a complex, convoluted system for deciding which message to respond to first, or you could adopt a more straightforward first-in-first-out approach. Start with the oldest and work your way through your list of messages.
What are we talking about here—perhaps a ten-minute delay for you to get to a particular message? Does ten minutes really matter? You’re not trying to save someone’s life in an emergency room, are you?
Messages are often more time-sensitive than emails, and I find that responding to them between work sessions works best.
For instance, if you were to protect 9:30 to 11:30 am for focused work. That’s two hours where you are technically not available. Once you finish that session, check your messages and respond to any that require a response.
When I set these barriers of doing undisturbed, focused work for two hours a day, I used to panic every time my phone dinged. I felt I had to respond immediately. Of course, that was not true. It never was, and it’s still not true for any of us today.
It took a few weeks to wean myself off panicking every time a message came in, but the results were fantastic. My productivity went through the roof, leading to fewer urgent tasks.
Our brains are not good at handling interruptions to the flow of work. I’ve seen studies showing that even a minor interruption can take you up to 18 minutes to refocus and get back to where you were before.
Think about that for a moment. Even if you were taking ten minutes to refocus and getting an average of six interruptions per day, you’ve lost an hour. Or to put it into a better perspective, that’s 12 ½ per cent of your work day gone. Wasted.
By responding to messages between work sessions, you avoid losing focus and get more work done in less time.
And it’s there that you will find fewer urgent tasks to do. Because you are getting more done in less time, you will be able to stay on top of projects and other work without getting too close to the deadline.
Another area that can make us feel that managing our time is a waste of time is focusing on the number of tasks rather than the time we have available.
Again, this is linked to the fragility of being human. We are affected by how much sleep we get, our mood, and our diet.
Have a bad night’s sleep, then a fight with your kids over the breakfast table and a sugary doughnut as a midmorning snack, and you’re not going to get a lot of work done.
You have a sleep debt, you’re worked up by the argument, and that doughnut is going to give you a massive energy crash.
This is why estimating how long a task will take is challenging.
I’ve been writing a 1,000-word blog post every week for around ten years now. You’d think I would be able to estimate reasonably accurately how long writing 1,000 words would take after writing over 500 blog posts.
Ha! No chance. Some days I can write the first draft in forty-five minutes, other days it can take me two hours.
The biggest effect on how long it will take me is sleep. If I get my seven hours, I know it’ll take me less than an hour. Less than six hours, and I’m struggling to do it in two hours.
A better approach is to allocate time for doing groups of linked tasks. For example, group all your actionable emails and set aside 40 to 60 minutes at the end of the day to deal with them.
This way, it doesn’t matter how many emails you have to act on; you do as many as you can in the time you have.
If you’re doing this every day, you’ll soon find you have no email backlogs.
What amazes me is the people who try this for a few days and give up because their huge backlog of actionable emails is not getting significantly smaller. Well, of course not. If you’re starting with six hundred actionable emails, it’s going to take you a long time to get that under control.
What you could do is set aside a one-off period to get that backlog under control first. Then set a time each day to keep it under control.
Or make sure you have a “net-gain” with your responses. For instance, if you get 20 actionable emails in a day, respond to at least 21. That’s a net gain. If you do that consistently over a few weeks, your backlog of actionable emails will reduce significantly.
You’re not going to lose the holiday weight you gained in a few days. It might have only taken you a few days to gain that weight, but it’s going to take you a few weeks, if not months, to lose it. (Life’s tough, isn’t it?)
Most of the reasons why so many people quit making necessary changes, whether in their work or personal life, are linked to the initial difficulty of change.
All change is difficult at first. You’re changing. But soon that change becomes your norm, and then it becomes easy. It becomes “just what you do”.
There’s a time and place for the things you want to or must do. This is where your calendar comes into play.
Scheduling time for play, rest and exercise is just as important as scheduling meetings with your clients or boss. Trouble is, we don’t do that. We prioritise work over other essential things in our lives.
As Jim Rohn said, “When you work, work. When you play, play. Don't mix the two”
Ask yourself, where’s your boundary? If you don’t have one, you’re not managing time; you’re allowing time to manage you.
There are many ways you can take control of your calendar.
You could, for example, limit the number of hours you spend in meetings each week. If you work a typical 40-hour week, you could set the maximum time you spend in meetings at 15 hours. That will leave you with 25 hours dedicated to doing your work tasks.
Most people I talk with have no idea how much time they are spending in meetings each week. They say “yes” to every meeting request. WOW! If you don’t have control of that, you’re “up the creek without a paddle”.
Managing time is about managing your calendar and doing the hard things, like saying no to additional meetings that won’t help you do your work.
This is one reason why the old-fashioned paper planners were so good. Because you had to handwrite your appointments into your diary, there was no way you could double-book yourself. Sadly, that one simple feature does not exist in digital calendars.
I’ve seen people with four appointments all scheduled at the same time. Come on, you cannot be in two meetings at once, let alone four!
You can also protect blocks of time for doing your most important work each day. It’s not difficult, and with shared calendars, doing so indicates to other people that you are not available at that time.
And most important of all, you can do a short daily planning session where you look at your calendar to see where your commitments are, then curate your to-do list so that the number of tasks you have for today is realistic, given how much non-meeting time you have.
Yet none of these are tool issues. These are human decisions we need to make, and we need to be strong enough to follow through with them. Blaming our boss, colleagues, customers, or tools won’t improve the situation.
Only by being strong enough to say “no, not then, how about this time”, can you ever regain control of your time and see a corresponding increase in your productivity.
So there you go, Michael. Time management and productivity systems can and do work, but they only work if you are willing to make the difficult choices that come with them.
Be consistent in trusting your calendar. Allow it to structure your day between your work and home life.
Don’t allow someone else’s “urgent” to become your urgent. Respond to messages appropriately, but within your time frames.
I hope that has helped, and thank you for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Back in October, I gave you the five questions to ask yourself before 2026. In this special follow-up episode, I share with you what you can do with the list you have been building over the last two months.
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Script | 394
Hello, and welcome to episode 394 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Hopefully, you’ve started creating a list of things you want to change and or do in 2026. If not, it’s not too late.
If you missed that episode, the five questions are:
What would you like to change about yourself? This question is focused on you, your habits—good and bad.
What would you like to change about your lifestyle? This is about how you live, the material things, if you like, such as your home, car and other possessions that improve your lifestyle.
What would you like to change about the way you work? The professional question. Perhaps you want to learn more about AI, or change jobs and work from home, or maybe go back to working in an office.
What can you do to challenge yourself? What could you do that frightens you slightly? This question is designed to help you move out of your comfort zone.
What goals could you set for next year? Realistically, what could you accomplish next year that has alluded you?
The idea behind this exercise is to give you time to think a little deeper and discover where you are happy and where you feel things need to change.
Now, one thing you will find helpful is to go back to your Areas of Focus. There, you have your definitions of what family and relationships, health and fitness, career, lifestyle, self-development and others mean to you. Often, you will find that by reviewing these eight areas, you will find something you have neglected over the previous twelve months.
As I’ve been helping my coaching clients with this exercise, it’s surprising how many of them have discovered neglected areas. This is quite natural, given that once the year begins, we can easily get caught up in the day-to-day crises. Then we drift away from our good intentions.
In a perfect world, you would give yourself two months to reflect on these questions. To explore options and talk with your family. But don’t worry if you have not started yet. There’s still time to develop your thoughts and ideas.
Now, some people have asked me where best to capture these ideas.
Over the last two years, I’ve written these questions out in the back of my planning book. This book is always on or near my desk, and I have captured a lot more ideas this way than I ever did digitally.
So, my advice to you is: if you have not started this exercise, grab yourself a notebook, write the five questions as headings, and over the next few weeks, allow yourself to think about them and write down your ideas.
Right now, it’s less about what you write out and more about just getting everything written. And there’s a very good reason for this.
If you do this exercise over a few weeks, what you will discover is that a theme will develop.
Let me explain. Last year, I failed at getting back to fitness. During 2023, I reduced my exercise time to focus on writing Your Time Your Way. I also wasn’t very careful about what I ate, and as a consequence, my weight ballooned.
Last year was supposed to be the year I got back into shape, and I failed miserably.
So, last year, as I went through these questions and captured ideas, I soon found that health and fitness were common themes. This meant when I began 2025, my focus was to get back into shape and not repeat the mistakes I made in 2024.
And it worked. I went from touching 88 kilograms (around 195 pounds) in January to where I wanted it to be—80 kilograms (around 176 pounds) by the middle of July.
To do that, I needed to change a few habits. Moving more and locking in a consistent exercise time were the obvious ones, but I also looked at my diet and removed all processed foods, replacing them with natural foods—real vegetables, fruit, and fresh meat.
Given that around Christmas and the end of the year are quiet times for me, I reviewed my calendar and moved a few things around to accommodate my new routine.
Another example, I remember two years ago, a client of mine was struggling to grow her side business. It was causing her a lot of frustration.
One idea she wrote down was to work harder on her business in the evenings, but every time she looked at that, she felt that was unrealistic, given that she had two sons, one aged three and the other five.
As we were talking about this, I asked her if she’d spoken with her husband about him possibly taking responsibility for the kids a few nights a week so she could “disappear” and work in her business.
She hadn’t. So her “homework” that week was to discuss with her husband. The result was fantastic. He agreed to take full responsibility for the boys Monday through Friday, leaving her undisturbed time in the evening to work on her business.
Within six months, she was able to give up her full-time job and work solely on her own business. That reduced the need for her to work on her business in the evenings, and she returned to what many would describe as a normal work/life balance.
Yet none of this would have happened had she not spent some time thinking about the five questions. She would have carried on as before and become increasingly frustrated.
The theme she discovered was that she desperately wanted her side business to succeed, but to do so, she needed to spend more time on it. Time she thought she did not have.
As I’ve been going through my questions this year, I’ve seen a theme emerge: Less but better.
Now I have a history with this quote from Dieter Rams, the celebrated industrial designer behind the German company Braun. He’s been one of my design heroes for many years, and his Ten Principles of Good Design philosophy is ingrained in my thinking about everything I produce.
Less but better bleeds into every area of my life, not just my professional life. For example, I have added to do a big clothes throw-out at the end of the year, leaving myself only with quality clothing made entirely of natural fibres—cotton, leather and wool.
These clothes and shoes are often more expensive than their man-made fibre equivalents, but they are also generally of a higher quality and last considerably longer.
So own fewer clothes, boots, and shoes, but better-quality items.
On a professional front, we’ve all heard a lot about how AI may, or may not, change the way we work. There’s a lot of hype around at the moment, and it’s not easy to see what’s realistic and what is fantasy.
However, what’s real is that AI is here and not going away. So, what could you do to keep up to date on what AI can do?
Maybe you could take a course, read a book, or do some self-learning beyond using ChatGPT or Claude to answer questions you used to ask Google.
Now, this may overlap with your self-development focus. It’s certainly a fascinating topic to learn, and in doing so, you may find that you can save yourself a lot of time by creating a process that AI does automatically for you.
The reason many people struggle to find what they really want is that life gets in the way. Family and professional demands pull our attention all over the place, and when we do stop, we’re exhausted and just want to flop into the easy chair, open our phones, and scroll through social media or the news.
One or two days like that is no problem, but it can rapidly become a habit, and we drift far from where we want to be.
Having a plan or a goal for the year gives you a roadmap for when you do become distracted and perhaps a little lost. You can use your weekly planning sessions to review your year-long plan, or, if you’re doing well, review it every 3 to 6 months.
If you’ve been working on this since October, now’s the time to begin filtering down your list. If you’ve found a theme or a few connected ideas, these will likely be the ones you highlight as potential goals to set.
This brainstorming exercise will generate many ideas, which will be too many to accomplish in 12 months. What you want to be doing now is looking for the ones that excite you and, more importantly, are realistic goals for the next 12 months.
Remember, you don’t have to do all of what you wrote. You can keep this list in your digital notes by scanning your notebook pages into a note titled “Annual Planning 2025.” Then next October, you can come back to the list to see if you can move anything onto your 2027 list.
Over time, you create an extraordinary archive of ideas you’ve had over the years, and you will see how much you are accomplishing—you really are.
While I haven’t filtered down my list yet, I’m already excited about 2026. It’s going to be focused on less but with a lot more quality.
You will make decisions, experience setbacks and failures, and face frustrations, but by the end of 2026, I know you will be further ahead than you are today. And that’s what it’s all about.
Now go on and break open that notebook and ask yourself the five questions:
- What do you want to change about yourself?
- What do you want to change about your lifestyle?
- What would you like to change about the way you work?
- What can you do to challenge yourself?
- What goals could you set for next year?
Good luck, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very productive week.
“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going."
That’s a quote from one of my favourite people, and a friend of this podcast, Jim Rohn.
Listening to one of his lectures—for that is what they were—in 2017 changed my life, and I hope this episode will change yours. Let’s get started.
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Script | 393
Hello, and welcome to episode 393 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Discipline is unsustainable. You probably have discovered that. Yet there are many people we look at and see someone living what many would describe as a disciplined life.
So how do they do it?
Well, I can promise you it’s not discipline. Discipline is like a rocket used when launching a spacecraft—it’s required initially to get the spacecraft off the ground, but once in orbit, the rocket can be discarded. Then the balance between forward velocity and the Earth’s gravitational pull maintains the spacecraft in orbit.
And that’s how these outwardly “disciplined” people do it. They decide what it is they want to accomplish—healthy eating, regular exercise, journal writing, daily and weekly planning, etc. And then they “launch”.
A lot of effort and focus is required initially, but after a few weeks, their forward velocity—or the habit—takes over and it becomes something they just do.
And you can do the same. And this week’s question is about how to go from an idea to turning that idea into something you will “just do”.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Anna. Anna asks, Hi Carl, for the last three or four years, I have done your Annual Planning exercise. And each year, I fail to accomplish the things I set out to do. I feel I don’t have the discipline to keep my commitments. There’s always something else that gets in the way. How do you help people start to live a more disciplined life?
Hi Anna, thank you for your question.
As I alluded to a moment ago, it’s not really about discipline. That’s a fuel that will run out eventually. Sure, it can get you started, but if you don’t develop the habit or routine over a few weeks, the consistency you want will slip away, and you’re back at square one.
The problem with discipline—and, for that matter, motivation—is that they rely on the human condition. For discipline, you need willpower. Willpower diminishes throughout the day.
You start with strong willpower, and as the day goes on, that power slowly wears down. But it is also dependent on how much sleep you got, whether you are in a good or bad mood, whether you are stressed or anxious, and the people around you.
You may have heard the advice to ditch your “toxic friends”. They are the ones who keep pulling you down to their level. If someone were attempting to give up smoking, the advice given is to stay away from their smoking friends.
If you surround yourself with people who hate exercise and you decide, for example, you want to take up the “from couch to 5K” programme, you’re not going to find a lot of support from the people you surround yourself with. They have become what is known as “toxic friends”.
Instead of thinking you need discipline to achieve the things you want to achieve, look at what you can do to make achieving your goals easier.
Imagine you decided you wanted to read more books. Many people will set the goal to read a certain number of pages or chapters each day. This method requires immense discipline to maintain consistency.
You see, people often set these goals when they are rested, unstressed, and motivated. What you need to think about is what a realistic target would be if you were tired, unmotivated, and just wanted to curl up and scroll through your phone.
A better approach would be to set a time target. For example, one of my clients wanted to finish reading the pile of books in his home office this year. He had around thirty-five books he’d bought, and they were real books, not ebooks.
I suggested to him that he set a target of reading for 20 minutes every evening before going to bed. This, he felt, was realistic on days he was tired out.
Speaking to him last week, he said he had discovered that on most days he read for well over 45 minutes, and on some days he read for over an hour.
Over the course of 2025, he’s only missed two days—and those days were when he was at home, but was away on a business trip.
He finished reading the books by the end of August. He’s now buying books again and is confident he’ll stay on top of them.
What happened here was that my client set a realistic goal based on the worst-case scenario rather than the best-case scenario. On most days, he exceeded his set minimum, which meant he finished his goal well before the deadline.
Another factor in his success here was the set time in the evening before going to bed. That gave him an anchor point.
This is why I recommend that people who wish to write a journal do it in the morning rather than in the evening. You have more control over the morning than you do the evening. And it’s a great way to begin your day with a nice cup of tea or coffee, and a place to write down your thoughts and feelings before the day gets going.
You can add to your journal in the evening if you wish, but if you want to be consistent in writing, you will find that starting your day with your journal will help you write every day.
I remember back in July when we went to Ireland to see my parents. There were my wife and my parents-in-law, and we stayed at my wife’s aunt’s house the night before, since she lived close to the airport and our flight was early the next morning.
Waking up at 4 am with everyone running around, making sure they had everything, didn’t feel appropriate for me to write my journal at that point. So I skipped it. However, by the time we got to the airport, went through security, and settled in to wait for our flight, I felt this urge to write. So, I found a small coffee shop, got a coffee and sat down to write.
The sense of relief I felt after writing my journal left me relaxed and ready for the long travels ahead.
There was no need for discipline or motivation. It had become something I do every morning, and when I don’t, something feels wrong.
And that’s what you are trying to do. Turning whatever it is you want to do consistently into your way of life.
This is why brushing your teeth when you wake up and before you go to bed is automatic. You learn to do it when you are young, and after a lot of nagging from your parents, it soon becomes automatic. The thought of going out in the morning without brushing your teeth probably leaves you horrified.
But if you stop and think about it, brushing your teeth in the morning is inconvenient. There’s a lot to do: get the kids ready for school, prepare their breakfast and get yourself ready. Three or four minutes in the bathroom, moving your arm from left to right… Argh! But you do it.
You don’t need motivation or discipline. You just do it. It’s a part of your life.
I was talking with a running friend of mine recently who wakes up at 6:00 am every morning, rain or shine, and goes out for his morning run at 6:30. I asked him if he ever considered staying in bed when the wind was howling outside and the rain was pouring down. He shuddered. The very thought of not going out for his morning run shocked him.
He doesn’t need discipline or motivation to get up and go for a run. His problem would be if the doctor told him to stay in bed for a few days. Then he’s really struggling because staying in bed is not his lifestyle.
All those people you look at and think, “Gosh, they are disciplined” —they never think they are. To them, whatever they do is just a part of their life.
I’m lucky because I have a dog. Dogs need exercise. They love walking. And Louis is no exception. It’s one of the highlights of his day. This means I need to find an hour each day to go for a walk with him. Yet, I don’t need any discipline to take him for his walk. It’s just something I do each day.
Similarly, at 4:30 pm, I do my exercise. 4:30 pm triggers the start of my evening routine. I exercise for an hour, take a shower, then go downstairs and cook dinner. I do this six days a week, with Saturday being the exception.
It never occurs to me not to go upstairs and exercise. If I’m not feeling great, I’ll do a lighter session; sometimes I may only do some stretching. But at 4:30, I know it’s time to stop work and exercise. It’s just what I do. It’s a part of my everyday routine.
Now, one more thing, Anna. A mistake many people make is trying to do too many things at once. When you do this, you are diluting yourself too much.
Remember, to accomplish anything, you will need some discipline and focus to begin with. You’re trying to do something that is not a part of your regular life, and it will feel uncomfortable at first.
I mentioned focus there because this is when you may need your calendar or task manager to nudge you for a few weeks—reminding you that you have something to do.
It’s easier to focus on one thing at a time.
A trick I started using—and found very effective—was to divide the year into quarters and start one new thing each quarter. This gave me three months to develop the necessary habits to turn whatever it was I wanted to change into a solid habit.
There’s no rush to accomplish these things. As Bill Gates said, “most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in twelve months”
Focusing on one thing at a time means you need less focus and less time.
And finally, if you were trying to do a new activity every day, you’re likely to miss some days. Take the reading habit, if your goal is to read for twenty minutes every day, allow yourself some wriggle room.
Rather than thinking you failed because you missed a day, look at achieving an 80%+ success rate. It’s hard to start a new activity and be consistent with it at first. It’s likely you will forget or just not do the activity one day. That’s okay. It doesn’t mean you failed.
What matters is that you acknowledge the skip and get back to it the next day. That way, you’re not looking at it as a matter of success or failure; you see it as a work in progress, and a day or two missed is not final. It just means you need to refocus the next day.
I always think of those early weeks as experimental weeks. If I find that the time of day I try to do something doesn’t work, I can try other times until I find the right one when I can be consistent.
I hope that has helped Anna. Do let me know how you get on, and thank you for your question, and to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
“When I was Leader of the Opposition in the UK and some time out from an election which we were expected to win, I visited President Clinton at the White House. As we began our set of meetings, he said: “Remind me to tell you something really important before you leave.”
I was greatly taken with this and assumed I was about to have some huge secret of state imparted to me.
As I was leaving, I reminded him. He looked at me very solemnly and said, “Whoever runs your schedule is the most important person in your world as a Leader. You need time to think, time to study and time to get the things done you came to leadership to do. Lose control of the schedule and you will fail.”
I confess I was a little underwhelmed at the time. But he was right.”
That’s an extract from former British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s book. On Leadership: Lessons for the 21st Century. And it’s perfect for the theme of this week’s episode—finding time to do the important things.
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Script | 392
Hello, and welcome to episode 392 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
It’s nice when our systems work. We follow our plans for the day and the week, and when we arrive at the end of the week and look back, 80% or more of what we set out to accomplish is crossed off.
Unfortunately, those weeks are rare—even for the most productive of people. There are far too many unknowns that will pop up each day and week for us to consistently get what we plan to do, when we plan to do it, done.
But that doesn’t mean that productivity systems are a waste of time. They are not. A solid productivity system keeps you focused on what’s important to you and gives you a way to prioritise what matters most.
And it doesn’t matter where you are in life. You might be nearing retirement and in the early stages of preparing your business for sale, or you could be starting out on a university graduate programme.
There will always be things to do, some important, some less so. The key is to remain consistent with your system so you know each week, you are nudging the right things forward, even if you’re not getting everything done.
And that leads me to this week’s question, AND… The Mystery Podcast Voice is back! So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Serena. Serena asks, Hi Carl, I have implemented productivity systems to keep me on track with my academics as a graduate student, and they have worked well when I consistently followed the steps. The problem is that when I get stressed out, I fall behind on deadlines. When the weekends come, I just want to decompress and do nothing. What can I do to get back on track with the system and continue to practice good personal productivity practices?
Hi Serena, thank you for your question.
When I was at university, we had four core subjects each semester. It was on these that we would be expected to write essays and be examined on at the end of the academic year.
This is nice because from an organisational standpoint, class times will be predefined for you. They would go onto your calendar. These become your weekly commitments.
And while you may not know the deadlines for the essays at the start of the semester, you will know roughly when they will be due. That would be the same with your exams; you may not know the precise date of the exams at the start of the academic year, but you will know roughly when they will be held.
This is often the same for many of you in the workplace. You may know which quarter a project deadline falls in, but you may not know exactly which date the deadline will be.
One thing you do know, though, is that there is a deadline.
Now, whatever we are working on we all have four limitations to deal with. Time itself, there’s only 168 hours each week. The fact that you can only work on one thing at a time, our emotions—sometimes we’re just not “in the mood” —and, as humans, we get tired and need to take a break.
There’s nothing we can do about these four limitations.
You can “optimise” the human things though, ensuring you get sufficient sleep being the obvious one, and becoming as stoical as you can be in any given emotional situation (a lot easier said than done)
Given that one of the “fixed” limitations is time itself, the first place to lock down is your calendar. As you will likely know when your lectures will be, the area where your calendar becomes powerful is locking down your personal study times.
For example, if you have a two hour lecture on a Monday morning, and a second two hour lecture in the afternoon, there’s going to be a gap somewhere in the day that will give you an hour or two “free”.
My wife’s currently back at university, and on Wednesdays she has a lecture from 9:10 am to 11:00am. Her next lecture begins at 4:00 pm and runs until 5:50 pm. For her, Wednesdays are her study and homework days.
There’s a five hour gap between lectures and so she can go somewhere quiet and study for the next test (they love tests at my wife’s university)
She calls Wednesday her study day. She’ll often do another two hours of studying after dinner on a Wednesday too.
This goes to something called “theming”. Theming given days for specific activities.
We all do this to a certain degree. For many of you, Monday to Friday are work days and weekends are rest days. But you can go further.
I do this with my week. Monday and Tuesday are writing days, Wednesday is audio/visual day, and Saturday mornings are my planning and admin mornings.
This does not mean all I do on those days is write or record videos and podcasts; it means that the bulk of what I do on those days is in line with that day’s theme.
This goes back to the limitation of being able to do only one thing at a time. However, if you know that on a Tuesday you will study a particular subject, the only decision you will need to make is what you will study. This means you avoid being overwhelmed by choice.
It’s Tuesday, so it’s anatomy day. That’s your theme, you study anatomy, for example.
Now, if you find yourself falling behind, there are a number of things you can do.
The most effectively one is to stop. Grab a piece of paper, a pen or pencil, and a highlighter, and write down everything you have fallen behind on.
Use the highlighter to highlight the most important items and start with them.
Then open your calendar and protect time for doing that work.
Remember, you can only work on one thing at a time, so pick one and start. It’s surprising that once you make a start on something, anything, how the anxiety and stress begin to fall away.
Many of my coaching clients have found that going back to their calendars and blocking two or three hours in the evening or on weekends to “catch up” also relieves stress and anxiety.
I know not taking work home with you is something many people strictly adhere to, but if not taking work home with you is causing untold amounts of stress and anxiety, leaving you with poor-quality sleep and emotions all over the place, perhaps that strict rule may be more damaging to your long-term health, than sacrificing two or three hours on a weekend to catch-up.
The thing is, you don’t have to do this every night or every weekend. It only comes into play when you identify a backlog or you feel you are seriously behind with something.
What you will find is the decision to work on something at a particular time, instantly takes the pressure off you. (Of course, you do need to carry through with your commitment to yourself to do the work at the time you set).
Another thing you can do with your calendar is to reserve some time each week as “catch up” time. Personally, I do this on a Saturday morning. The house is quiet and I have complete control over what I do at that time.
You don’t need to do this Saturday mornings. Many people I work with block Friday afternoons to catch up on work they are behind on, their communications, and admin. Of course this will depend on your lecture times.
If you have lectures on a Friday afternoon, there’s likely to be another day in the week when you have a block of time you could designate as your catch-up time.
It’s this “catch-up” time that gives you the peace of mind knowing that you have time at some point in the week to catch up.
The benefit of having these blocks of time for study, research, and catching up is that you start the week knowing you have enough time, and all you need to do is respect your calendar.
Now, I know that if you haven’t used your calendar as your primary productivity tool before and rarely use it to plan your day, it’s going to be challenging to develop the habit initially. All positive habits are difficult at first. You have to focus on it, and it’s easy to forget.
However, there are two ways to build this habit.
The first is to set aside five to ten minutes at the end of the day to open your calendar and look at what you are committed to the next day. Then mentally plot out when you will do what needs to be done.
The second is to do it in the morning; however, I’ve found the most effective way (and the least stress-inducing) is to do it before you end your day.
As an aside, talking to a couple of my longer-term clients recently, they both mentioned that the best thing they ever did was to set aside five to ten minutes after dinner to plan the next day. Both have recently switched to paper notebooks, and each new page marks a new day.
At the top of the daily page, they write out the two or three most important tasks for the day. Underneath, they capture notes from the day and when they do the daily planning, they transfer any important information or commitments into their digital system.
It’s simple and an A5 notebook is small and non-intusive.
So there you go, Serena, be aware that the limiting factor involved in maintaining your productivity system is time itself. How will you allocate what needs to be done over the 168 hours you have each week? Be clear about when you will do what needs to be done, and try to protect some catch-up time each week.
Thank you for your question and thank you for listening too.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
"Prioritise what matters. You can't be everywhere, do everything, and have everything!"
That’s a quote from Oprah Winfrey, and it captures the essence of this week’s question.
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Script | 391
Hello, and welcome to episode 391 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
You arrive at your desk, open up your Teams messages or email, and your screen fills with line after line of unread (and read) messages. One message grabs your attention, it’s from your boss and you feel compelled to open it.
And from that one action, your whole day is destroyed.
And while I am sure that message from your boss was important and potentially urgent, but did it really warrant destroying your day?
That scenario is happening every day to millions of people, and it makes deciding what your priorities are for the day practically impossible.
So, what can you do to ensure you are acting on your priorities and not being distracted by what appears to be both urgent and important? Giving some reflection, putting aside that so-called urgent message might actually be the best thing you can do.
So, with that said, let me read out this week’s question (The Mystery Podcast Voice is on holiday this week).
This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, hi Carl, I really struggle to decide what I should be working on each day. My work is very dynamic; a lot can be thrown at me each day, and whenever I plan my week or day, none of it ever gets done. What’s the best way to prioritise?
Hi Michael, thank you for your question.
In many ways, what you describe is what I see as the curse of the modern world. The incredible advances in technology have enabled us to do seemingly impossible things, yet they have also sped everything up.
I remember just twenty-three years ago when I worked in a Law office in the UK, and if we received a letter (remember them?) from another lawyer, we effectively had around twenty-four hours to compose our response—even if what was being asked was urgent.
We relied on the postal service, and no matter how fast we responded to that letter, it would not leave our office until 4:00 pm at the earliest on that day.
And if we missed the 4:00 pm deadline, tough. It would have to wait until 4:00 pm the next day—which incidentally gave us a wonderful excuse for anything arriving late.
The expectations from the “other side”, as we called them, were that they would receive the reply two days later.
Today, just twenty-three years later, those two days seem to have fallen to just two minutes. What went wrong?
The problem is that no matter how well planned our days and weeks may be, owing to others’ expectations, we are “expected” to respond within hours, sometimes minutes, not days. This has blurred the line between what we know is important and what is simply urgent noise.
This is why it’s more critical today to be absolutely clear about what is important to you. And I emphasise the words “to you”.
What’s important to you is not necessarily important to another person. When someone requires you to do something for them urgently, it’s urgent to them, not necessarily to you.
You may have twenty similar urgent requests waiting for you. You are expected to decide what is the most urgent. That’s an almost impossible decision to make—if you don’t know what’s important to you.
So, the important place to start, Michael, is to establish your areas of focus. These are the things that are important to you, and they are based on eight areas:
Family and relationships
Health and fitness
Finances
Career and business
Lifestyle and life experiences
Self development
Spirituality
And your life’s purpose.
The first step is to define what each one means to you and then pull out what action steps you need to take to keep everything in balance.
These are the higher-level priorities in your life.
There’s a little more to it than that, and if you want to learn more about developing your areas of focus, you can download my free Areas of Focus Workbook from my website; the link is in the show notes.
Next, what is your core work? This is the work you are employed to do.
Now, most people can describe their jobs. For example, I’m an architect, a doctor, a nurse, a bricklayer, a teacher, or a TV presenter.
Yet, there’s another step here. What does doing what you do look like at a task level?
I know what architects do—they design buildings—but I don’t know what they do at a task level.
I’ve seen building blueprints, so I guess they create those, but I don’t know how they do that. Is it with a pencil and a ruler, or is it done on a computer?
Those tasks that you identify as being critical to the work you are employed to do will always form your priorities each day when at work.
After all, if you are not doing the work you were hired to do, you’re not likely to be in your job for very long.
Now this makes your life a little easier. Once you know what you need to do each day, or week, for your job, you will also be able to make a reasonably accurate estimate how long each of those tasks will take you.
This will tell you how much time you need to perform your work each week.
Now, you can only work with averages here. There are some external factors that could throw off your timings. Things such as poor sleep or a crisis at work.
Yet, on the whole, you’ll find you manage to get all the essential work done each week.
Now the clever part is to protect time for doing your most important work.
I’ve found that if you can dedicate two hours each morning to your critical work for the day, you will be on top by the end of the week.
From a professional perspective, if you are writing off two hours a day for doing your most important work, that still leaves you with around six hours to deal with anything else.
I grew up on a farm. It was an arable farm with some animals. Each harvest time, when it was time to combine the corn fields, my father would never entertain the thought of meeting with the bank manager, tax inspector or representatives from the seed company.
And to make things more complicated, my father farmed in the UK, which has notoriously unpredictable weather. When the corn was ready and the weather was dry, it was out! Out! Out!
I remember my mother frequently calling dentists, doctors, the bank, and anyone else my father was scheduled to see to cancel appointments.
Harvesting the crops was core work. Nothing got in the way of bringing the barley and wheat in.
And that’s the approach you need to have with your core work. No matter who requests your time, when it’s time to get on with your core work, it’s no. No, No. Come back in an hour and I’ll be able to help you.
Now, I began by telling you to establish your areas of focus. Because these are the higher-level areas of your life, it’s important to adopt the same approach to protecting time for the things that matter.
For example, I have many clients who prioritise being home in time for dinner with their spouse or partner and kids. This means if the family sits down for dinner at seven and it takes thirty minutes to get home, then no matter what, you leave the office at 6:00 to 6:15 pm.
It’s a non-negotiable.
The good thing about this kind of constraint is that it invokes Parkinson’s Law, that is where the work will fill up the time available.
If I have thirty minutes to finish writing this script, I’m certain I will do it. Similarly, if I had ninety minutes it would take me precisely ninety minutes. It’s a weird law that works.
The sense of time pressure focuses your brain to filter out what would usually distracts you.
When it comes to priorities, knowing what is most important to you makes deciding what to work on first much easier.
Now, imagine you had ten pieces of work to complete, all equally important, urgent, and connected to your core work. How would you decide?
Well, your only option is to follow the principle of first in, first out. Begin with the oldest one and work from there.
Incidentally, I suggest you do the same with your actionable email. Begin by replying to the oldest first. In Outlook and Apple Mail, you can reverse the order of messages in each folder. By default, these will show you the newest at the top. Change that to show you the oldest first.
That might be a little uncomfortable at first because it will remind you how far behind you are with your email. But stick with it. You will soon find that your response times to emails speed up without any extra effort.
Another level you may wish to add here is to create some “if this… Then that” rules.
For example, if there are certain people whom you know you must respond to immediately, then apply a rule. “If I get a request from X, then I will prioritise that request”
However, be careful with that one. It’s easy to take the easy way out and add bosses, supervisors and pretty much anyone to this list.
For me, there are only two people: my wife and my mother, I would do that for. That’s because my Family and relationships are the most important area for me. (And because my father doesn’t have a phone, hahaha)
At a work level, I will prioritise anything related to money or lost passwords. I know how concerned people are about money—they bought the wrong course, or a refund needs processing.
Beyond that, any other request will have to wait its turn.
I know this will be difficult for some of you at first. It certainly was for me. But I can promise you that if you work at it and drill down into learning what is important to you, you will find making these decisions easy.
I hope that has helped, Michael. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."
That’s a famous quote from Groucho Marx and encapsulates perfectly what this episode is about
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Script | 390
Hello, and welcome to episode 390 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I’ve been coaching people one-on-one for seven years, and in that time, I picked up some ideas that, when adopted by clients, almost always guarantee they will transform their time management and productivity.
None of these ideas is revolutionary, which isn’t surprising since people have long struggled with time management and productivity issues.
Our attitude to time and the expectations of others has changed, but the amount of time we have hasn’t.
Technology, rather than helping us to do more in less time, has elevated the amount we are expected to do.
Fifty years ago, we might have received thirty letters; today, technology has elevated the number of digital letters and messages we receive into the hundreds. And while we may be quicker at responding, we’re not realistically able to respond to hundreds of emails and messages each day and still produce work.
(Even though I know a number of you are trying)
It goes back to what I wrote and spoke about two or three years ago, fashions may change, but the principles don’t.
AI and ChatGPT are all the rage today. If you’ve gone down that rabbit hole, you will have been blown away by what it can do. It’s incredible.
Yet what is it doing? It is making some parts of our work faster. Yet, most people still don’t have enough time to do all their work. What’s happening?
Well, telling everyone that you can now produce a sales review presentation in less than twenty minutes with the help of ChatGPT means you are now expected to create more presentations.
That sales review presentation may have taken you two days before, but now, if you can do it in twenty minutes, boom! Your boss can give you more work to do!
So what are the traits, best practices and ideas that do work that the people who have seen a massive increase in their time management and productivity follow?
Well, that’s the subject of this week’s question. And that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Lauren. Lauren asks, “Hi Carl, I know you have been coaching people for a long time, and I am curious to know what the most productive people you meet do that is different from those less successful at it.”
Hi Lauren, thank you for your question.
As I eluded to, the most productive people I’ve coached follow principles, not fashions, and are ruthless with their time allocation.
Those principles are to collect everything, process what you gathered, eliminate unnecessary things, and allocate time for doing what’s left.
But it goes a little deeper than that.
First, you need to know what is important to you. That relates to your Areas of Focus. Those are the eight areas of life we all share but will define and prioritise differently.
Things like, your family and relationships, career, finances, health and fitness and self-development.
Knowing what these mean to you and what priority they are in your life goes a long way to helping you to build productive days.
Almost every client of mine that has significantly improved their time management have gone through the Areas of Focus exercise and defined each one.
The second part to this is to be clear about what your core work is. This is the work you are employed to do.
What I found interesting is that my YouTube Short video with the fewest views is the one asking the question: What are you employed to do?”
That doesn’t surprise me.
Going through and defining your Areas of Focus and core work is not sexy. Quick fixes, new tools and apps are the sexy things, yet none of those will ever help you regain control of your time.
Sure, they are fun, exciting and interesting to explore. But they are distractions that will never help you be better at managing your time.
(I learned that one the hard way. I used to waste so much time each week playing with new apps, programmes and tools)
Speaking of tools, I have noticed that the most productive people use simple tools. Often it’s Microsoft ToDo or Apple’s Reminders. Quite a few use Todoist, but I suspect that’s because I have done nearly four hundred videos on Todoist and many of my clients found me through YouTube.
People who struggle the most are using project management tools like ClickUp or Monday.com.
Those types of tools require far too much maintenance to keep them up-to-date and that takes time away from you doing the work you are organising.
It’s as the old saying goes, you’re trying to crack a nut by using a sledge hammer.
But, the stand out change that people make that has the biggest impact on their time management and overall productivity is they get ruthless with their time allocation.
And I mean ruthless.
For example, one long term client, now a senior executive in his company, will not allow any meetings on a Monday morning or a Friday afternoon. Those times are blocked on his calendar.
He uses that time for doing his most important work for that week.
Three hours Monday morning and three hours Friday afternoon. That’s six hours he knows will not be interrupted and so he can confidently allocate work to those times.
I remember when we first started. He was all over the place. He had meetings lined up Monday through Friday and couldn’t even find a hour to quietly get on with his work.
His default answer to any request was “yes” and it was destroying him.
Now, not only does he have greater respect for his own time, his colleagues also do. Nobody even bothers to ask for a meeting on a Monday morning or Friday afternoon because they know he will say no.
The key here is to get control of your calendar. (Another principle). If you’re not in control there, it doesn’t matter what you do elsewhere because you’ve lost control in the one area that determines what you do and when.
Everyone will be different here.
I have one client who’s a surgeon and a professor. She has to divide her time between the operating room and the classroom.
Her surgery hours are fixed. So, she knows she will be in the operating room on a Tuesday and Thursday. Her teaching hours vary according to each semester, but once the academic year begins, her lecture times are fixed.
These times are locked into her calendar. But she goes further. She knows that she will have to meet with patients and students. So, Wednesdays are dedicated for patients. She will visit the patients she will be operating on the next day and deal with any out-patient clinics on a Wednesday.
So three days a week are dedicated to her role as a surgeon.
She will do her academic work on Mondays and Fridays. Most of her lectures are in the mornings, and she will stay in her office in the afternoons so she’s available for students if they need her.
What she has done is to become ruthless with how she allocates her time each week. Her calendar is sacred territory.
She does open Saturday mornings during exam times so students can access her if needed, and she can do any outstanding admin work in between.
What got her back in control was taking back control of her calendar and saying “no” to requests that did not fit in with her priorities.
And this is where it’s hard for most people. Getting control of their calendar. The easy part is organising and reorganising your task manager. Really all you are doing there is moving things around.
When it comes to getting control of your calendar you have to interact with other people and that means in some instances you will need to say No.
And there human nature will challenge us. We’re wired to “please people”. So saying “no, I cannot meet with you” is tough. It’s easier to find an excuse why you are different to everyone else.
Yet, you don’t have to say no. You can use services such as Calendly, that lets you pick times you will be available for meetings and all you need do is share your unique link with people requesting a meeting with you. They can then choose a time that works for them without all the hassle of trying to find a time.
Technology has conditioned us to become comfortable with automated systems. There’s little to no pushback these days. In fact I’d go as far as to say that people much prefer to choose their appointment time from an online booking service.
Another long-time client of mine is a financial advisor. He adopted Calendly for his clients to use to book a call with him.
He was expecting a lot of pushback from his clients. Instead he got a lot of compliments. They loved it. They could book a time to talk with him from the comfort of their own sofa late at night without having to call or message him during “office hours”.
Now, whenever he gets a message or email requesting a meeting, he sends them the link to his booking service.
This means he’s in complete control of his time. He can open or close meeting time slots during his weekly planning sessions, and he knows when he will be meeting clients so he can be better prepared for the meeting.
And speaking of weekly planning. This is possibly the number one idea that brings the most significant improvement.
Consistently planning the week is really a no-brainer no matter what role you have in your professional and personal life.
The senior executive, surgeon and financial advisor I previously mentioned wouldn’t dream of beginning a week without a plan. It’s how they can manage conferences, holidays and other extraordinary weeks.
Without a plan for the week, it’s like setting out on a journey without knowing where you are going. You’ll get somewhere but highly likely it’ll be a place you do not want to be.
The weekly plan is about deciding what is important to you that week. What projects need attention, where your meetings are, and what you want to accomplish.
For instance, many of my clients will decide when they will exercise at a weekly level. They’ll decide how many times they want to go to the gym or out for a run and set that as an objective. This gives them the flexibility they need to ensure they are getting the right things done whilst taking care of the personal maintenance we all need of the right amount of sleep, exercise and eating the right food types.
The final piece is the daily planning. This is where you decide at a task level what needs to be done.
Because the world we live in today is fast moving, there will likely be things on your weekly plan that need to change. It’s the daily planning where you can make those adjustments.
For example, if the senior executive came into work one day and walked into a crisis such as what recently happened to Jaguar Land Rover with the cyber attack, his whole week would need to change. It’s at a daily level that those changes can be taken care of.
Meetings can be cancelled, auto reply can be set up on email services to explain why they cannot respond to emails and messages, etc.
That might be extreme, but it clearly can happen and things will need to change.
So there you go, Lauren. The people who get it, who are living productive and well managed lives follow a few simple principles.
They follow the COD methodology—collect stuff, organise and process that stuff, eliminating the unimportant and then ensure they get on with the work.
They ruthlessly protect their time on their calendars and never delegate management of their calendar to anyone else.
They plan the week and day to ensure they are working on the right things at the right time and are clear about what is important to them.
I hope that has helped and thank you for your question.
It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Hyrum Smith, the creator of the Franklin planner, once said: "When your daily activities are in concert with your highest priorities, you have a credible claim to inner peace."
And that nicely begins this week’s episode: what I’ve learned from my time with the Franklin Planner over the last twelve months.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Script | 389
Hello, and welcome to episode 389 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Between October and the end of December, I like to experiment with different time management and productivity tools to see what I can learn and discover about managing my work.
Last year, I chose the Franklin Planner. That has been a revelation. It allowed me to revisit how I managed my time and work while working in a high-pressure work environment with rapidly changing priorities and a constant supply of crises each day.
In this week’s episode, I want to share what I learned from the experiment with the Franklin Planner and how it has changed how I manage my work and time.
I was first introduced to the Franklin Planner back in 1992. My former boss, Andrew, inspired me to start using it. At that time, I also read Hyrum Smith’s Ten Natural Laws of Time and Life Management, which was a book written to introduce the planner.A
From 1992 to 2009, I religiously used the Franklin Planner to manage not just my work, but my life.
I remember writing in my planner the first time I had the idea of coming to Korea, and then turning it into a project in the back of the planner. All my fears, concerns and excitements were written in there. Twenty-three years later, I still look back on that decision to come to Korea as being the best decision I’ve ever made.
For those unfamiliar with the Franklin Planner, let’s start with the idea behind it.
When you first receive your Franklin Planner, you are encouraged to write out your “governing values”. These are the things that are important to you—values such as honesty, integrity, how you treat others and your family.
From these, you can determine your performance against what is important to you and set goals based on that.
This is where I got the inspiration for my areas of focus. We all share eight areas of life, which we define and prioritise differently.
These eight are: family and relationships, Career or business, health and fitness, self-development, finances, lifestyle and life experiences, spirituality and life’s purpose.
It’s these governing values that become the foundations of your system with the Franklin Planner.
Once you have established your governing values, you can begin using the daily pages. On the left, you have a prioritised task list. Next to that, you have your schedule for the day, and on the right-hand page, you have a space to collect notes.
What became immediately obvious to me when I been using the Franklin Planner, was the way it forced me to stop and think.
The act of handwriting what I decided were my most important tasks for the day slowed me down and got me thinking about what was genuinely important.
With digital systems, it’s all too easy to add random dates to a task, hoping that by some miracle you will find the time to do it. And I know some of you add random dates because you’re afraid of forgetting about the task, even though the task does not need to be done on the date you assigned it.
With the Franklin Planner, you stop doing that. You become more intentional about what you will do each day, which ensures that you are focused on the important tasks.
What I noticed was that I became much better at prioritising.
It becomes annoying to rewrite a task day after day because you didn’t do it. So you either delete it or you do it.
With digital systems, it’s easy to give up and move the task to another random day. And when that day comes, you don’t do it again, so push it off again and again.
The other related lesson from the Franklin Planner was that you become hyper-aware of what you can realistically do each day.
Because you write out your appointments for the day first, you can see, in plain sight, just how much time you have for doing tasks.
If you’ve got seven hours of meetings, a concert to go to, and you want to fit in a thirty-minute exercise session, you will instantly see that you won’t have much time to do tasks.
With digital systems, all your tasks are hidden and given that most people don’t manage their calendars particularly well and have multiple events in the same time slot, it’s difficult to see where the important events and tasks are.
Not so with the Franklin Planner. You won’t be able to over-schedule yourself. Writing out your commitments each day ensures you don’t overcommit.
I did discover some redundancies with the Planner, though. One of which was the monthly calendar tabs in your planner.
The digital calendar is superb. If an appointment is rescheduled, it’s easy to drag and drop it to the new date and time. In the Franklin Planner, you would need to Tippex or cross out the appointment and rewrite it on the new date.
Although if you want to retain complete control over your calendar, the Franklin Planner would be a better option. Nobody would be able to add an appointment to your calendar, and you would have to go through you first to schedule anything with you.
I did find a useful way to use the monthly calendar tabs, though. Each month, I write out my goals and the projects I expect to complete that month. This has been very useful when doing my weekly planning, as it gives me a central place free from the distractions of other goals and projects.
A great way to stay focused on what you have decided is important in that month.
Another feature of the Franklin Planner is the way you reference information you collect. When you write a note in the daily notes area, each note is assigned a number.
For example, the first note you write is given the number 1, and the next is number 2. This then gives you a simple way to retrieve information you may have written.
At the beginning of each monthly tab, you have a sheet called the “Index”. If you want to find the note you made, all you need to do is write the date you wrote the note and its number. For example, 19-10/1 would refer to the first note you made on the 19th October.
It’s a wonderful retrieval system and one I found very useful when planning the month or the week.
But the biggest takeaway for me was the way the Franklin Planner slowed me down and got me to think about how I was using my time. Planning the day by writing out my appointments first to see how much time I had left after them to do my tasks forced me to get realistic about what I could do that day.
For example, yesterday, I took my mother to the airport. The airport is about a four-hour drive each way. This meant I was away for at least eight hours, and I could see that on my calendar for the day. It meant I had very little time to do tasks, which I could see when I did my daily planning the evening before.
It really focused me on getting the critical work done before we set off because traffic conditions are unpredictable, and I didn’t want to leave anything to chance when I got back, just in case I was delayed.
Sure, you can do that digitally, but because all our tasks are in our digital systems, it can become overwhelming and stressful looking at hundreds of tasks trying to decide which ones must be done that day.
With the Franklin Planner, you effectively have a blank slate each day to choose what you must do. Taking ten minutes away from your screen and really thinking about what is important for the day can do incredible things for your focus.
Oh, and I should mention that the dopamine hit you get from crossing off a task by hand is way more powerful than a digital click.
So what has this experiment with the Franklin Planner changed about my system as a whole?
Well, the first thing is I’ve started to add to my journal the two most important tasks of the day. I write my journal by hand each morning, and I’ve always tracked my morning routine habit and my exercise in there. Now I write out my two most important tasks.
Again, what this has done is to get me focused on the day.
My daily planning has changed, too. Now, I start by looking at my calendar for the next day’s appointments before I curate my list of tasks for the day.
For example, today I have seven hours of meetings. When I did my planning last night, I saw that and realised the only thing I would be able to do today was this podcast.
In the past, I would have ignored all that and begun the day with ten to fifteen tasks and seven hours of meetings. Those days were broken before they started. There was no way I would do all that in one day.
Will I continue with the Planner? That’s a difficult one to answer.
The areas where the planner has helped me can be replicated with a regular desk diary. I did not find that I added that many notes to the daily notes field. I carry a pocket notebook with me for random thoughts, and I like the randomness of that.
Meeting notes, project, and content ideas go directly into my digital notes system, and I have a paper-based planning book where I plan out my bigger projects, weekly plans, and YouTube videos.
And the “deal-breaker’ for me has been the poor quality of paper that Franklin Planner uses. I am a fountain pen user, and the paper in a Franklin Planner is terrible for fountain pens.
A good quality desk diary with fountain pen-friendly paper would give me everything I currently use the Franklin Planner for and allow me to use my family of fountain pens.
But for someone who struggles with digital systems, feels swamped by long lists of to-dos and wants to adopt a simple paper-based system, then the Franklin Planner would fit perfectly.
For me, a three-month experiment this year, I am going all in with Apple’s Productivity system. Using only Apple’s Reminders, Notes and Calendar for three months to see what I can learn about these tools.
If you’re interested in this experiment, keep an eye on my YouTube channel as I will be updating my discoveries there.
Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
“I used to say, ‘I sure hope things will change, ' then I learned that the only way things are going to change for me is when I change."
That’s a quote from the wonderful Jim Rohn. A strong proponent of developing a plan for your life, and a part of that is creating a strong plan for the new year.
In this special episode, I’ll walk you through the steps for the Annual Planning Season, which began on October 1st.
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Script | 388
Hello, and welcome to episode 388 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
A mistake I used to make was to come up with some ideas about what I would like to change in the new year in that gap between Christmas and the New Year.
The only reason I ever did that was because my friends were asking, “What are your New Year’s resolutions?” I never really had any, so I used to quickly think up some cool-sounding ideas and say that was what I was going to do.
And yet, it wasn’t always like that.
When I was a competitive athlete in my teens, each year in December, I would sit down with my coach and plan what we would achieve the following year.
What times we were going for and which races were to be the “big ones”.
I still remember the year I broke 2 minutes for the 800 metres and 4 minutes for the 1,500 metres. We knew I was close, having ended the previous year at 2 minutes 3 seconds for the 800 and 4 minutes 6 seconds for the 1,500.
All that was needed was a good, strong winter and pre-season training. I remember going into 1986 in one of the most positive frames of mind ever.
Then, when I stopped running competitively—one of my biggest regrets—I stopped planning the year. And that coincided with my not achieving very much.
I drifted from one job to another. Had no idea what I wanted to do, and I remember feeling unfulfilled and lost.
Fortunately, I rediscovered annual planning. The sitting down and thinking about what I wanted to accomplish. It was that restart that resulted in me coming to Korea, and discovering my passion—teaching.
Everything I have achieved over the last 23 years can be traced back to following my annual planning method.
From finding a career I loved, to getting married and moving to the East Coast of Korea—one of the most beautiful places in the world—and starting the company I run today, now employing four people.
All of these ideas began with the annual planning method.
So, what is the annual planning method? Well, it’s five simple questions you ask yourself and give some thought to over two months—October and November.
Those five questions are:
- What would you like to change about yourself?
- What would you like to change about your lifestyle?
- What would you like to change about the way you work?
- What could you do to challenge yourself?
- What goals would you like to achieve?
Let me explain the kind of things you can think about.
What would you like to change about yourself? This is about you. Your current habits and routines. Are these delivering the results you want?
When I sat down to write Your Time, Your Way, I knew I had to sacrifice some exercise time in order to write. I was okay with that, and I also knew a consequence of reducing my exercise time would be a gain in weight.
Two years later, I had gained eight kilograms (about 17 ½ pounds)!
Not good. If my weight exceeds 83 kilograms, I feel sluggish and quickly become tired.
So, in my planning last year, I made it a non-negotiable to get my weight back to my regular weight of 80 kilograms (about 176 pounds or 12 ½ stone)
Today, as I write this, my weight is 80.5 kgs. Well within my weight window.
That all started with asking myself, “What do I want to change about myself?” The answer was to get back into my regular exercise routine.
So, what would you like to change about yourself? Are you doing things that are not contributing to the results you want? Are you not consistently planning your days or weeks?
Are you not moving enough? Are you spending too much time sitting down in front of a screen and not enough time in nature?
Another one is how you dress. The pandemic saw a collapse in the way people dressed. This may not interest you, but perhaps you’d like to dress better when you go out. What could you do to improve your dress sense?
Maybe you’d like to begin journaling or meditation. Write anything you consider down. You’re not committing to anything yet; you’re brainstorming ideas. The commitments you make come in December. October and November are all about developing ideas and going deep.
The next question, “What do I want to change about my lifestyle?” Is about how you live your life every day. Is your house a mess? Do you leave your bed unmade when you get up in the morning? What about your car? Is it a garbage can on wheels?
Perhaps you’d like to come home to a clean home at the end of the day? If so, what could you do to change things?
One idea that my wife and I had at the end of 2019 was to move to the East Coast of Korea. To do that, we knew we’d have to finally get a car. Living in Seoul, the capital city, with its superb public transport system, meant that having a car was not a high priority for us.
Yet, for us to get out of Seoul and live in a cleaner, quieter city, we needed to explore Korea. So, that became the plan: to buy a car and begin exploring possible places to live.
By the end of 2020, we had a car and moved to the East Coast.
That change brought some tremendously positive changes in our lives.
Yet, I know that had we not sat down to talk about our future plans, we’d still be living in a crowded, noisy, polluted city. Seoul is a great city, don’t get me wrong, but with 11 million people sharing it, you can imagine how noisy and crowded it can be.
Is there anything you’ve always wanted to do relating to your lifestyle that you’ve never considered what you need to do to make happen? Write that down.
What would you like to change about the way you work? A great question if you’ve found yourself stuck in a job or career that leaves you feeling dead inside.
Some people I know have decided to completely change their careers when answering this question, while others have started their own businesses.
It doesn’t have to be as dramatic as that, though. Perhaps you don’t like the structure you have in place to do your work. It could be a tools thing, too. Do you need to upgrade the way you manage your tasks and projects?
What about your workspace? Does it need an overhaul? I’ve done that a few times. Does your current workspace feel sterile and cold? Could you change your desk or your chair?
If you work from home, can you do anything to make your workspace more stimulating? Perhaps move your desk nearer a window or change the lighting?
All these ideas can lead to some fantastic changes. However, you do need time to think things through, and that’s what October and November are for.
The fourth question is What can you do to challenge yourself?
This question is there because often we get stuck in our comfort zones. We become afraid to change anything because we fear what those changes may bring. Yet, if you’re not challenging yourself, you soon find yourself trapped in stagnation.
Physical challenges are a great place to start. If you feel you’ve become a little too sedentary, perhaps you could challenge yourself to do a park run in March.
Or for those of you who are more ambitious, perhaps you could challenge yourself to do a triathlon or a full marathon in 2026.
What about going back to school and getting a degree? One such challenge that comes up each year on my list is to do a master’s in contemporary British history. I’m sure it will be on my list this year, too.
Think of the things that frighten you. Is there anything you could do to overcome that fear?
The final question is What goals would you like to achieve in 2026?
There’s a reason this is the final question. That’s because after you’ve thought about the previous four questions, you’re more likely to think about how you can measure success in the changes you want to make.
One such goal my wife and I have already added is to have a big savings goal in 2026. This will affect both our spending habits—no more fountain pen purchases for me (oh no!) We haven’t settled on an amount yet, but we’re thinking about it.
Perhaps you want to set the goal of getting a promotion next year or finally starting that business you’ve been thinking about for years.
Or it could simply be a bad habit that you want to stop. Doom scrolling, the new smoking bad habit, or going to bed earlier. What about reading books? How many would you like to read in 2026?
The purpose of these questions is to get you to think. Think about what you want out of life.
You are amazing, and there’s so much you could do. Yet, you will only be able to do those incredible things if you externalise them and begin to think about how you could make them happen.
The best place to keep this list of questions is in a paper notebook. I used to do this digitally, but found I was too easily distracted when trying to write them out on my iPad or phone.
When I switched to writing these questions out in my Planning Book—an A4 notebook where I keep all my initial project plans, weekly planning sessions, and YouTube video plans—I found I thought more deeply and better.
But, if you prefer digital notes, then by all means use that.
Remember, now is not the time to make any firm commitments or even to think about how you will accomplish any of these things. Now is about idea generation.
Many of the things you write down may not be practical or realistic next year, but they may begin a chain of thought that leads you towards achieving them in future years.
That’s why it’s important to write your thoughts down in a place to return to next year. It’s a starting block. I’m always amazed at what I accomplished when I review my previous years’ notes on 1st October. And yes, occasionally disappointed that I didn’t follow through with something.
The focus, though, is ultimately on 2026. What do you want to accomplish?
Now, for those of you who have taken my Time And Life Mastery programme, October’s a great time to retake it.
When I developed that course, my purpose was to create something you could return to each year to help stimulate ideas and remind you of what you want to do in your life.
I must confess, even though it’s a course I created and wrote, I use October to go through it myself. It reminds me of my long-term vision of the life I want to live and refocuses me on my objectives.
If you haven’t joined the programme yet, you can do so today. And if you use the coupon code “codingreat,” you’ll get 50% off your purchase.
I’ll leave the details in the show notes for you.
And there you go. That’s how to plan out a fruitful, exciting year. Start now and begin thinking about what you want to change. Don’t hold back either. Be as wild as you can be. You do not have to commit to anything right now. That’s for December. All you are doing now is preparing the land, if you like. You can choose what to sow later.
And, one more thing… Have fun with this and talk with your partner and loved ones. I involve my wife because the lifestyle question involves both of us, and the things I want to change about myself can often be stimulated by asking her what she thinks. My wife can be brutally honest, frequently leading to some excellent changes.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.”
That is possibly one of Stephen Covey’s most famous quotes. It’s at the heart of almost all time management and productivity advice today. It addresses one of the biggest challenges today—the cycle of focusing on the urgent at the expense of working on the important. If you focus on the urgent, all you get is more urgent stuff. If you focus on the important, you reduce the urgent stuff.
It’s all about priorities, and that’s what we’re looking at today.
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Script | 387
Hello, and welcome to episode 387 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
There are two natural laws of time management and productivity that, for one reason or another, are frequently forgotten, and yet they are immutable and permanent, and you or I cannot change them.
They are:
You can only do one thing at a time, and anything you do requires time.
When you understand this and internalise it, you can create a solid time management and productivity system based on your needs and what you consider important.
This doesn’t change at any time in your life. When we are young and dependent on our parents, these natural laws still hold true.
These laws are still then when we retire from the workforce and perhaps gain a little more agency over our time. You can take the time to landscape your garden and travel the world, yet you cannot do both simultaneously.
Even if you are fortunate enough to be able to afford to hire a landscape gardener to do the bulk of the heavy lifting for you, you will still need time to plan what you want done and find the right landscaper.
What this means is every day you have a puzzle to solve. What to do with the time you have available that day.
And the secret to getting good at solving this daily puzzle is to know what your priorities are. And that is where a little foresight and thought can help you quickly make the right decisions.
And that neatly brings us to this week’s question, which means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.
This week’s question comes from Mel. Mel asks, Hi Carl, I’ve followed you for some time now and would love to know your thoughts on prioritising your day. I have family commitments and work full-time, and I often struggle to fit everything in. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.
Hi Mel, Thank you for your question.
I must confess it took me many years to understand these natural laws. Like most people, I felt I could get anything done on time, that I had plenty of time to fit in more meetings, accept more demands on my time, and still have time to spend with my family and friends.
Yet, I never managed to accept more meetings and requests, meet my commitments, and spend quality time with the people I cared about.
I found myself working until 2:00 am most days and starting earlier and earlier each day to keep my promises.
And, like most people, I thought all I needed to do was to find another productivity tool. A new app would surely solve my time problems.
This was at the height of the “hustle culture” trend ten to fifteen years ago. It was all about working more and more hours. I fell into the trap of believing that to be successful, all I had to do was throw more hours at the problem.
Well, that didn’t work out. All that happened was I felt tired all day, and my productivity fell like a brick.
It felt good to work until one or two in the morning. I felt I was doing what I needed to do to be successful. Yet, I conveniently forgot I was having to take naps throughout the day, and when I was awake, I procrastinated like I was in the Olympic procrastination final.
And all those new tools I was constantly downloading, looking for the Holy Grail of productivity apps, meant I had tasks, events and information all over the place, which required a lot of wasted time trying to find where I had put the latest world-changing idea.
What I was doing was violating the laws of time.
You can only do one thing at a time, and everything you do requires time.
The lightbulb moment was realising that I had a limited amount of time each day, which meant that if I was to get the most important things done each day, I needed to know the most important things.
Here’s what’s important to you.
The promises you make to other people, particularly those you make to the people closest to you.
And it doesn’t matter who you are. Anything you promise you will do for another person becomes a priority.
On a personal level, this means if you promise your daughter that you will take her to the theme park on Sunday, you don’t look for ways to get out of it because your boss asked you to finish a report and have it on her desk Monday at 8:30 am.
You take your daughter to the theme park, and you negotiate with your boss. If your boss won’t negotiate, you find a way to finish the report before Sunday, so when you do take your daughter to the theme park, you are 100% committed and present.
Meetings you have committed to are a promise. It’s a promise that you will be in a given place at a specific time. Once you have confirmed the meeting, you’re committed and, except for exceptional circumstances—illness, for example—you turn up on time.
When you treat your promises as a commitment you cannot break, you start to see that your time is limited.
It’s limited because no matter what, you get twenty-four hours a day, and that’s it.
Now, it’s a little more complicated than that. We are human beings, and an inconvenient truth about being human is that we need a certain amount of sleep each day to perform. Without enough sleep, you will discover what I discovered when I was all in on the hustle culture: Your productivity drops significantly.
You might think you are working sixteen to eighteen hours a day. Yet, your output will have dropped, and your results will only be as if you have been working eight to ten hours.
There are other factors too. A poor diet and a lack of movement will also significantly lower your performance and overall productivity.
In the end, when you think you can fit everything in and continue to say yes to every request, “Your ego is writing checks your body can’t cash”, as Stinger said to Maverick in the movie Top Gun.
You will quickly find you’re making promises you cannot keep because you’re constantly tired, not in the mood and letting the people around you down.
Prioritising your day starts with you. The first thirty minutes of the day should be focused on you and the things you enjoy. That could be a freshly brewed cup of tea, ten minutes of meditation, a few light stretches, or a few moments writing your thoughts down in a journal.
I know many of you may have young kids; if they are waking up with you, could you engage in some quiet activities that involve them? Perhaps you could sit quietly together and read a real book or do some light exercise together.
Next, come your confirmed appointments. When are they, and where do you need to be? These appointments give you structure to your day. You’ve committed to them, so you are now obliged to turn up on time.
Then comes your core work—the work you are employed to do. What is that, and what does that look like at a task level? In other words, what does doing the work you were employed to do look like?
Finally, from a work perspective, comes everything else. The work you volunteered for, the emails and admin and any other non-core work activities you may have said yes to.
One way to look at your day is how your grandparents would have seen their days. There’s work time and then there’s home time.
When at work, your priorities are your work promises and commitments. When at home, your priorities are your family and friends.
As Jim Rohn said:
"When you work, work; when you play, play. Don't play at work, and don't work at play. Make best use of your time"
A simple philosophy and one that works superbly well today.
I’ve found that a simple daily planning sequence helps people to focus on the right things at the right time.
First, review your appointments for the day. This gives you a good idea of your available time for everything else.
Second, look at your list of tasks for today and curate it based on how much time you have left after your meetings. It’s no good thinking you will get ten or more tasks done today if you have seven hours of meetings. That won’t happen.
Yet, on days when you have one or two meetings, you can schedule more tasks.
Finally, prioritise the list of tasks. For non-core work tasks, you can prioritise based on time sensitivity and your promises.
If you told a client or colleague you would complete the work they asked you to do by Friday, and today is Thursday, that task would be your priority. You made a promise, and your integrity is at stake. If you fail to meet the deadline, you don’t keep your promise, your client or colleague has every right to question your integrity and reliability.
One more idea you could adopt, Mel, is to think elimination, not accumulation.
It’s easier today to collect stuff than it’s ever been. We see something online we’d like to buy and send the link to our task managers. Someone recommends a book, send it to your task manager.
This results in a task manager stuffed with promises you’ve made to other people and random items you’ve seen online that you found attractive. It’s the Magpie Complex—attracted to shiny objects. (Although that’s apparently not scientifically true. Magpies are not naturally drawn to shiny objects.)
By all means, collect these items if you wish to, but when you process your task manager’s inbox, you move low-value items somewhere else. For example, things you’d like to buy can be moved to a purchase list in your notes app.
Then, create a task that reminds you to review the list once a week. I do this every Saturday as part of my admin time. I’m relaxed, have no meetings, and the house is quiet. I can review those lists and decide whether to buy something from the list or eliminate items.
The goal is to keep your task manager clean and tight, showing only what matters and eliminating the things that don’t.
This has the advantage of making your daily planning faster and easier. You don’t need to go through a long list of random stuff to find the essential tasks for the day. Your only decision is, “Will I have time to do that today?”
So, there you go, Mel. Be aware of things you’ve promised others—they will always be your priority. Ensure you have enough time protected for your core work and eliminate, don’t accumulate.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
I want to begin today’s episode by thanking you for listening to this podcast. Earlier this week, this podcast surpassed one million downloads.
For context, that puts this podcast in the top 3 to 5 percent of the productivity and time management niche.
So, thank you. I do this for you, and for all of you who have sent in questions for answering. You keep me on my toes and challenge me every week. For that, I am eternally grateful.
Thank you.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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The Time-Based Productivity Course
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Script | 386
Hello, and welcome to episode 386 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
This week’s question is about a subject I’ve always been a little afraid of covering. I’m afraid because there is no simple answer, yet it’s certainly one that has a solution. Unfortunately, that solution isn’t an easy one to implement.
How do you manage your time and productivity in a dynamic, fast changing work environment?
The problem is that standard advice often doesn’t work. For instance, if you are in IT support and systems and company wide software are continually breaking down, how do you find the time to do focused work, when you are being interrupted by emergencies from the moment you arrive at work to the time you leave?
It does have a solution, but it involves the word “no” and the use of experience and knowledge to determine how “urgent” something really is.
I’m currently reading Dominic Sandbrook’s book, Seasons in the Sun. It’s about Britain between 1974 and 1979. Five years when the British government was in perpetual turmoil. Not just dealing with one or two crises. There were hundreds and they were happening every day.
From economic breakdown to Northern Ireland being on the verge of civil war. Every day brought a new emergency that needed instant solutions.
Reading it today makes the political turmoils we face now look like a walk on the beach by comparison.
Yet the government managed, just. It wasn’t easy, but they muddled through, and economic collapse and Northern Ireland civil war did not happen. It was close, but these catastrophes were fortunately averted.
Reading about it now, it seems the UK between 1975 and 1980 was collapsing, yet as Dominic Sandbrook points out, it didn’t and most people were able to get on with their lives and improve their living standards.
If you’re working in an environment where you feel you are only one crisis away from a total shutdown, don’t despair. It can be handled, and it’s possible to implement some processes and techniques to maintain some sanity when you may feel things are about to fall apart.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jan. Jan asks, Hi Carl, I work in a company with no boundaries. Anyone can send a Teams message to me anytime, and I am expected to deal with it immediately. This means I never have time to do my important work. What advice would you give to someone in my position?
Thank you, Jan for your question.
One of the most dangerous things one can do is to believe there is no way through when the work piles up and there seems to be no respite.
The first place I would begin in your situation, Jan, is to look at the type of requests you are getting. Not all of them will be urgent must be done immediately.
It’s also likely when you look at them, you will find that very few are of that nature.
Back in the day, when I worked in hotel management, it could be said that no one day was ever the same. And there were a lot of unknowns happening practically every minute.
Yet, our training was build on understanding what was urgent and what was not.
A business party turning up at 8:30 am asking where their pre-booked meeting room was, when no such room had been prepared was a drop everything and get the room set up urgently.
Similarly, a guest asking for a hairdryer, was also a drop everything urgency—it was likely they discovered their hairdryer was not working after they had just washed their hair.
Yet most other requests were handled in the normal fashion. A change of towels, a noisy air conditioner that won’t turn off or missing bottles of water from a room’s mini-bar.
All of these “urgencies” would have been unknown when the day began, but given that they happened every day, the hotel had processes in place to deal with them.
One thing we did have, which I notice many companies do not, is a clear list of priorities.
Take for example my priorities for handling email.
Anything to do with money or forgotten passwords are things I will deal with immediately I see the email. Sorting them out doesn’t take long—five minutes for most—but I understand how frustrating it can be waiting to get a response.
Everything else has a 24 hour response cycle.
It’s rare I will get either of those two emergencies—perhaps one or two a month—but when they do happen, it’s automatic for me to immediately jump into action and deal with them.
And that’s one of the first things I would recommend you do, Jan. Categorise the requests you get and put in place some rules for dealing with them.
What are genuine emergencies? What are not?
I know if you are new to your company, there will be a period where you will need to learn what’s urgent and what’s not. That’s where experience and knowledge comes into play.
Given time, you will be able to analyse the types of requests you are getting and learn the patterns. There will be some people you work with that expect immediate responses. Is that a people issue or a genuine problem issue.
Some people have become conditioned to expect an immediate response. With these people it might be prudent to slowly change their conditioning by gradually reducing your response time.
Now, of course, you may not be able to do with people in higher positions than you but for others you may be able to do so.
In Your Time, Your Way, I wrote about how emergency room medical staff use the medical triage method. Each patient is assessed against a scale or urgency.
A Level 1 needs immediate attention and their condition is life-threatening, Level 2 is urgent attention required as their is potentially a threat to life, Level 3 requires timely intervention but life is not threatened, Level 4 is less urgent, and Level 5 can wait for care.
You can use this approach when you are dealing with customer care or IT issues.
Monitor the requests you get over a week or so and grade them. You may not need five levels, three or four levels would be sufficient. For example:
A Level one request requires immediate attention.
A Level two request requires attention within two hours
A Level three request can be dealt with within the day
And a Level four can be ignored.
You will need to be careful not to treat everything as a Level One. If everything was a level one, then nothing would be urgent because everything was.
One of the great things about this kind of approach is there’s no hesitation. You know exactly what to do. If something is urgent, for example, the whole company’s system goes down or there is a security breach, everything stops until the issue is resolved.
Hopefully, this kind of emergency won’t happen often. If it does, then there’s likely to be a problem in the company’s systems that need fixing and that would need to be escalated to the relevant person.
The next problem in these circumstances is that you may feel obligated to be constantly watching your email and internal messaging system. If you want to be able to get on and do your work, that’s going to be a no no.
You cannot do both. There has to be some flexibility.
What I’ve found helpful for many of my coaching clients is to protect the first thirty minutes of their work day for going through all their communication channels to see what’s happening.
This way, you can deal with any immediate problems before they destroy your day.
Then the next hour (or two if you dare), you do your focused work.
You can then check your messages and emails once you have finished your focused work. It’s only one hour.
If you’ve never done this before, I should warn you that it will be scary. You’re likely to have become used to being reactive, and changing that to being proactive by focusing on your most important work for the day for an hour or so, can be deeply uncomfortable at first.
Here you will need to be persistent. It gets easier, and your confidence grows with time.
I used to be always checking my mail for “problems”. It was horrible. It took me several weeks to become comfortable turning off all communication systems for two hours while I got on and did my most important work for the day.
But it was worth it. For one thing, I began understand that most things were not really urgent and as long as I responded within twenty-four hours people were happy.
For you, you may need to respond faster than that. But it’s unlikely that you will need to be responding immediately to everything.
You’ve got to remember that no matter what work you do there is always a limited resource—time. You get twenty-four hours each day and that’s it. No more and no less.
And while you can expand that to a week, that still only gives you 168 hours.
However, careful management of that time can help to reduce many emergencies. Ruthlessly protecting one or two hours a day for your most important work, for example, ensures that you are not dealing with final demands and missed deadlines.
One way to do that is to again monitor when most of your requests come in. I’ve learned that between 9:30 and 11:30 am it’s extremely rare for me to receive an urgent request. This is why I protect that time on my calendar for doing my most important work for the day.
Most of the urgent requests I get come in through the night, and I always keep 9:00 to 9:30 am free for dealing with them if they do arise.
So there you go, Jan. The best thing you could do right now is to start analysing the requests you are getting and to develop a triage system for prioritising those request.
You’re not changing anything immediately, but you are gaining information you can then use to develop a process for reducing the urgency and for bringing some structure back into your work day.
You will feel uncomfortable when you first begin implementing these changes, and you may get some pushback from your colleagues, that’s the be expected, but it’s important to persist if you want to gain some control back.
You may find you will need to adjust things. That’s normal. Don’t worry, just because you need to move things around in your categorisation system doesn’t mean it’s failed. Your adjusting, learning and, more importantly, improving your system.
I hope that has helped, Jan. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all very very productive week.
"The real magic lies at the intersection between eating, moving, and sleeping. If you can do all three well, it will improve your daily energy and your odds of living a long, healthy life,"
That’s a quote from Tom Rath, author of Eat Move Sleep. The three most important factors in you becoming more productive, focused and motivated each day.
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Script | 385
Hello, and welcome to episode 385 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Don’t skip the basics. For me, this was a hard lesson to learn. I used to stay up late to finish work or watch TV. I’d skip my exercise or allow myself to get involved in meetings I didn’t really need to attend—just to feel a part of something.
And I would eat rubbish—cereal for breakfast, sandwiches and rice or fries for lunch and pizza for dinner.
And I felt it. I was tired, unproductive, and did not know where I was going. My weight kept going up and up, and every day felt like a drudge. I would wake up, feel horrible, go to work, come home, collapse onto the sofa, turn on the TV, and escape the real world.
It was easy to blame everyone else. My boss, my colleagues, my customers, the weather, where I lived, the company, etc.
Yet, it wasn’t anyone else’s fault. It was mine.
I had allowed myself to wallow in self-pity. That was a choice.
I cannot say there was a particular moment that changed me. It was more a gradual change.
What I learned, though, was that creating an enjoyable, exciting, and fulfilling life started with getting the basics right.
And that is what this week’ question is all about. What are the basics, and why do they matter? So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ali. Ali asks, hi Carl, my life’s a mess. I stay up all night watching TV or YouTube videos, and then wake up late and have to rush to get to work. Then at work I feel tired and unmotivated all day. What can I do to have some better habits?
Hi Ali, thank you for your question.
The first step would be to read James Clear’s Atomic Habits. It’s a brilliant book, that explains how habits work, how to create your own and does all that in a simple step by step approach.
The next step is to understand some time tested basics.
One of the many reasons why anyone would feel demotivated about the day is they are not clear on what is important to them.
Not everyone wants to be supremely fit and sporty and that’s fine. You don’t have to be. But it’s equally true no one wants to die prematurely.
As Steve Jobs said in his famous commencement address in 2006
"No one wants to die... even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there"
To find your purpose, or simply the motivation to jump out of bed each morning go through the Areas of Focus workbook. It’s free and you can download it from my website.
This will give you the eight areas of life that should be in balance.
Those eight are:
Family and relationships
Career or business
Health and fitness
Finance
Lifestyle and life experiences
Self development
Spirituality
Life’s purpose
Now, when I say in balance, it means defining what each one means to you. For example, for your finances area of focus could be something as simple as “I live within my means and not over spend on trivial things” or your lifestyle and life experiences could be “I live in a clean and tidy home”.
Getting these eight basics of life in balance will give you some purpose each day. Living in a clean and tidy home may mean that before you leave to go to work, you make your bed and wash the dishes.
To keep your finances in check, you may decide to do a weekly or monthly budget to track how you are spending your money.
That becomes a habit. It’s a must-do.
None of these takes a lot of time, but they help to keep your areas of focus in balance.
Now onto another important factor. One of the things I’ve noticed about highly motivated and successful people is they have some structure in their lives.
They wake up at the same time each day, they follow a morning routine and have some structure for the rest of the day. That could be exercising at the same time each day or just going for a walk at the end of the day to decompress.
Apple’s Tim Cook, for example, starts his day with an extremely early wake-up, around 3:45 AM, to read emails from customers and employees before heading to the gym for an hour of exercise. He eats a healthy breakfast, gets coffee, and then begins his workday.
I recently wrote about Hercule Poirot, the Agatha Christie detective in many of her novels in my weekly newsletter.
Poirot was obsessive, it’s true. He was immaculately turned out at all times. Yet he had structure to his days. Breakfast was at the same time each day and he had his famous tisane (a kind of herbal drink) served in the same glass.
What draws me to Poirot is that fastidiousness. Nothing was rushed. The only things that ever bothered him was if his routines were interrupted. Perhaps not a good thing, but it did enable him to have a purpose each day.
If he was taking a holiday, he refused to entertain any work. He was resting his “little grey cells” and that was the purpose of the holiday.
When he was working he was engaged completely. He actions were methodical and deliberate. I know Poirot is a fictional character, but in fictional characters there’s always a grain of truth somewhere.
Perhaps Poirot’s obsessiveness for order and structure, was motivated by someone somewhere.
The one thing I’ve learned is if you’re not getting the basics right, then everything else falls apart.
The basics are your daily routines. Your sleep schedule, what and when you eat and stepping away from screens and moving.
They are not difficult to do, but without one essential ingredient, you won’t do them. That ingredient is self-discipline.
You need discipline to get out of bed on a cold, wet morning. You need discipline to say no to that plate of unhealthy food, and you need discipline to turn off the TV and go to bed at the right time.
I often shy away from advising people to develop their self-discipline because it’s hard to do. And these days I find many people have simply given up and just tell themselves they have no self-discipline and that they never have had.
They will look back in their lives to find examples and use that to prove it to themselves. Ignoring the fact that there will also have been examples of them being disciplined.
It’s complete rubbish for anyone to say they lack self-discipline. It’s innate and inside all of us. But, like a muscle, if you don’t use it, it will weaken. But never disappear entirely.
Strengthening your self-discipline isn’t particularly difficult. As Admiral McRaven said in his Texas University Commencement address—begin the day by making your bed. Is that so difficult? It’s one thing, but it’s the start of strengthening your self discipline.
Now you mentioned that you want better habits. What would you consider to be “better habits”?
That would be the place to start.
I’ve never been a good sleeper—as a consequence I fell into the trap of believing it was “just the way I was wired”. Of course, that’s not true.
In January I made a commitment to myself I would be in bed no later than midnight. It was a struggle, but I persisted. Now, nine months later, I’m in bed consistently at midnight and my sleep is better than ever.
It took a bit of self-discipline for the first week or two, but soon it was a habit.
Changing your sleep habit is straight forward. Calculate how much sleep you need, then decide what time you want to wake up, and work backwards.
So, if you discover that you need seven hours sleep and you want to wake up at 7:00 am, then you need to be in bed by 11:30 pm. (It’s not like we instantly fall asleep when we get into bed)
Another thing you mentioned, Ali, is you lack motivation at work. That may be a bigger issue. If work is demotivating you, it’s also draining you of purpose. That’s where I would spend some time analysing.
When your purpose is drained, that has a big effect on your mental energy.
What is it about your work that is demotivating?
If it’s just a stage—we all go through that at times—what can you do to find some purpose. Perhaps you could set yourself a target. Sell X amount of products, solve a particularly difficult problem for your team or do something to improve your own workflows and processes.
If it’s bigger than that and it’s about the job itself, then it may be time to begin looking at alternative jobs. It doesn’t mean you have to quit your current job, what it means is you begin looking at alternatives.
What kind of work would motivate you?
It’s perfectly okay to accept that you made a mistake in your choice of career. That does not mean you are stuck with that mistake. You can change careers at any time. I’ve been a hotel manager, car salesperson, a lawyer and teacher.
The hardest part for me was accepting that the legal profession was not for me. I’d spent six years in school and training, but after graduating and working in a law office, I soon found myself hating it.
I felt I was in a day release prison. I had to sign in at 9:00 each morning and was not allowed to leave until 5:30 pm. During that time it felt I was chained to a desk only being allowed to move to go to the bathroom.
It was hard to accept I had made a monumental mistake. But the thought spending the next twenty-five years stuck behind a desk was terrifying. I had to change my career.
That was when I came to Korea—I told myself it would be for one year and during that time I would think about my future.
I was lucky, I fell in love with teaching, loved the way of life in Korea and met some amazing people. At the end of the first year, there was no way I was going to go back to the UK. So, when my employer in Korea asked if I wanted to sign an extension to my contract, I ask, where’s the pen?
Twenty three years later, I’m still here. Doing what I love day in day out.
Sometimes, we have to do the unthinkable. I remember my friends telling me I was mad to give up a career in law to become a teacher in a foreign land. But I knew deep down I was not cut out to be a lawyer.
So, Ali, take a step back. Ask yourself what needs to change. Do you have the basics right? Are you getting enough sleep, moving enough and eating right?
If not, focus your attention there. Build some habits around those three areas.
Then look at your career. Are you happy? If not, what alternatives could you look at. Remember, you do not have to quit your job to do this. Perhaps you decide to go back to school and learn a new skill, or simply to change the way you work—you processes and workflows.
I should add, you do not have to rush this. Just getting the basics right will bring you better focus and energy. From there you can decide what to do next that will bring some purpose back into your life.
I hope that has helped, Ali. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Let me take some pressure off. Your problem is not discipline. Your problem is not organization. Your problem is not that you have yet to stumble upon the perfect schedule. And your problem is not that the folks at home demand too much of your time. The problem is this: there’s not enough time to get everything done that you’re convinced—or others have convinced you—needs to get done.
That’s a quote by Andy Stanley, an author and church leader and perfectly captures the topic of this week’s episode. Enjoy.
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Script | 384
Hello, and welcome to episode 384 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
It’s easy to create a productivity system on paper, working with theories and concepts. The challenging part comes when that system is confronted with real-life events.
The upset customer who demands immediate action, a colleague off work sick and a boss who thinks you can drop everything and work on their latest wheeze.
It’s not that these productivity systems don’t work, they do, it’s that a system is only as good as the person adopting it is willing to slow down and consider how important the demand in front of them really is.
It’s also understanding what you have control of and what you don’t.
You don’t have control over whether your daughter’s after-school class is cancelled at short notice or not. You do have control over putting in place a contingency in case it happens.
In the real world, things change fast. An urgent email you received at 9:15 a.m. Is resolved on its own by 9:28 a.m. A meeting you spent all weekend preparing for get’s cancelled two hours before it’s due to begin. The list is endless.
Yet, having some kind of system still helps you.
And that’s what this week’s question is about. How to use a productivity system in a fast moving, chaotic world.
And so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks, hi Carl, how would you advise someone that is struggling to set up a system because their work is always changing. My customers expect me to be available all the time and my boss keeps calling meetings without any notice. I never have any time to do my work.
Hi Alan. Thank you for your question.
I think it was Jim Rohn that taught me to understand that there are a lot of things in life that we cannot control. Obvious ones would be the weather, or a train breaking down that prevents you from getting into work on time.
Yet, there are also things like phone calls and urgent messages that can significantly change your plans for the day.
This is what I suppose we call life. Life has a nasty habit of getting in the way of our plans.
However, it’s always been like that. Life has always been unpredictable and yet many people have managed to deal with it.
There are a number of things you can do that will help you to stay on track, yet have the space and time to deal with the unexpected when they occur.
The first one is when planning the week, don’t focus on tasks, focus on objectives.
What I mean by this is when you focus on scheduling tasks for the week, it’s likely 60% or more will not get done. Either you don’t have the time or things change and they no longer need to be done.
Too much can change over seven days.
I’ve seen people carefully schedule out an exercise plan for the week, only to pick up a calf strain on Tuesday that prevents them from doing any more running for the rest of the week.
Yet, had they set the objective to exercise four times that week, the calf strain would be a minor inconvenience and perhaps to fulfil their exercise objective they could go swimming or to the gym and do non-leg exercises instead.
Similarly in the work environment, if you were to plan out a project’s tasks for the week, and you keep getting pulled into a last minute “urgent” meetings, the chances are by the end of the week you will have done practically none of the tasks you scheduled for yourself.
If you had instead set the objective of doing some work on the project, you would give yourself more flexibility to choose what to do given the changing circumstances of your week.
This way, although you may have only done three things on the project you still completed your objective. That’s a win.
Had you set yourself up to complete ten tasks on the project and only done three, you would consider that a failure and feel planning the week is a waste of time.
It’s as if all you are doing in a weekly planning session is scheduling tasks you won’t do. Which then makes it feel like a waste of time. But It’s not a waste of time if you are setting yourself realistic objectives based on what your calendar says you have time for.
Tasks are assigned at a daily level.
When you assign your tasks at a daily level you can take into account the changing nature of the week.
I’ve had clients have their complete week destroyed because of a crisis with a client in another country. They go into work with one expectation and by 11:00 am they are driving to the airport to catch a flight to the other side of the world to resolve a crisis.
This is why weekly and daily planning go hand in hand.
Another tip I would recommend is to avoid scheduling anything for the first thirty minutes of your work day.
Use that time to get a heads up on the day.
Go through your messages and emails to see what is happening.
I don’t subscribe to the idea that you should not check your email or messages in the morning. That to me is a ridiculous idea. When you stop yourself from processing your messages, you start to worry that there might be something in there that is important.
That worry causes distraction and it becomes difficult to focus on anything else.
The chances that there is a crisis that needs your urgent attention is slim and if there is a crisis that needs your attention better to know about it early so you have time to slow down and consider the best steps to resolve it.
But more importantly, those first thirty minutes gives you a chance to get a feel for the day, confirm your plan and decide when best to do whatever work you had decided to do that day.
To give you an example. I woke early this morning for a meeting at 8:00 am. I did my morning routines, and as I was preparing for the meeting, I got a text message informing me that the meeting had been cancelled.
That gave me back an hour I had not planned for.
So, I looked at my plan for the day and decided that the best use of that hour would be to begin writing this podcast script. Doing that would take the pressure off the rest of the day and give me a chance to bring forward other work.
All this does not mean having a system is pointless. Having a system means you can switch focus quickly and you know where to look to make better decisions on what to work on next.
For example, having a quick and simple way to collect stuff is a no-brainer. A paper notebook open on your desk with a pencil ready to go allows you to quickly jot something down when on a call or in the middle of doing something else.
Making sure that your phone and computers are set up for quick capture is also important. Ideas and requests can happen at any time. Being able to collect those ideas with the minimum of fuss is important.
Then, allowing yourself ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day for processing what you collected so you can delete the unnecessary and ensure that what is left is either scheduled or dealt with.
This is why I urge everyone to take the free COD course. COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do and it’s the foundations of every solid productivity system.
I’ll put a link in the show notes for you if you haven’t taken the course yet.
Another thing you can do, which is linked to the first thirty minutes of your day is to mentally map out when you will do something. This is where you use the power of “implementation Intentions”.
This is where you used an “if this, then that formula”
If it’s 2:00 pm then I will spend an hour clearing my actionable email.
If it’s 5:30 pm, I will stop and plan tomorrow for ten minutes.
I like to use the first thirty minutes of the day to review my calendar and then visualise the different times in the day what I will be doing at that time.
It really helps to get you focused and prevents you from getting involved in things you do not need to be involved in.
Don’t be too strict with yourself. If you planned to respond to your actionable emails at 2:00 pm and it’s now 2:20 pm, it doesn’t matter. Just start going through your actionable emails. Whether you spend an hour or forty minutes on this activity isn’t the issue. What matters in you spent some time doing it.
Being consistent and allowing yourself to get back on track is what really matters. When it comes to things like emails and messages and daily admin, it’s never going to be about clearing everything in one day. It’s always about spending some time doing it daily.
If you’re just starting out on an exercise programme, it’s not really about the quality of your workout initially, It’s about spending time doing exercise. Getting fit and healthy doesn’t happen with one workout. It’s an accumulation of many workouts done consistently over a period of time that results in your increased physical fitness.
A final point is if you work in a dynamic environment. This is work that involves multiple interruptions each day and rapid changes in focus.
Here we have to be careful. Many people believe their jobs are dynamic, but often the chaos is not the job, but the way they are structuring their day.
I remember once being contacted by someone who worked in customer support. They worked in an office and they were customer facing. There was no place to go and do other work without the risk of someone coming in and interrupting them.
In this instance asking what is their core work gave then the answer they were looking for. They were employed to deal with customer issues, face to face.
The priority here was to be available for customers coming in to their office. If there was a lull, then they could make calls or follow up people they were waiting to hear back from. If there wasn’t a lull, then as long as they were in front of the customer, they were doing the job they were employed to do.
The solution in this instance was to arrange with their team leader to allow the customer support team to have thirty minutes each day away from talking with customers face to face to deal with any follow up issues.
As it happened in that case the team leaders realised that this was a good idea and allowed all customer support people to have two thirty minutes periods each day. Those times were fixed where possible so the team could better plan their days.
The key here is to protect periods of time in the day for doing the non-dynamic work. You can do this weekly or daily. If you do it daily, the daily planning will become more important as you will be fixing in these protected times when you do your daily planning.
And remember, thirty minutes is always going to be better than zero minutes.
I hope that has helped, Alan. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
“I'm not gifted. I'm not smarter than everybody else. I'm not stronger. I just have the ability to stick to a plan and not quit.”
That’s a quote from Jonny Kim. A Navy SEAL, Harvard educated medical doctor and NASA Astronaut. All of which was achieved before he was thirty five.
Now the key part to that quote is “the ability to stick to a plan and not quit” And that’s the topic of this week’s podcast.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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The Time-Based Productivity Course
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The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 383
Hello, and welcome to episode 383 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
It took me many years to learn that the best things in life never happen by accident. They are the products of slow steady work.
Becoming a lawyer or a doctor is not about making a decision in middle school and then miraculously ten years later you’re performing in the Supreme Court or surgery in a top hospital.
It takes years of slow steady study, experiencing ups and downs and frequently wanting to quit because it’s hard.
Yet that’s the way it’s supposed to be. It’s hard because as human beings we thrive when we have a goal that requires us to work hard consistently.
Jonny Kim is remarkable because he did three incredibly hard things. Yet, to achieve all of them required him to follow a simple process of study and preparation. It wasn’t impossible. All it took was a steely determination to achieve these things, being consistent and, to take control of his calendar.
And that’s what this week’ question is all about. How to do the the hard things consistently so you start to see progress.
So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Joe. Joe asks, hi Carl, the one thing I find incredibly hard to be is consistent. I’m great at setting up task managers and notes apps, but after a few days, I stop following the system. How do you stay consistent?
Hi Joe, thank you for your question.
There could be two parts to this. The first is what I call the “Shiny Object Syndrome”. This is where you see every new tool on YouTube or in a newsletter as something that promises to solve all your productivity and time management problems.
We all go through this phase. In many ways, I think it’s important to do so. This way you learn the limitations of tools and find out, the hard way, that no tool will ever do the work for you.
You also discover that the more addictive the tool (I believe they call it “sticky”), the less work you will do.
For me, Notion was a classic example of that. When Notion first came onto my radar around 2018, I was fascinated. I downloaded the app and began setting it up. It was exciting. Far more editable than Evernote or Apple Notes.
There were all these cool things you could do with it. Change the font, the colours, the background, create increasingly more complex dashboards and so on.
On that first day, I spent eight hours “setting it up”. It was later that evening I realised that if I were to use Notion I would never get any work done. I’d always want to play with it and try and get it to show me what I wanted to see, when I wanted to see it. A goal I was never likely to achieve.
So, I deleted the app.
It came down to one very simple thing. Do I want tools that will help me do my work or not?
Well, the answer was I wanted tools that got me to work fast. And that was not going to be Notion.
The tools that best promote solid work are boring. They have no flamboyant features. They just do what they are meant to do. In other words they are so featureless the only thing you can do is get on and do the work.
I rather envy those people who have the time to be constantly changing their apps. I know from experience that transferring everything to a new app takes time. And then there’s the learning curve, although I suspect that’s where the dopamine hits come from.
I certainly don’t have the time to do that. I’d prefer to spend my free time with my family, walking or playing with Louis or reading books.
The other area where a lack of consistency comes in is when you have no processes for doing your regular work.
Humans work best when they follow a pattern.
If you’ve ever learned to ride a bicycle, you will remember it was difficult at first. You were wobbly, probably fell off. Yet, if you persisted, today riding a bicycle doesn’t require a thought. You jump on and off you go.
There’s an illustration that Tony Robbins talks about. When a child learns to walk it’s a painfully slow experience. There’s the crawling, the pulling itself up on a chair, the inevitable first step and the constant falling over.
Yet, no parent would ever say stop! Give up. You’ll never be able to walk.
We persist and after a few days or weeks the child is walking everywhere.
If you want to be consistent with something, there will inevitably be a period of a few weeks or months where things don’t go smoothly. Mistakes are made, plenty of falls and a lot of frustration.
That’s the initial learning curve. We all have to go through it.
Recently, I updated my iPad to the new operating system. I do this annually to get to know what’s new in preparation for updating my Apple Productivity Course.
This year, Apple has significantly changed the design of the operating system. It’s slick, fast and very different to what I am used to.
Now, each morning, I clear my email inbox on my iPad. I’ve done this for years and it’s automatic. Write my journal, then grab my iPad and clear the inbox.
Over the last few days I’ve felt a little frustration. The layout of Apple Mail has changed and buttons have moved. For two days I was trying to get rid of the sidebar (a new feature). I done that now and after a week, I’m beginning to get used to the new layout.
The issue here is that those changes slowed down my processing speed. This in turn threw out my routine a little.
It reminded me why changing apps all the time destroys ones productivity. But more importantly it reminded me that consistently following processes ensures speed—which ultimately is what reduces the time required to do the work.
The problem with following routines and processes is that doing so can be boring. Yet, anything worthwhile is going to be boring at times.
But boring is good for your brain. It doesn’t have to think too much and it gives it a chance to relax.
Constant stimulation, problem solving, learning to use new apps, messing around with routines and processes that work may be exciting (dopamine hits), but they don’t get the work done.
This one of the reasons why having a regular morning routine is a great way to start the day. By following a set routine every morning from the moment you wake up, allows you to do healthy things that do not require a lot of thought.
A morning routine could be making yourself a cup of coffee, doing some stretches, brushing your teeth and taking a shower.
Or it could be a little more with meditation, journal writing or exercise. These are your morning routines, so you get to choose what you do. All that matters is that whatever you choose to be your morning routine, you consistently do it. Every morning (including weekends)
Another way to bring consistency into your life is to put some stakes in the ground. In other words, build some structure around your day based on meal times, for example.
I do the family’s laundry when I go down to cook dinner. The washing machine is in the area of the kitchen, so it seems natural to take down the laundry and do the washing while I cook dinner. Once dinner is done, the washing is finished and ready to be hung up. (I refuse to use a dryer as it destroys clothes).
With work, I try to protect 9:30 to 11:30 a.m. each day for doing the most important work of the day. It’s not always possible, sometimes I need to be in a meeting, but I will fight tooth and nail to protect that time where possible.
It took a year or so to consistently protect that time, but now, even my wife respects it. She knows not to disturb me when I am doing my focused work.
It’s just two hours a day. That still leaves me with six hours for emergencies, customer queries and team requests.
You can also do this with your communications and daily admin. If you were to protect the same time each day to respond to your actionable emails and do whatever admin is required it makes things so much easier for you.
If, you were to choose 4:00 to 5:30 p.m. For your communication and admin time, and got serious about protecting that time each day, after a few weeks it would feel very strange if you were not doing it.
This is how Jonny Kim managed to do what most people would consider impossible. It wasn’t because he was smarter than anyone else. He never graduated top of his class. Instead it was down to ruthlessly protecting time to study and train.
It’s how averagely talented athletes win Olympic gold medals. They prioritise the small things. The long boring runs, the hours in the gym, or practicing their serve over and over again.
It’s boring, yes. But it gets results, every time.
And yet, if you were to look at how much time you spent on these routines, it’s tiny. Out of twenty-four hours, you’re using two to four hours a day on doing the basics.
It’s when you don’t do that, that you need to find eight to twelve hours just to catch up. And because you don’t have a regular process for doing the work, it’s slow, feels laborious and horrible and you have to repeat multiple times each month.
When you’re consistent, you don’t think about it. You just do it. It’s neither boring nor difficult. It’s just what you do.
Think about brushing your teeth and washing your face. It’s boring right? You do it two to three times a day, yet it’s something you just do. You don’t think about it.
That’s how being consistent with doing the important things—keeping backlogs at bay, dealing with messages and emails and doing your core work works.
It’s exciting the first time you do it, less so the second time until it’s just boring. Then suddenly, it’s something you just do. It’s neither boring nor exciting.
Getting there is the challenge. That why kids argue with their parents about brushing their teeth or washing their hands before meals. It’s boring and unexciting, until it isn’t. It’s just something they automatically do.
So there you go, Joe. You will have to go through the valley of despair, go through the boredom stage until suddenly, it’s just something you do. It’s then when you know you are now consistent.
Good luck. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
"There's no such thing as work-life balance. There are work-life choices, and you make them, and they have consequences."
That’s a quote by former GE CEO, Jack Welch.
This week’s episode is about finding balance in our lives.
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Script | 382
Hello, and welcome to episode 382 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
It’s always fascinated me how so many people see the attainment of a “work-life balance” as their goal in life. Yet, that balance is easily achieved if you know what is important to you, are clear about your core work activities, and take control of your calendar.
I’m reading Dominic Sandbrook’s brilliant book State of Emergency: The Way We Were, Britain 1970 to 1974.
In Britain in the early 1970s, the economy was in dire straits. The labour unions were fighting the employers and the government, inflation was rising uncontrollably and unemployment was becoming a serious problem. Nothing the government tried worked and often made things worse.
Yet, despite all these travails, people got on with their lives. They went to work, came home had dinner with their families or dropped into the pub to meet up with friends. At weekends kids went out to the cinema, or hung out on the high street with their friends.
Parents would potter around their gardens or attempt DIY projects at home.
Balance was a given. Work happened at work. Home life happened at home. There were clear boundaries.
Today, it’s easy to find people being nostalgic for those halcyon days, yet they weren’t all great. There were frequent power cuts (power outages), droughts, and the incessant strikes meant often people couldn’t get to work, or their workplace was closed because of the strikes.
Having a work life balance shouldn’t be a goal. It should be the way you life your life. There’s a time for work, and a time for your hobbies and family. Not in a strict sense, but in a flexible way.
This week’s question is about ho to achieve that with the minimal amount of effort and fuss.
So, to get into the how, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Isabelle. Isabelle asks, Hi Carl, I’m having a lot of trouble trying to balance my professional and personal life. I never seem to have time to meet my friends, and often skip going to the gym because I have to finish my work late in the evenings. What do you recommend someone do to regain some work/life balance?
Hi Isabelle. Thank you for your question.
One of the most effective ways to start this is to create what I call a “perfect” week calendar. This is where you create a new blank calendar and sketch out what you would like time for each week.
Begin with your personal life. How many times do you want to go to the gym, how much sleep do you want each night, and how much time you want to spend with family and friends?
Add these to your calendar.
Then sketch out how you would like to divide up your work time. How many meetings per week, how much time can you spend on admin and communications each day and time for doing deeper, focused work.
Once you have done this, you will get to see if what you want time for each week is realistic. I’ve found most people who do this exercise discover that they are trying to do the impossible.
You only have 168 hours a week. And you do not have to do everything you want to do in those 168 hours.
Before coming to Korea, I used to go to watch Leeds Rhinos Rugby League team every home game. In those days, those games were usually held on a Friday night.
This meant, every other Friday, I’d make sure I left work on time, got home, changed, had a quick dinner, then went to pick up my friends and off we went.
After the game we’d call into the local pub for a few beers before going home.
During the season, we made it a non-negotiable event. It would have been unheard of for any of us to miss a Friday night game.
If I had urgent work to finish, I would rather go back into the office on Saturday morning to finish it off than miss a game.
That was the mindset. Those games and meeting up with friends were non-negotiable.
And that is the first lesson here. If there is something you want to do, then make it non-negotiable.
Of all the productivity and time management tools available, the only one that will tell you if you have time to do something is your calendar.
Task managers and notes apps can collect a lot of stuff. Ideas, things to do, future projects, meeting notes. The list is infinite.
Yet, the time you have is not infinite. It’s limited. Each day has 24 hours, each week has 168 hours.
Part of the reason many feel there is no balance in their lives is they’ve allowed task managers to become their primary time management tool.
If you look at your task manager, it’s just a list of things you either have to do or would like to do. There’s no time frame. Some of the things on there will be important and time sensitive. However, a lot won’t be. And when you scroll through the list, all you see are things to do.
It numbs the mind and makes you feel you have no time to rest.
The difference between today and the 1970s is what we are prioritising.
Because in the 1970s the only productivity or time management tools we had were desk or pocket diaries and notebooks, the only tool we looked at when asked to do something was our diaries.
This meant we would instantly see a conflict and would be able to say “No, sorry I cannot do that on that day”.
Today, when we are asked to do something we add to our task manager-after all, it’s easier to add it there than to open up our calendar app, and look at what we are committed to.
If you have on your calendar a regular aerobics class on a Tuesday at 6:00 p.m. And you’re asked to attend a meeting at 4:30 p.m. You’d more likely say you cannot attend that meeting if all you had is your calendar to look at.
Today, we don’t do that. We say “yes, okay” then later realise we’’ll struggle to get to our class.
I remember when I was at university, my finish time at work was 5:30 p.m. and my lectures began at 6:00 p.m. There was no way I would accept a meeting request on a Tuesday or Thursday after 3:30 p.m.
It took me twenty minutes to get to my university from the office.
Attending university was a non-negotiable for me. Meetings with colleagues could be arranged either earlier in the day or the next.
This is why you cannot afford to leave things to chance if you want to bring balance into your life. If something is important to you, you need to be intentional about it.
But there’s another important consideration and that is flexibility. Balance is about being flexible.
Most nights, I finish my coaching calls around 11:00 p.m. Now it would be very tempting for me to quit and flop down in front of the TV and mindlessly watch something. Yet, reading real books is something I get a great deal of pleasure from. So, before I consider turning on the TV, I grab my book, go through to the living room and read for twenty minutes or so.
It’s wonderfully relaxing—much more so than trying to find something to watch TV.
Yet, if there is something I do want to watch on TV, I’ll skip the book and watch the TV show.
There are sometimes when for one reason or another, I have not cleared my actionable email. If all I have is the hour after my calls finish to do it, then I’ll spend thirty minutes or so clearing as many emails as I can.
Doing my email late is far better than having to try and find additional time the next day.
On Wednesday this week, my wife asked me if I would go with her and her parents on a little trip to the mountains that afternoon.
I had not planned for it, but said if I could have the morning to record my YouTube videos and get my Learning Note out, I would love to go.
I knew I would have to edit the videos when I got back that evening, but spending time with my family was important. So, that’s what I did.
We had a lovely afternoon in the mountains and I got my videos edited.
As I sat down to read my book on Wednesday night, I had a little smile on my face because the day had been fantastic, and all my important work had been done.
Creating balance in life is not about adding more and more stuff to do in a task manager. It’s about how you are allocating your time each day.
What is important to you? That’s what goes on your calendar. There’s a time when you can sit down at your desk and do work. But there’s also time when you need to stop, relax and spend time with the people you care about, or do your exercise, play with your kids or walk your dog.
Everything you want to do requires time. Yet, time is the one thing in your life that is limited.
You can accept thousands of tasks, and have hundreds of ideas to do things but none of those will happen if you do not have the time to do them.
That’s why I advocate managing your work by when you will do it, rather than managing endless lists of tasks. When you focus more on your available time to do stuff, you begin eliminating more of the low-value stuff and begin to appreciate your time more.
There are thousands of things you could do, perhaps would like to do someday. None of that matters today. What matters today is you get the important things done. And choosing those are is entirely within your power.
Yes, you can go to the gym, you can also have a movie night with your friends or family. They are important (think family and relationships and health and fitness areas of focus).
Yet, if you have an important interview tomorrow and feel a couple of hours this evening spent preparing would be a better use of your time, then ask if you can postpone the movie night to tomorrow.
Tonight is not zero hour. You can move things around to better fit with your priorities for today.
And that neatly brings us back to the daily and weekly planning.
Weekly planning is about the big picture. The big things you want to get accomplished. If you decide that you will go to the gym three times this week, schedule it.
If you see that a good use of your time would be to work on that big project where the deadline is approaching, schedule time for working on it.
The daily planning is about making the necessary adjustments to deal with the things that you were unaware of when you did the weekly planning. The client with a crisis, your disorganised boss that forgot to tell you about her impending deadline, or your son coming down with a heavy cold.
It all starts and ends with your calendar. That worked perfectly well for hundreds of years, it still works today.
Task managers and notes apps support you. Your calendar is where you get to see what you’re committed to and tells you if you have time to take on more, or whether taking a few days break would be more beneficial for you.
I hope that helps, Isabelle. Thank you again for sending in your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
"Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall, and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings."
There, Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello reminds us to focus on the magic in front of us.
What are you doing to switch off, and if you cannot do so, how can you do it? That’s why we’re looking at this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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The Time-Based Productivity Course
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 381
Hello, and welcome to episode 381 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
How often do you completely switch yourself off from tasks, projects, emails and messages?
And not just professional emails and messages and tasks, it includes all the WhatsApp messages from friends, strangers and the home projects you promised yourself that you would do this weekend, but never did?
It seems we’ve found ourselves caught in the to-do trap. Where the only thing on your mind is all the things you’ve listed somewhere that you think you must do.
It’s a horrible existence. As soon as we sit down to relax, our phone reminds us there’s more to do. More emails and messages come in, task manager reminders pop up on the screen with a bing telling us we’re supposed to call this person or that one.
And given that we now carry our phones around with us everywhere we go, it’s as if the phone no longer serves us, but we serve it: jumping to its every whim and beep.
The problem here is that it’s not something you suddenly start doing. It’s a gradual creep. It begins with waiting for your daughter to text you the time her train arrives at the railway station, to suddenly worrying about whether a customer or your boss sent you last minute Teams message before the end of your work day. You’e got to check right?
And before long, you feel intensely uncomfortable if your phone isn’t in your hand or near you. It’s then when you have gone beyond experiencing a healthy relationship with your digital devices. It’s time to unravel all those now ingrained impulses.
And that’s where this week’s question comes in. And that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Maggie. Maggie asks, hi Carl I see all these productivity YouTube videos, and listen to a lot of podcasts, but very few of them ever talk about how to switch off at the end of the day and relax. This is something I am really struggling at the moment with.
Hi Maggie, thank you for your question.
You’re right, I rarely see videos or hear podcasts talking about switching off and relaxing. I do sometimes hear people saying to stop and relax, but not how to do it.
As I mentioned a moment a go, this is not something we just stop doing. It creeps up on you. One moment you’re a child without any digital devices, being curious, running around, trying new hobbies then falling asleep to suddenly being held hostage by task lists, projects and long lists of thing you think you should do.
Not to mention the anxiety of responding quickly enough to a friend’s text message or your boss’s email.
If you think about it, while we seem to have adapted well to this new phenomenon, and appear to just accept this as the way of life, it’s really a horrible existence.
Last week, I mentioned that I had embarked on a 13 hour autobiographical TV series on Lord Louis Mountbatten.
The series was recorded in and around 1969, so was shot before the dawn of home computers.
What I noticed was how people in those pre-home computer days relaxed. There were family board games, book reading and going out for walks and having picnics by the river.
Because the only way you could be contacted was via a letter, telegram or land line phone, once you left the house you were free. And “free” in a real sense. If you were to take a walk by the river or pond or lake, you could fully engage with your surroundings and the people you were with.
And family meals were important.
The aristocracy in the UK would dress for dinner, and even as we went into the post-war years, there would be a ritual of adults and children washing their hands before sitting down to dinner.
I rarely see that with people today. I should point out that it’s still a good practice to do—you know, washing your hands before eating your meals.
Currently, I am reading the enormous series of books by historian Dominic Sandbrook, the co host of the excellent podcast The Rest is History.
Sandbrook begins this series of books in 1950s UK and I am currently up to 1970, having just finished reading his excellent book Mad As Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of The Populist Right, a book about how US culture changed in the 1970s.
The books have chapters on how families lived and the activities they did in their spare time and as I was reading these chapters I felt a sadness that many of these activities seem to have disappeared.
For instance, in the UK, there was in almost every town and village a working mens club. Yes, today that would be considered sexist, but when these clubs started they were established for the men who worked down the mines or in the factories.
One of the clubs I used to go to would have a guest act on every Sunday night. Sometimes the act was a musician other times it might be a comedian. These clubs would be full of husbands and wives having a drink, playing bingo between the act’s sessions.
It was a wonderful evening. I remember never once worrying about work, or even talking about work. It was families talking about where they were going on holiday, playing bingo and watching the acts.
I never experienced what we called in the UK “Sunday night blues”—that depressing feeling of knowing you had to go back to work tomorrow.
I only ever experienced that when I stopped going to the club on a Sunday and instead sitting at home watching TV.
Somehow, we’ve sacrificed human activities—going out with friends and family three or four times a week—to sitting on sofas watching TV or scrolling through endless feeds in social media. Often feeling jealous of the fake lives people put on there.
And certainly not engaging with other human beings in the same room as you.
And the word “Hobby” seems to have become a quaint old-fashioned word. I mean, who’s got time for hobbies today?
And that to me is where people need to start. Have a hobby that does not involve a digital tool.
One of my rediscovered hobbies is collecting books. Real books. I’ve always enjoyed reading. It’s been a big part of my life.
I remember before I got an iPad in January 2011, I would spend weeks deciding which book to take with me on the plane when I travelled. It became an annual ritual. A week or two before I was due to fly I would spend a Saturday afternoon at the bookstore in the local shopping centre looking for something I could read while I was on holiday.
After January 2011, I no longer went to a bookstore. I downloaded books from Apple Books or Amazon. Accidentally, something I had found immensely pleasurable—spending an afternoon wandering around a bookstore, to simply hearing about a book, finding it on a digital bookstore and buying it.
The pleasure of aimlessly wandering around a bookstore was ripped away from me for the sake of convenience.
I can fully understand why the sales of vinyl records and record players have exploded in recent years. The lack of convenience and a limited record collection makes listening to music a genuine pleasure.
Those of a certain age may remember creating something called a “Mix tape”. This was where you recorded from a hi-fi system records to a tape cassette that you could play on a cassette walkman or in the car when going on a long journey.
There was was something deeply pleasurable in make those tapes. I used to do this when going on family holidays. It didn’t require a lot of brain power. Just looking through your records (and later CDs) for songs and then recording them, in real time, to a cassette.
You had to sit and listen the whole song before pressing pause on the tape and choosing the next song. Completely inconvenient by today’s standards, but that wasn’t the point. It was relaxing, enjoyable and there was a sense of pride when finished of a job well done.
And that’s where I think we should be looking for activities that help us to switch off at the end of the day or at weekends. Activities that take us away from the digital noise.
For example, this year, I’ve made it a habit to spend a minimum of thirty minutes reading a real book after I finish my evening coaching calls.
I close down my office, grab the book I am currently reading, and go through to the living room, settle down on the sofa with the book and read. While I will read for at least thirty minutes, I often find myself still reading after an hour. During that time, it’s just me and little Louis lying next to me.
It’s quiet and incredibly relaxing.
Another “hobby” I began this spring was to have a bedding box on the terrace outside my office. In this box I’ve been growing flowers. It needs watering and the occasional weed needs pulling out. This had led me to want to add more flower boxes for next year.
I’ve been sketching out on paper ideas of where I’ll put these boxes and what flowers I could grow in them. I’ve even considered growing my own vegetables too.
All non-tech hobbies that have brought some real enjoyment with them.
Other activities you may wish to consider are knitting and needlework. I’ve remember teaching myself to sow buttons onto shirts and jackets—great fun but can be equally frustrating.
Water colour painting. There’s an initial cost in paints and paint books, but again great fun when you get going. This is a particularly good hobby if you like to get out into the countryside.
Winston Churchill used painting as a way to destress at weekends and on holidays.
While I’m not a big fan doing digital detoxes or restricting use of digital tools, that’s just a waste of time because you end up finding excuses to check your digital devices.
What I have found, though, is if you have a hobby or activity that is non-digital, you lose the temptation to “check” for messages and notifications. You become engrossed in the activity you engaged in.
Perhaps you could have a Saturday or Sunday morning family walk. Give it some added interest by including some bird spotting or trying to find new routes around the park or woods.
When to comes to switching off, look for activities that don’t involve phones or computers. Puzzles are good, learning to detail a car (my current hobby) or some gardening—which can large or small.
I hope that has helped, Maggie. Try to use things to switch off that do not involve a screen and you’ll find yourself relaxing and rediscover some lost pleasures in life.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
"Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why."
Eddie Cantor
This week, I’m answering a question about why it’s important to slow down and allow your brain to do what it does best and why you do not want to be competing with computers.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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The Time-Based Productivity Course
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The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Subscribe to my Substack
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 380
Hello, and welcome to episode 380 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
It’s very easy to get caught up in the hype about AI and what it promises to do or can do for you.
And it is an exciting time. AI promises a lot, and our devices are becoming faster. Does this mean it’s all good news? Well, maybe not.
You see, while all this technology is becoming faster, our brains are not. Evolution takes time. We can still only process information at the same speed people did hundreds of years ago.
And it’s causing us to take shortcuts. Shortcuts that may not necessarily be in our best interests.
Thirty years ago, people would buy a newspaper in the morning and that single newspaper would furnish us with analysis and news throughout the day.
I remember buying my newspaper from the newsagent outside the office I worked at in the morning. I would read that newspaper during my coffee breaks and lunch. I’d begin with the front page, then the sport on the back page and usually in the afternoon, I’d read the opinion pieces.
It was a daily ritual, and felt natural. I’d pay my fifty pence (around 75 cents) each morning and by the end of the day, I would feel I had got my money’s worth.
I remember reading full articles, getting to know both sides of the argument and the nuances within each story.
Today, people are in such a rush, they rarely read a full article, and only get a snapshot of what’s really going on. There are apps that will summarise documents, articles and important reports for you. But is this really good for you?
This is why over the last two years, I’ve been intentionally slowing down.
It began with bringing pens and paper back into my system, then going on to wearing an analogue watch instead of an Apple Watch. It’s moved on to buying real books, and this year, reacquainting myself with the joys of ironing, cooking and polishing shoes.
And that brings me on to this week’s question. So, that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, Hi Carl, you’ve talked a lot about your pen and paper experiment and I was wondering why you are going against technology, when clearly that is the future.
Hi Michael, thank you for your question.
I should begin by saying I am not against technology. I love technology. I still use Todoist and Evernote, and I use Anthropic’s Claude most days. Technology is still a big part of my life.
However, I began my “analogue experiment”—if you can call it that—because I began to realise that trying to keep up with all the advances in technology meant I was missing out on life.
I had stopped thinking for myself and was looking for confirmation of the opinions I had formed about a subject. And technology does that extremely well.
I remember during the last US Presidential election I was curious about what the arguments were about. I watched a few videos on YouTube from Fox News and MSNBC trying to maintain some kind of balance.
That didn’t turn out so well. I must have accidentally watched a video or two more from Fox News and suddenly my YouTube feed was full of Greg Gutfeld and Meghan Kelly.
So much for trying to hear both sides of the argument.
It took over a month to get those videos out of my YouTube feed.
From a time management and productivity perspective I’ve always felt it’s important that you decide what is important and what is not.
For most of you, you will have gained a few years experience in the work that you do. That experience is valuable. It gives you an advantage. You have learned what works and what does not work. Not in a theoretical way, but in a practical way.
Sales courses can teach the theory, but to become a great salesperson requires real, hands on experience. Talking with real people, dealing with objections and allowing your personality and charm to come through. You can’t learn that from an online course or four hours chatting with an AI bot.
Henry Kissinger was a divisive figure. Some loved him, others hated him. Yet successive presidents both Republican and Democrat sort his advice long after he had left government. Why? Because of his vast personal experience dealing with dictators and uncompromising world leaders.
Now I understand why technology does this. Companies such as Google and the media organisations want my attention. Their algorithms are trained to do just that. And as a human being it’s very difficult to resist.
But the biggest problem with this is everything is becoming faster and faster. So fast, that your brain cannot keep up.
Now there are things we should move fast on. An upset customer, a natural disaster in your town or city, A suddenly sick loved one or a burst pipe in your bathroom.
Equally, though, there are a lot of things we shouldn’t be moving fast on. Deciding what must be done today, for example, sitting down and talking with your kids, or partner. Talking with your parents, siblings, friends or taking your dog out for a walk.
One work related example would be managing your email. There are two parts to this. Clearing your inbox requires speed. You’re filtering out the unimportant from the important. And with experience, you soon become very fast at this.
Then there’s the replying to the important emails. That requires you to slow down and think.
Now I know there are AI email apps that promise to do the filtering for you. Yet do you really trust that it got it right? That lack of trust results in you going through the AI filtered emails, “just in case”.
Which in turn slows down the processing. You would have been faster had you done it yourself.
But this goes beyond where AI and technology can help us. It goes to something deeper and more human.
One of the most mentally draining things you can do is sit at a screen all day.
You can respond to messages, write reports, design presentations, edit videos, and read the news all from a single screen. This means that, in theory, except for needing to go to the bathroom, you could spend all day and night without getting up from the chair.
That’s not how you work. Your brain cannot stay focused for much more than 90 minutes without the need for a break. Yet, if a break means you stare at another window, perhaps stop writing the report and instead read a news article, your brain is not getting a rest.
Instead, one of the best things you could do, particularly now, with the new flexible ways of working, is to get up and do something manually.
Perhaps take the laundry and do a load of washing. Then return to your computer, work for another hour and then hang the washing up.
Two things happen here. First, your brain gets a rest from deep thinking and does something simple. And secondly, you move. Another thing your brain requires to work at its best.
Repetitive tasks are therapy for your brain. This is why some say that jogging or hiking is therapeutic. The act of putting one foot in front of another is repetitive and your brain can operate on automatic pilot.
Yet, there’s something else here.
The other day I had a pile of ironing to do. It wasn’t overwhelming, but there was around forty-minutes of work there to do.
At the same time, I was working on an article I was writing. That writing began strongly, but after an hour or so, my writing had slowed considerably. I was struggling. It was at that moment I looked up and saw the pile of ironing.
So, I got up, pulled out the ironing board and iron and spend forty minutes or so clearing the pile.
WOW! What a difference. After hanging up the clothes, I sat back down at my desk and the energy to write returned and I was able to get the article finished in no time at all.
Now what would have happened had I stayed tied to my desk? Probably not very much at all. I would have continued to struggle, perhaps written a bit, but likely would have had to rewrite what I had written.
Instead, I gave my brain a break. I did something manual that was repetitive, ironing. I know it’s not exciting, but that’s the point. It recharged my brain and I was able to return to my writing refreshed and didn’t need to rewrite anything later.
Other activities you can do is to make your own lunch. Going into the kitchen to make a sandwich does not require a lot of brain power. It gets you up from your desk, gives your brain a break from the screen and you’re making something.
It was a sense that everything I was doing was done at a screen that was the catalyst for me to return to doing some things manually.
I remember when I decided to start using a pen and notebook for planning out my week. I was shocked how much better I thought.
When I was planning my week digitally, I couldn’t wait to get it over. Just to make it feel more worthwhile, I would clean up a folder or clear my desktop of screenshots and PDFs I no longer needed. I noticed I was doing anything but actually plan the week.
When I closed my computer, pulled out a notebook and one of my favourite fountain pens, I actually planned and thought about what I wanted to accomplish that week.
My Saturday morning planning sessions have become one of my favourite times of the week. I can stop, slow down and just think slowly and deeply about what I want to accomplish.
And all these little things that have slowed me down have resulted in me getting far more done each week.
Without consciously choosing to do so, my social media time has dropped significantly. I don’t watch as many YouTube videos as I used to do, and I feel more fulfilled and accomplished at the end of the day.
A couple of months ago, while my wife was studying for her end of term exams, I would finish in my office, go through into the living room where she was studying, pick up a real book and read.
It was a lovely feeling. My wife, Louis and myself all on the sofa engaged in something meaningful. We were still able to ask each other questions, but for the most part it felt calm, quiet and natural.
Last weekend, during my TV time, I began watching the autobiographical series on the Life and Times of Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Mountbatten was born in 1900 and died in 1979. He lived through two World Wars, was a part of both, was a member of the Royal Family, being the cousin of King George 6th, and was involved in many post war events.
As he was describing his work, I noticed there was no “9 til 5” hours or any of the structures we impose on ourselves today.
For most of Mountbatten’s life there was no television. Instead, people wrote letters or read books in their quiet times. Most weekends were spent socialising with family and friends and there was a lot of walking in the countryside.
Yes, Mountbatten lived a privileged life, he was royalty after all, but even if you study the working classes of the time, they went to work—often hard manual labour, and come home where they would either spend the evening talking and playing games with their families or call into the local pub and enjoy time with their friends and neighbours.
They were different times, of course, but the noticeable thing was the everything that needed to be done got done.
Was was most striking about these times was the sense of fulfilment people spoke and wrote about. They were doing hard manual work, yet had a sense of accomplishment each day.
Today, that sense of fulfilment and accomplish can be lost and instead because of the endless lists of to-dos, messages to respond to we feel overwhelmed and swamped.
The most noticeable benefit I’ve found by returning to a few analogue tools is I no longer feel overwhelmed. I find I am more intentional about what I do and at the end of the day, I feel a sense of accomplishment.
So there you go, Michael. That’s why I’ve brought back some analogue tools into my life. They slowed me down, enabled me to think better and ironically, I am getting a lot more done that I did when I was completely paperless and digital.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening.
Now I must go and hang up the laundry.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential”
That quote from Winston Churchill perfectly captures the dilemma we face when it comes to planning.
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Script | 379
Hello, and welcome to episode 379 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Planning and organising have their place. Yet, there is a danger of taking them too far and using them as an excuse or as a way to procrastinate.
Ultimately, whatever you are planning to do will eventually need to be done. The goal, therefore, is to get to the doing part as quickly as possible.
One of the dangers of David Allen’s Getting Things Done book, is the emphasis on organising and doing the weekly review. It’s a procrastinators heaven. An authority in the the productivity space giving you “permission” to spend two to four hours a week planning and reviewing and another large proportion of your time organising and reorganising your lists.
Don’t get me wrong. Both planning and organising have their place and as Winston Churchill says, “planning is essential”, but it’s a thin line between helpful and unhelpful planning and organising.
In today’s episode, I will share with you some ideas that you can use to ensure that you are following some sound principles with your planning and reviewing.
So, that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Sally. Sally asks, hi Carl, I’m struggling to get myself organised. I have so many things on my desk and on my computer’s desktop I don’t know where to start. I feel like all I do all day is plan what to do and tidy up my lists. How do you avoid over planning and organising?
Hi Sally, thank you for your question.
Firstly, I must admit I have been down this road of over-planning and organising.
I read Getting Things Done in 2009 and loved it. I ditched my Franklin Planner, the “tool” I had been using consistently for over fifteen years, bought myself a nice Quo Vadis notebook (the paper quality was better than Moleskine) and spent a whole weekend setting up the notebook as a GTD tool.
I also printed out the GTD weekly review checklist from David Allen’s website and stuck that into the back go my planner and became a GTDer.
It took me seven years to realise that I wasn’t getting anything significant done. I had a lot of ideas, plans and goals, yet all I seemed to be doing was reviewing, planning and doing the easy things from my context lists.
Replying to emails was much easier than sitting down to write the first chapter of the book I wanted to write. Spending more time mind mapping the presentation I had to give on Friday seemed more important than opening up Keynote and designing the presentation.
Yet, ironically, it was an end of year review that forced me to face up to reality and see that while I was excellent at planning and reviewing, I had become terrible at doing the work.
And this is one of the most common problem areas I see with many of my coaching clients. The fixation on having everything perfectly organised and planned.
You see, the problem here is not that everything is neatly organised and you have the plans to do whatever it is you want to do. The problem is nothing is being done to do those plans.
While I was working on my recent Time-Based Productivity course, the project note I had for it was a mess. I had a lot of notes, ideas and thoughts. Yet, I maintained a strict next actions list at the top of the project note as well as links to the documents I was working on.
It didn’t matter that below those items was a horror show of ill-thought out ideas and random thoughts. They were there in case I got stuck somewhere. What mattered was the important information was clear and at the top of the note.
The note was designed so that the work got done. It was not designed to look pretty.
I’ve seen clients with thirty page Word documents detailing their department’s plans for the year. It’s written in some vague management language that leaves a lot to interpretation. It’s as Winston Churchill once said of a similar document from the government’s treasury department:
“This paper, by its very length, defends itself from ever being read.”
You can spend hours going through a document like that, and nothing will ever get done.
What matters is knowing what the department’s objectives are and what needs to be done to accomplish them.
That does not need thirty pages. That can be summarised on one page, at most.
If you’re working in an organisation that loves using management speak to communicate their ill-thought through ideas, one of the best ways to navigate these documents is to establish what the ultimate goal is.
What are the targets, or in management speak “KPI’s” (Key Performance Indicators)? Once you know how you or your department will be measured, you can use your own experience and knowledge to put in place a plan to achieve those targets.
Ultimately, your boss, and their boss, are concerned about your targets. How you achieve those targets are less important, although they should always be achieved legally, of course.
In many ways translating these verbose annual planning documents is the role of the departmental managers. This means translating them into actionable items so that everyone in the team clearly understands what they are aiming for.
This then reduces the necessity of further planning meetings and everyone can get on and achieve the objectives.
And this is the same for individuals.
When we plan things out we are exploring options, considering best ways to do things and perhaps thinking of potential outcomes.
While these exercises do have their place, they cannot replace doing the work.
The objective, therefore, is to figure out as quickly as possible what you need to do to get the work completed.
My wife bought me a new iron and ironing board for my birthday. I love ironing, I find it relaxing. I’ve learnt that no matter how big the pile of ironing is, the pile is not going to diminish by more planning and strategising. The only way the pile of ironing will shrink is for me to plug my iron in, set up my ironing board and get started.
Now years of ironing has taught me to begin with the clothes that require a cooler setting and finish with clothes that require a hotter setting such as linen shirts. That’s experience, although, I remember being taught that one by my grandmother many many years ago.
The final part of this is choosing when to do the ironing. For me, I find ironing after I’ve been sat down for a long time works best. I’m stood up and have to move around to hang my shirts up after they’re ironed. So, doing the ironing in the afternoon or early evening works best for me.
Given that I generally do the ironing once a week, all I need to decide is when. When will I do it? That’s the only planning I need to do with something I routinely do.
When it comes to organising, I’m always surprised how so many people have missed one of the best features of computers and technology. It’s not so you can sit and stare at a screen for hours on end. It’s the speed at which a computer can organise your files.
You can choose to organise your files by date created, date modified, title, type of document or by size. The only thing you need to do is to put the file into a folder.
If you were to keep things as simple as possible, two folders one for your personal life and one for your professional life would work. (And I know a lot of people who do just that and can find anything they need with the use of a keyboard shortcut or a few typed letters.
While travelling last month, I had all my flight confirmation emails and car hire documents stored in Evernote in its own notebook. Before we set off, I made sure this notebook was downloaded to my phone so that no matter where I was in the world, I was not going to be relying on flakey internet.
This meant, when we finally reached the car hire desk at 11 p.m. At Dublin Airport, all I needed to do was open Evernote, type Europcar in the search and all my details we instantly on my screen ready to show the assistant.
Most notes apps people are using today have incredibly powerful search features built in. Evernote was build on its search features. I’m frequently amazed at how quickly Evernote can find something I vaguely think might be in there.
I remember my wife trying to sort something out for me on a Korean website while we were sitting in cafe. She asked me if I remembered my password for a particular website I had not used for over ten years.
I opened up Evernote and typed in the name of the website and in less than second the login and password details were there. My brain cannot work that fast when trying to recall something from ten years ago.
What this means is you do not need to spend days or months trying to come up with a “perfect” notes organisation system. You could quite easily operate on a simple professional and personal folder system.
You’d still be able to find anything you were looking for, and all you would need to do is to learn how to use the search features.
So, Sally, if you want to get things organised, let your computer do the work for you. Start by creating a simple folder structure of personal and work, and organise your documents there first.
As you’re doing this I would add that you ensure the title of the documents and files are clear. Sometimes we download something from the internet and we end up with a jumble of letters and numbers. While your computer will be able to tell you when you downloaded it and what the file type is, it won’t be able to tell you what it is. That part of the organising process is on you.
If you wish to have a little more structure than simply personal and professional you can modify things later. The goal here is to begin the cleaning up process.
And don’t forget the delete key. It’s your best friend when cleaning up.
Once you’ve tidied everything up and you know where everything is, when it comes to what to do next will naturally follow.
This organising may take you a weekend to do. Yet, that investment in time will be well worth it. You’ll feel less anxious, lighter and will have begun developing confidence in your system. That’s a very nice place to be.
I hope that has helped, Sally. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you a very very productive week.
“Word-processing is a normative, standardised tool. Obviously, you can change the page layout and switch fonts, but you cannot invent a form not foreseen by the software. Paper allows much greater graphic freedom: you can write on either side, keep to set margins or not, superimpose lines or distort them. There is nothing to make you follow a set pattern. It has three dimensions too, so it can be folded, cut out, stapled or glued.”
That’s a quote from Claire Bustarret, a specialist on codex manuscripts at the Maurice Halbwachs research centre in Paris. And is the start of my attempt to explain why you don’t want to be abandoning the humble pen and paper just yet.
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Script | 378
Hello, and welcome to episode 378 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I recently came across a short video from Shawn Blanc of the Sweet Setup website who argued that paper-based planners enable better focus and less distractions that their digital counterparts.
And in my now ten-month experiment with the Franklin Planner I also have discovered that planning on paper gives me greater insights about what is important and what is not, it has allowed me to reduce my to-do list dramatically and improved my ability to think at the next level—the level that really matters if you want to go beyond just the rudimentary basics and create something special.
This week’s question is about my “experiment” and what I did it and what I learned. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Phil. Phil asks, hi Carl, I’m curious about your Franklin Planner experiment. Why did you do it and what have you learned from the experience?
Hi Phil, thank you for your question.
Before I begin, I should give you some background.
My planner journey began on my 18th birthday when my uncle and auntie bought me a black leather Filofax. These were all the rage in the mid to late 1980s. They were a symbol of what we called in the UK the “YUPPIE generation”
A YUPPIE was a young urban professional or young upwardly mobile professional. It was a term used to describe a young, well-educated, and affluent person who worked in a city. It was often associated with a particular lifestyle and consumption patterns.
Filofaxes had a diary—usually a week to view—, an addresses area, and other planning pages such as a goals and notes area and an expenses tracker.
I loved that Filofax. And I remember carrying it around with me everywhere. I was living the YUPPIE lifestyle without having the job, type of car or luxury apartment associated with them. I was pretending hahaha.
A few years later, while working in car sales, I was introduced to the Franklin Planner. I think it was around 1992 or 1993, by my general manager, Andrew.
That changed everything for me. No longer was I just carrying around information—really what a Filofax did in those days—and I had a tool that enabled me to establish what was important to me (my “governing values”) and a way to plan the day, and week.
I used that Franklin Planner for fourteen years. It went everywhere with me. I’d take it on holiday with me and often find myself sat on the hotel’s balcony late at night writing out how I felt my life was going and what I wanted to change.
It was a tool that kept me accountable to my goals and values and really did change my life for the better.
Then came what I call the digital explosion in 2009. That’s when I got my first iPhone and that coincided with my first reading of David Allen’s Getting Things Done.
I stopped using the Franklin Planner and began a transition to digital tools.
It was an exciting time and my whole time management system began to change. Often for the better, sometimes for the worse. Yet, on the whole I enjoyed the evolution.
That’s the background.
So, why did I decide to go back to using a Franklin Planner.
Well, I had begun to notice that I felt I was rushing everything. Sure, some things needed to be done quickly, but the majority of my work didn’t need to be done right now. Those tasks in my task list could wait until another day, yet, I had this feeling I had to complete them today.
It created a sense of anxiety. A sort of low level buzz in my head telling me I should be doing work, checking off my tasks and not taking time to step back and think if what I was about to do was necessary or important.
It was unpleasant.
So, I decided to go back and try a Franklin Planner for a few months to see what would happen.
It was a revelation and I was shocked.
The first thing I noticed was I slowed down. Because you have to manually write out your tasks and appointments each day, you had time to contemplate whether they really needed to be done.
With my digital system, I had things like watch this YouTube video, or read this article. Yet, these were not important at all. For some reason the digital task manager elevated their importance because they were on the list and had to be done—which, of course, they didn’t.
I never wrote those down in the Franklin Planner. I might have written them down in the notes area for later, but they would not be a task.
It was too easy to add stuff to a digital task manager, which meant all sorts of rubbish got added to the list. What that did was to make my task lists bigger and bigger. It got to a point where there were over 600 tasks in my task manager.
I remember looking at that realising that 80% of what was in there was either no longer relevant or would be a waste of time if I did do them.
That never happened with the Franklin Planner. The act of writing down tasks, meant you would carefully consider whether it was worth doing or not.
The result of this transition was instead of having fifteen to twenty tasks on my task list each day, in my Franklin Planner I had less then eight most days and what was there was genuinely important.
Another area that changed almost immediately was I started to think again.
Earlier last year, I had started planning out my projects, YouTube videos and weekly plans in what I called my Planning Book. This was an A4 ring-bound notebook that contained all my plans and initial thoughts about a project or video.
Suddenly, I found I was thinking things through better. When I sat down to plan out something, I was completely engaged. There were no pop-up notifications, or other digital distractions that would stop my thoughts. I could go deep, much deeper than I ever did digitally.
And the results were almost instant. My YouTube video views went from an average of 3 to 4 thousand in a week to over 10,000!
The only change I had made was to plan out my videos on paper instead of an Evernote note.
On analysis, what I noticed was I became a better storyteller—and important part of creating YouTube videos. And that resulted in almost three times more views on YouTube.
I quickly began to see that there was something going on here.
Digital tools are great. They are so convenient, and it’s fantastic that you can carry around fifteen years of notes on a simple device like your phone. But, is that really helpful.
99% of my journeys and trips never required me to have to look up some important information.
And on those rare occasions when I did need to look up something, I could have easily explained to the person I was meeting that I would send the information when I got back to my office.
In fact, remembering to do that after writing it down on a piece of paper may have impressed the person I was meeting and would have given me time to think of a memorable way to convey the information.
Returning to the Franklin Planner and bringing some paper-based planning back into my life has been a revelation. It’s slowed me down, while at the same time has helped me to become far more productive.
It’s done that by getting me to think again.
And that’s perhaps where digital tools are failing us.
Technology is all about speeding things up and making things more convenient.
Think about it, the introduction of elevators and escalators has coincided with people becoming less fit and healthy. The convenience of delivery food has created a generation of people who wake up, sit down at a desk all day, then order food and continue to sit while they eat highly processed foods that are slowly killing them.
Walking up stairs and cooking your own food ensures you are moving and likely eating a lot healthier. It also means you more likely to eat with your family and as a consequence maintain that all important communication with the people you love.
Technology has massively increased the speed at which things can be done. And in some areas that’s helpful. But, and this is a big but, your brains ability to process all that information has not speeded up.
This means, if you want to feel fulfilled and be more productive, you should become better at filtering out the noise and focus on the things that are genuinely important.
Digital tools make that difficult with their emphasis on speed and monotonous lists.
Paper-based tools enable your brain to slow down, work at a healthy pace and to think deeper. A consequence of which means you think better, make better decisions about what to work on and feel less stressed and overwhelmed.
Will I go back to an all-digital system? No.
I’ve found a happy balance. My Franklin Planner allows me to make better choices about what I should work on today. My Planning Book gives me a space to think about what I am trying to do and to brainstorm better ways of doing the work.
However, I do see a space for digital tools.
I always scan in my plans to a digital project note. The output of my work is digital. Blog-posts, YouTube videos, online courses and even my coaching programmes are all done digitally. (I use Zoom to talk with my clients who are based all over the world)
I also use Todoist to keep track of the recurring stuff I would likely forget to do. Reminders to water the office plant (every four days), to do my expenses, respond to my actionable emails and to send out regularly recurring invoices are all managed in Todoist.
The conclusion I have come to from this experiment is that the perfect system is a hybrid of digital and analogue tools. Your calendar works best digitally, yet on a daily basis, slowing down and writing out what you will do that day works better in an analogue form. It stops you from overwhelming yourself.
Thank you, Phil, for your question. And thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
“If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.”
That’s a quote from Alex Pang’s book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less.
How many of you are taking a holiday (“vacation” for my American friends) this year?
I know that for many—myself included—taking a holiday is not something they find comfortable. They know they need it, yet there’s just so much to do and so little time to do it.
Anyway, having just returned from a ten-day holiday, I thought I would share with you some ways you can get some significant rest and still use your holiday time for some useful work.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Script | 377
Hello, and welcome to episode 377 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
For many people, going on holiday is something they look forward to. It’s an opportunity to get away from the daily grind of meetings, deadlines, emails, and messages.
Yet for others, it can be more stressful than when at work. There’s a worry that something important will be missed or that an emergency of their making will occur while they’re away.
However, there’s is something else a holiday offers you, that few people ever take advantage of. In this week’s episode I will share with you the things I do while away.
Now, some of what I do may not be for you—I run my own business which means I need to be watching, at the very least, what is happening within the business each day. Yet, many of the things I will suggest may be just the thing for you to help you get on top of your work.
Now, before I get into the ideas, just a quick heads-up.
Before I went away, I launched a brand new, ground-shattering course. The Time-Based Productivity course.
It’s an evolution of everything I’ve taught over the last several years.
You have no control over what’s coming in each day, yet feel you must finish everything. Trying to decide what’s important, what can wait, and what must be done right now causes you to freeze, become anxious, and then spend time reorganising all your tasks.
It’s unsustainable and leaves you feeling lost, out of control, and overwhelmed.
Enter time-based productivity, where what matters is how much time you allocate to the different types of work you need to do.
It’s a method that works, and will transform your relationship with time once and for all.
There’s currently an early-bird discount of 20% on the course. So, if you want to become less stressed, more in control of your time, and have the time to do the things you want to do, this course is for you.
Oh, and I should point out that this course also gives you free access to my Areas of Focus and my all-new Time Sector System course.
Okay, now on with the podcast.
First up, we have to accept that even though we are on holiday, email and messages are not going to stop coming in. They just don’t.
If you’re employed, I would strongly advise that you set up an auto-respond email that informs the sender that you are away and will not be checking your email while away or responding to anything when you get back.
Instead, inform them to resend the email on the day AFTER you get back.
This does two things. The first is it allows you, if you wish, to delete anything that came in while you were away. For those of you who are more squeamish, you can archive them instead.
The second is it sorts out the important from the not important automatically for you. If something’s important, you will get the email again the day after you return to work.
Why the day after you return? Well, I can promise you on your return to work, there’s going to be a lot of catching up to do. You don’t want a lot of emails coming in on that day causing you to instantly feel overwhelmed on your first day back.
For those of you, like me, who cannot, or are not willing to, stay away from their email, then setting up a routine can help.
I travelled to Ireland. That’s eight hours behind Korea, so my sleep schedule changes. Normally, I am a night owl. I prefer to work late into the evening and start the day around 8:30 am.
When I am in Europe, that changes and I become an early bird. I normally wake up around 4:00 am and go to bed around 8:30 pm.
I use the two hours between 4:30 and 6:30 am to deal with communications and admin tasks that, as a business owner, are my responsibility to deal with.
It’s just two hours a day done before the day gets started.
The great thing with this approach is that once I’ve done it, that’s it for the day. I won’t return to my email or messages for the rest of the day and I get on and enjoy the holiday.
This is a better approach than to come back to 800+ emails and messages on your first day. If you’re going straight into meetings and catching up with what has happened while you were away, you’ve just created a huge backlog for yourself that will take weeks to get back on top of.
Next. One of the biggest issues I get from my coaching clients is they don’t have any time to step back and define what is important to them, reorganise their daily structure or to establish what their core work is.
Holiday time is great for this. There’s often a lot of travelling involved, and it’s likely to be with your family. This is a wonderful opportunity to talk with your partner about what you want as a family.
My wife and I use flying time to talk about what we want to accomplish as a family over the next year. It’s not planned. It’s spontaneous. And, it’s usually when we are flying back home rather than when we fly out. Yet, we always do it.
I remember when I was employed and suffering from what we called “the holiday blues”. This is where you feel slightly depressed on your return to work for a week or two. You miss the sense of relaxation and have nothing to look forward to except for the daily drudge of work and meetings.
Having a talk with your partner and or family on your return journey can give you a multitude of things you can do as a couple or family. Giving you something to look forward to.
If you’re taking a summer holiday, this is also a good time to review how you are doing on your goals this year.
When this year started, I was 88 kilograms (about 195 pounds or nearly 14 stone). That’s way above my target weight of between 80 and 83 kilograms (175 to 180 pounds or 12 ½ to 13 stone)
So, my number one health and fitness goal for 2025 was to get my weight back to within my normal range. That was achieved, but, while away I ate too much—don’t we all when on holiday?—and need to refocus my attention on getting it back.
Fortunately, it’s only two or three pounds, so the target it to get it back within acceptable limits by the end of July.
This means, I need to quickly get back into my exercise routine and eat healthily.
It’s a great way to get yourself refocused on your return.
Another thing you can do while away is to do some digital cleaning up. I love this time.
While you’re on holiday there is likely to be pockets of time you can use to clean up your notes, calendar and task manager.
Let’s be honest, when we’re in the day to day hustle, we throw a lot of useless information into our notes and add tasks into our task manager that we know we will never do.
This is a wonderful time to clear these out.
Last Wednesday, my first day back at work, my notes were organised, my task manger was clean and tight and my calendar was cleared of conflicts. What a wonderful way to restart.
What I noticed was I felt organised, focused and ready for anything. Isn’t that what a holiday is meant to do for you.
Yet, if you don’t do any cleaning up, you come back to a mess. Nothing has changed and the very things you hate about your work life continue. No control, a messed up list of things to do and a calendar that fills you with dread.
And, something powerful happens when you do this learning up. You learn a lot.
You discover better workflows and processes and you gain a sense of optimism about how the changes you make now will bring you incredible rewards once you return to work.
I often find I cannot wait to get restarted because I’m excited to test out new ways of managing my work day.
And let’s be honest, cleaning things up doesn’t require a lot of mental energy. It’s the kind of thing you can do in the evenings with a laptop on your knees while enjoying a cocktail or two. (Although not too many. You don’t want to delete important things)
Now, you may be thinking ‘no way! I’m on holiday I don’t want to deal with any work issues’. And I get that.
But, and it’s big but, your holiday may only last a week or two, and then you’re back at work. Doing all or some of these tips, will last far longer and leave you with less stress and overwhelm.
It gives you optimism, and helps you to refocus on the important things in life. Surely, a few hours out of your holiday time to do some cleaning up is worth it to feel that way?
In the past I’ve not done any of these things and just found myself in the same mess I was in before my holiday. It’s not pleasant and that’s when I struggled with the holiday blues.
Now, I do these things and I’ve never experienced holiday blues and instead am excited to get back to work feeling refreshed and energised.
It’s your choice. But I can assure you, if you do all of these or just some of them on your next holiday, you will continue to do it for every holiday in the future.
Thank you for listening and don’t forget to check out the brand new Time Based Productivity Course.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
“Every morning in SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they'd do is inspect my bed.
If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers would be pulled tight, the pillow centred just under the headboard, and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack. It was a simple task, mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection.
It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that we were aspiring to be real warriors. Tough, battle hardened SEALs. But the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over. If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day.
It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another, and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter.
If you can't do the little things right, you'll never be able to do the big things right. And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made that you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.”
That is an excerpt from Admiral McRaven’s Commencement Address at Texas University in 2014. And it’s the heart of this week’s episode. Simple, mundane tasks that carry far more weight than you may think.
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Script | 376
Hello, and welcome to episode 376 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
If you were to read the comments on any productivity or time management YouTube video, you’ll find many well-meaning commentators talking about this app, or that new method or hack to play with.
The truth is few of them will work and most involve adding more and more layers of complexity which only stops you from doing the work that matters.
Real improvements in your time management and productivity comes from the boring and mundane. It’s the sitting down to respond to your emails and messages every day. It’s taking the laundry to the washing machine and hanging it up after it’s been washed. And yes, it’s making your bed each morning before you leave to take your kids to school.
Doing the simple, basic tasks each day whether you’re in the mood or not, is the secret to massively improved outcomes. It means when you get home after a particularly stressful day, everything is calm, peaceful and ready for you to relax get some rest.
It’s how you avoid getting home, stressed out and exhausted only to find your breakfast things are still on your dining table, your bed’s unmade and your laundry basket is overflowing with clothes that are beginning to give off a rather unpleasant odour.
And, yes, it means giving yourself five to ten minutes each day to map out your day. To see where your appointments are and what tasks you must get done.
None of this is complicated. It’s basic, it’s almost laughably unimportant, yet it isn’t. These are the critical things each day that ensure you remain on top of everything and know what needs to be done, where you should be and when and leaves you feeling calm, serene even, and ready for the next day.
And with all that said, it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Charlie. Charlie asks, hi Carl, over the last twelve months, I feel everything has spiralled out of control. I get home exhausted and just never seem able to catch up. My Task list is out of control and my calendar seems to fill up with random meetings each day. What can I do to get some control back into my life?
Hi Charlie, thank you for your question.
This is something that can happen from time to time. Things spiralling out of control. It’s often because we say “yes” a little too freely, or we stop following some basic principles.
The basic principles of better time management and productivity are planning your days and week. Not in a micro-management way, but more in a what’s happening tomorrow or this week way.
It’s also understanding that in most cases you can cancel or reschedule a meeting. I’ve often looked at my diary for tomorrow and seen I was over scheduled and realised I needed to postpone some meetings or rearrange some of the things I had planned to do.
It’s never the end of the world if you have to reschedule. It’s just a part of life.
For example, if you’re scheduled to pick your kids up from school but realise that if you do you’ll not be able to finish the proposal that must go out today, you could ask your partner or parents to help you out today.
It’s only today. Or, you may decide to ask to be excused from a team meeting so you can finish the proposal.
We always have options. Yet, if you want more options, plan the day the evening before and you will see any potential conflicts with plenty of time to explore all options.
If you don’t plan your day, it’s likely you will see the problem you have a couple of hours before you have to pick your kids up. You’re not leaving yourself with much time to sort out the conflict.
It’s the same reason why weekly planning is critical. The weekly planning session gives you the “big picture” view of your week. It your chance to see any potential issues well before they become crises.
This is the number one reason you will find you feel behind, rushed and overwhelmed. You’re not giving yourself a moment to pause to look ahead for potential storms so you can plot an alternative route through.
To start getting back in control, do a weekly plan for next week. Open you calendar and first look for any conflicts—these are where you have inadvertently double booked yourself. You cannot be in two places at once, so pick one.
Next, open your task manager. This is probably where the bigger problems lay. When we lose control we start throwing all sorts into our tasks managers. It’s easy to put stuff there.
If your sense of control has completely gone, it’s possible you may have stopped looking at your task manager altogether. If that’s the case, open it.
Now you have a choice. You could declare task management bankruptcy and delete everything. Don’t worry, if something’s genuinely important, you’ll be reminded of it somewhere. You can then add it back later.
The second choice is to go through everything in your task manager one by one. Delete what’s no longer relevant, update what is by making sure the task is written in an actionable way. In other words you have an actionable verb in the task so it’s clear what you need to do.
Then for anything in your inbox, ask the three processing questions:
What is it?
What do I need to do?
When will I do it.
Then, organise your tasks by stuff you will do this week, next week, next month.
Once done, go back to your this week list and, with your calendar open, put the day you will do the tasks next week.
Now be smart here. If you have six hours of meetings on Wednesday, avoid putting tasks on that day. You won’t have time. Not when you remember you will need to spend some time on your email and messages and any other matters that will inevitably pop up once the week gets going.
Anything not in your this week list can be left undated. Hopefully, many of those will sort themselves out. If they don’t, you can look at them again when you do you next weekly planning session and decide if they need to be brought forward into the following week.
Just doing these basic weekly planning steps, you’ll instantly give yourself a sense of control.
Yet, this is only as good as your ability to say no.
You cannot be in two places at once, and you’re not going to be able to complete sixty tasks and attend seven hours of meetings in one day. If that’s what your day looks like stop.
You’re going to have to say no to something and the sooner you do this the easier it is to do it.
The consequences of not doing these planning sessions are missed deadlines, over booked calendars and a lot of late nights and weekends spent catching up, feeling stressed and blaming your company.
The blame game solves nothing unless you’re willing to say “no. This has go to stop”. If you’re not willing to do that, don’t complain. A bit harsh, I know, but you always have a choice remember.
More basics are giving yourself time each day for your messages and emails. I’m always surprised how unwilling people are to protect time for dealing with these.
99% of the time it’s out of control email, Slack and Teams inboxes that people are most stressed about. And I know, if you don’t spend sometime on your communications daily, they will backlog quickly.
And when I say quickly I mean it. One day missed will mean you will need double the time tomorrow. And that keeps increasing until you decide to spend a whole day clearing up your email.
If you want to avoid spending days clearing your email inbox, protect time every day for dealing with it. That has to be a non-negotiable.
I believe it was Einstein who said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.
Well unless you protect time for managing your communications each day, you’ll be spending days clearing your inbox every month. Nothing will change unless you are prepared to change the way you schedule your day.
So there you go, Charlie. The important basics of getting back control and staying in control, is daily and weekly planning and protecting daily time for dealing with communications. Do that, and you’ll soon find yourself regaining control.
I know it sounds simple, perhaps too simple but it goes back to what Admiral McCraven said in his commencement address, “if you want to change the world, begin by making your bed.”
Thank you for your question, Charlie, and thank you to you too for listening.
Oh, and just a quick update, this podcast will be on holiday for a couple of weeks. We’ll be back in a couple of weeks.
It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
”But the fact remains, with all the changes that have happened in our lifetime—whether we’re “boomers,” “Gen Xers,” “Millennials,” “Gen Zers” or whatever comes next—one thing has never changed nor will it ever change, and that is the amount of time we all have.”
That’s a quote from Hyrum Smith’s book, The 3 Gaps: Are You Making A Difference
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Areas of Focus: The Foundation Of All Solid Productivity Systems.
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Script | 375
Hello, and welcome to episode 375 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One thing you may have noticed is that there are many things we have to or want to do, yet there never seems to be enough time to do them.
You are not alone. Everyone feels this either all the time or at least some of the time. The reason is that it’s true. There will always be more to do than time available to do it.
This means we should approach the problem from a different angle.
Traditionally, people have spent extra hours trying to catch up. Working late or even working the weekend. Yet, is throwing more time at the issue the best solution?
I don’t think so.
We live one life. Our work is just one part of that life. If you work an average forty-hour week, your work only accounts for around 25% of your time.
Yet, for many people, their work causes 80% or more of their stress.
This week, I want to share some ideas and a paradigm shift in how you think about the tasks you have to do and the time you have available. It’s a simple shift, but one that will reframe your relationship with time and ultimately give you more time for the things you want time for.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Marcos. Marcos asks, Hi Carl, I struggle to keep up with all the tasks in my task manager. Most days feel like I am adding more tasks than I complete, and my inbox is now full. Todoist won’t allow me to add any more. How do you cope with an ever-growing list of things to do?
Hi Marcos, thank you for your question.
There could be a number of reasons for this. One of the most common ones is moving any email you need to respond to into your task manager’s inbox.
You don’t need to do that. Instead, you can create a folder in your email system and call it “Action This Day”. Then, any email you need to act on—reply, read, forward, etc. You place it there.
Then, add a recurring task in your task manager that tells you to “clear my Action This Day folder”.
That will remove many tasks from your task manager. It will also begin the process of changing the way you think about things to do and the time you have available to do them.
It’s no longer about how many emails you must reply to; it’s about when you will work on your emails.
Other things that can clog up a task manager are articles and newsletters to read, YouTube videos to watch and books to buy.
All good stuff, but since so many of these are non-urgent, you would be better putting them in a dedicated note in your notes app.
That way, when you do have time to read or watch these, you can open up your notes app and choose something.
I covered this recently in one of my YouTube videos. There is information we like to collect—articles, YouTube videos, etc., often the easiest thing to do is to add this information to your task manager’s inbox. After all, reading or watching them is something to do.
Yet, the worst place to collect these items is your task manager. There’s no urgency to read or watch these. We can do it anytime. Perhaps we’re waiting at the doctor’s office, or, in my case, for my wife somewhere.
In these situations, I can open my notes app and, depending on my mood, choose between reading or watching something—my notes are always on my phone.
So, Marcos, one of the first things you can do is to remove all these non-urgent informational items from your task manager and move them to your notes app.
I would add that a great place to read articles is something like Instapaper or Read. Both of these apps are designed to collect newsletters and articles.
Using tools like these gives you a central place to read your saved articles. It’s like having your personalised curated news feed.
The only addition is finding a regular time to read what you collect. The problem with keeping these in your task manager is that you’re not reading them. Moving them out of your task manager and into a read-later app is just shuffling things around if you are not committing to a daily reading time.
When I commuted to work each day, I read these articles on bus and train journeys. This prevented me from getting sucked into the negative news cycle and clickbait headlines.
My news feed was free of junk and algorithmically generated stuff I was no longer interested in.
And there is another tip for managing the things we have to do. Having a set time each day for doing the things we want to do.
The challenge we all face today is that everything is so convenient; we can pretty much do anything at any time. You can set up a bank account, apply for a credit card, and even buy a car online today.
You don’t have to leave the comfort of your own home.
In the past, if we wanted to open a bank account or buy a new car, we would have to go to a specific place. Going to these places meant we needed to schedule time to go.
I remember when I was in car sales and couples would come in either in the evening or at weekends. During the weekday, things were relatively quiet for us. Time spent with a customer would typically be around an hour or two.
So the customer had to go to a showroom intentionally, talk to a human being and in most cases test drive a car.
Now, if you can do almost anything at any time from anywhere, the challenge becomes, what do you do now?
If you are task counting, you’re putting yourself into an impossible situation. The number of tasks you have to do is not within your control.
You do not have control over what your boss or customers will ask you to do today. You don’t have much control over what your partner or family members may ask you to do. You also don’t know when they will ask you to do something.
By focusing on what you have to do, you’re setting yourself up for overwhelm.
Instead, you will find focusing on when you will do something a much more realistic approach. Not only do you put yourself back in control, you will also be working within a realistic system.
This system is called time-based productivity, and it’s been around for a very long time.
I’ve tracked it back to 1918 with the Ivy Lee Method. That’s where you wrote down the six things you want to get done the next day, and when the day began, you started with the first item and worked your way down the list until the end of your work day.
Anything you did not get done would be moved to the list for tomorrow. It’s simple and based on a realistic evaluation of how much you could get done in a day.
From there, it advanced throughout the century to when we began using things like the Franklin Planner.
Something went wrong in the early 2000s. Somewhere along the line, we stopped calculating how much time we had available to do things and began focusing on the things themselves.
Well, that’s an impossible situation. You’ll always have stuff to do. If you focus on all that stuff, you’re going to feel anxiety, stress and overwhelm.
If you want to stop the struggle Marcos, then returning to a time-based system will do that for you.
The first step is to look at all the tasks you have to do and categorise them. You will have admin and communication tasks—we all do. Then there will be tasks related to your specific work. If you work with clients, then there will be client work to do. If you work in management, there will be management duties you will need to perform.
Once you know what your categories are, you can then allocate specific time for doing those categories of work.
Let me give you an example of this with email.
Imagine you get 150 emails a day. Of those, around thirty require you to take action. When you process your email, you move those actionable emails into your action this day folder, and either delete or archive the rest.
This leaves you with thirty emails that require some action from you.
If you were to allocate an hour each day for dealing with your actionable emails, you will always have time to respond to your email. Sure, some days you may not be able to clear them all. However, if you consistently spend an hour a day on these, you will never develop a significant backlog.
Most days you will be ahead; other days you might be slightly behind. But you won’t feel it’s out of control.
You can also apply this to your admin tasks. Admin tasks have a habit of building up over time because they are generally low in urgency and importance.
If you were to give yourself thirty minutes or so each day for admin tasks, you would find that no backlog is building up, and you are, for the most part, on top of things.
You can do the same for your client work. If part of your responsibilities is to send out proposals to customers, then allocating some time each day for doing this means all you need to do is refer to a list of proposals to write, and for that allocated time, you do as many as you can.
That list may be in a CRM system or a simple note in your notes app. Your calendar will tell you that it’s time to write proposals. You then go to your list of proposals to write, and start.
This way, you won’t need to use your task manager.
I do this with my coaching clients. Every day, I allocate an hour to writing feedback for each client. The list of feedback to write is in Evernote. Some days, there will be six or seven pieces of feedback to write, and other days, perhaps only two or three.
I know I can write around three pieces of feedback in an hour. This means if I do this every day, nobody is likely to be waiting more than 48 hours for their feedback.
I’m not focused on how many pieces of feedback I have to write. All I am focused on is writing the feedback in the hour I have to write it. I will write as many as I can. No pressure. Just begin with the oldest and carry on down the list.
And that, in a nutshell, is what time-based productivity is all about. It’s not about how much you have to do. It’s about how much time you have available to do the work you have to do.
If you have enormous backlogs now, you may need to increase the time you allocate to specific work periods for a little while. That actually helps because it means you are learning new habits and processes for getting the work done, which ultimately speeds you up over time.
So there you go, Marcos. I hope that has helped. Take a look at your task manager. Remove individual emails and stuff to read or watch.
Then in Todoist, use the labels to categorise your work and use those categories to protect time in your calendar to do the work.
Be consistent with this and you will soon find that the overwhelm and struggle diminish.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don't much care where.
The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.
Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere.
The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”
That is the famous dialogue between Alice and the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carrol.
And it’s a great illustration of what happens when you don’t know what is important to you and where you want to go. You’re going to go get somewhere and that somewhere is probably going to be a place you never wanted to go to.
This week, I’ll share with you why developing your Areas of Focus is so important.
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Areas of Focus: The Foundation Of All Solid Productivity Systems.
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Script | 374
Hello, and welcome to episode 374 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
So, why are your Areas of Focus important? Well, in a nutshell, they give you direction. They help you to prioritise your days and weeks and give you purpose.
Without them, you’ll end up helping someone else achieve their goals, more often than not, in exchange for money, only to discover you’re health is shot to pieces and you’ve spent your forty years of working life miserably giving away five days a week to something you hated doing.
A bit harsh, I know, but if you’ve read the book The Top five Regrets of The Dying by Bronnie Ware, you’ll know that the number one reason given was “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
It’s your areas of focus that will allow you to live a life true to yourself because by developing your areas of focus, you’ll learn what is important to you and what is not.
And the second reason? I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
When you don’t know what is important and what is not, you will work too hard. Everything becomes important, and that means you work long hours and at weekends, missing out on your children growing up and enjoying the best years of your life doing the things you want to do.
I’m pretty sure that’s not how you want your life to work out.
So with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Julie. Julie asks, hi Carl, I hear you mention knowing what’s important to you a lot, yet I really don’t know what’s important. I’m under pressure at work and I have two teenagers at home. I feel my life is being pushed and pulled by everyone but myself. What can I do to create some boundaries in my life?
Hi Julie, thank you for your question.
It’s when we feel lost and out of sorts that our Areas of Focus can help to bring back some peace to our lives.
Our areas of focus are focused on our needs and wants. And because of that, people feel it’s an indulgence to even consider spending time on developing them. That’s particularly the case when we have a young family and we’ve allowed our work to dominate our lives.
The first book I ever read on time management and productivity was Hyrum Smith’s Ten natural Laws and time and Life Management, and around the first quarter of that book is spent on developing what Hyrum Smith calls your governing values.
Your governing values are the values by which you live your life by. With these, we will all be different. For some, being a good mother or father will be their most important value, for others, it might be building a successful business.
Now, when I read that book I was around eighteen or nineteen and that part of the book washed over me. I was young, I believed I was immortal and I could do anything I wanted to do. I didn’t have time to think about my “governing values”.
Yet, with age, came wisdom and around my late twenties I began to see the importance of having a set of values to guide me.
That’s when I gave myself a couple of weekends to write out my governing values. Funnily enough, as I look through my old Franklin Planners from that era, I can see that the values I wrote down then are not far away from how I define my Areas of Focus today.
it’s these areas that give you a direction and a purpose. They help you with prioritising your days and weeks and give you a solid foundation on which to build your goals.
For example, I used to be a smoker. Throughout my twenties and thirties I’s smoke around twenty cigarettes a day. I found it relaxing, a great way to step away from my work and to think. Yet, I knew that by continuing to smoke I was violating my area of health and fitness.
I was going to the gym and running, I was eating healthily, but i was destroying all that by continuing the smoke. As I got older, the pressure inside me to quit something I enjoyed doing grew stronger. it eventually reached a point where I had to quit.
Every time I reviewed my areas of focus, I had that niggling voice reminding me that the vision I had for my later life—being able to travel the world running marathons, exploring places like Mount Kilimanjaro and the Rocky Mountains would be just a pipe dream because I would be spending my later life in and out of hospital.
And so, I set the goal to quit smoking. Now for anyone who has gone through the process of quitting smoking, you’ll know it’s one of the toughest things to do. It took me two years to finally quit. Yet, the effort was worth it.
Quitting gave me a sense of accomplishment, a realisation that I could do anything if I put my mind to it and it was compatible with what I felt was important.
Yet without a set of principles—something your areas of focus will give you—things like stopping something that is slowly killing you or staying in a career that is draining you and leaving your feeling depressed and unhappy—will never occur to you. They will be placed on what Brian Tracey calls, “Someday Island”, a place where nothing happens because you’re waiting for “someday”.
another illustration of this was when i joined a law firm. I had spent six years training to be a lawyer. I worked hard, to get my legal qualifications, yet when I began working in a law firm, I quickly realised I’d made a huge mistake.
I hated being stuck behind a desk eight or none hours a day.
Prior to working in an office, all my jobs had involved a lot of moving around. I began my career in hotel management, where I spent all day running around a large building dealing with all sorts of issues. I’d sometimes be on reception helping to check people out, then I’s be in the restaurant serving lunch. It was fun, physically exhausting, yet incredibly fulfilling.
Then I went into car sales. And again, my days were largely spent running around a showroom and forecourt talking with customers.
Suddenly, I’m chained to a desk and within six months I’d gained 20 pounds in weight, I was unhappy, and felt trapped. It was as if I had been sent to open prison where I was expected to be in one place for eight to nine hours a day Monday to Friday. it was horrible.
So, I quit and came to Korea. a decision that turned out to be the best decision I’ve ever made.
Yet, when i told my friends and family I was quitting the law firm and going to teach English in Korea, they thought I was mad. Why was I quitting a potentially lucrative career to go and do something I knew nothing about?
Yet, it was my areas of focus that told me what I needed to do. staying in that legal job violated my career and business area. I was trapped in an industry that held firm to a tried and tested career path. I didn’t want that constraint. I wanted a lot more freedom to help people and perhaps change their lives for the better. Being a lawyer would never give me that freedom.
The benefit of having a set of established areas of focus is they give you a blueprint for the life you want to live. By writing them down, and reading through them every six months or so, you get the chance to realign yourself with the way you want to live your life.
Now, for those of you who have not looked at your areas of focus before, there are eight areas we all share. These are:
Family and relationships,
health and fitness,
Finances,
Business / career
Lifestyle and life experiences
Self development
Spirituality
life’s purpose
Each one of those mean something to us. However, how we define them will be different of each of us, snd in what order of importance will change as we go through life.
For example, as you get older, your health and fitness and finances will likely move up the list and your career and business will drop down.
When or if you start a family, your family and relationships will rapidly climb the list.
You may even find that over time you redefine one or more of your areas. This is perfectly normal.
however, at their core, these areas define who you are and what’s important to you.
This means, Julie, when it comes to juggling your career with your family, you will be able to see by how you prioritise your areas whether you should attend your daughter’s netball finals or that important meeting at work.
If family and relationships is above your career, then it’s an easy choice to make. However, if you have prioritised finances above family and relationships, you’ll need to decide if the risk of missing out on a promotion, is worth it to see your daughter play in the netball finals.
The problem most of face is there are too many competing demands on our time. Time is fixed. We get twenty-four hours a day; that’s it. The good news is, no matter what work you do, you always have control over how you spend those twenty-four hours.
I know many people will say they don’t have control over their time. But you do. You can decide not to attend a meeting you’ve been invited to. You get to choose whether to tap the accept, decline or maybe button when it appears on your calendar.
Whether you accept a meeting request or not, will depend on what you prioritise.
Given a choice between a meeting with an important person on a Saturday evening or spending that time with my wife, I already know the answer. my wife will have priority. Family and relationships is much higher than my career/business area.
I can renegotiate the meeting with the important person. Saturday nights are my family’s protected time. It’s one night a week, and I won’t sacrifice it for anything.
This also translates to my work week. My exercise time is 5:00 pm. At that time, I stop what I am doing and either head out for a run or go upstairs to the loft and lift weights. I never schedule meetings at 5 pm. That’s my exercise time and right now, my health and fitness area is higher than my career/business area.
All this comes down to knowing what’s your areas of focus mean to you and how you prioritise them. There we will all be different, but it’s your areas of focus that will give you a blueprint for how you want to live your life, what is important to you and where you want to spend your time.
Not knowing what your areas of focus are will be like being Alice in Alice in Wonderland. you’ll feel the need to go somewhere, but will have no idea where and then you will end up following someone else, and that someone else will not always have your best interests at heart.
I hope that has helped, Julie. My advice is to spend some time working on your areas of focus. Determine what’s they mean to you and pull out any activities that you can do consistently and add them to your task manager or calendar. That way you will stay on course. And, if you find you are not happy with the direction you are going, redefine your areas and adjust course.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
“Whoever runs your schedule is the most important person in your world as Leader. You need time to think, time to study and time to get the things done you came to leadership to do. Lose control of the schedule and you will fail.”
That is a quote from former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. And it strikes at the heart of mastering time management. Today’s episode explores why your calendar is your most important productivity tool.
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Script | 373
Hello, and welcome to episode 373 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Whoever controls your calendar controls you. They can (and often will) destroy your plans for the day, prevent you from doing your most important work and be the reason you fail in your career goals.
If you are a leader, you will likely have plans for your team. In order to implement those plans and move them to completion, you will need time. It’s up to you to find that time.
Top leaders understand this. They are very strict with their calendars. Nobody but themselves has control of it. And, probably the most important factor of all, they have the confidence to cancel appointments if those appointments do not align with their weekly or daily strategic plan.
And yes, it’s a confidence thing. Nobody, not even your boss, really has control over your time. You always have the option to negotiate an appointment or say no.
In this week’s episode, I will share some ideas you can use to get control of your calendar and have the confidence to negotiate appointments and/or say no.
So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Karen. Karen asks, Hi Carl, I lead a team of sixteen people and am struggling to get my work done because my boss and team are always demanding meetings with me. Do you have any tips on protecting time for important work when you don’t have control of your calendar?
Hi Karen, thank you for your question.
This can appear to be a difficult change to make. Particularly if your team and bosses have become conditioned to you being available whenever they need you.
One of most powerful lessons I learned in my early career was from the so—called “my office door is always open” concept. For those of you not familiar with this concept, it began in the late 80s or early 90s (possibly earlier). This was where bosses used to tell their employees my office door is always open. You can come and talk to me at anytime.
Nice concept. It gave the impression that your boss was approachable. Yet in reality, it was not really a practical way to operate.
It meant that bosses were constantly being interrupted—well, those that we not scary, anyway,
The two most productive bosses I had in my early career did follow this policy, yet with one addition. That was to tell us that when their door was closed they were not to be disturbed.
One of those bosses, would close his door every day around 2 pm. He would then use that time to get his most important work done. David, had a secretary, who would hold his calls too. If you needed David between two and four, you had to go through his secretary, Michaela and Michaela protected David’s time ruthlessly.
Yet, for the other times in the day, David was available. He’d walk around the office from time to time asking if we were okay. He made himself available.
What happened, was if we needed David for anything, we knew we had to catch him before 2 pm or wait until after 4 pm.
I don’t recall anyone complaining. The Managing Partner of the firm respected it. And so did David’s clients—he was a partner in the law firm I worked at.
The key to this working was David’s consistency. His team, bosses and clients all knew that David would not be available between two and four.
Since then, every productive person I have met, has operated something very similar. They have periods of time in the day where they are not accessible. In that time they are doing their most important work. That period of time is generally at the same time each day.
I remember, once being on a training course and the instructor, told us she would be available at any time after 11:00 am if we had any questions.
That’s it. A simple sentence. “Available at anytime after 11:00 am”. I don’t recall any one of us on that training course ever trying to contact her before 11:00 am.
Now, it might not be possible for you to cut yourself off from the outside world at the same time each day—although we all do this when we are sleeping and the world doesn’t end, does it?
A lot of this depends on the job you do. I’ve mentioned before in this podcast the best salesperson I’ve ever worked with, Claire.
Claire would never be available between 9:00 and 10:30 am. It was during this time she was on the phones prospecting and following up customers. That one strategy was the difference between her and every other salesperson in that company. She outsold her nearest colleague two to one most months.
We worked a nine hour day in that sales job, and Claire was unavailable for just ninety minutes. She was in charge of her diary. That still left her with seven-and-a-half hours where she was available.
So, Karen, the place to begin is to ask yourself how much time do you need each day to stay on top of your work?
Given that a managerial role is largely about communicating with a team and bosses, you will likely need to be available most of your working day. Yet, you will still have some individual work to do. So, how much time do you need to complete that work each week?
You will only be able to work with averages. You will not be able to be specific about how much time you need each week. You’re human. Sometimes we are on fire and can plough through a lot of work. Other days, we’re tired and anything we do is sluggish and slow.
By working with averages, you’re still getting work done and when you are on fire you can catch up.
For instance, on average, I need around 14 hours a week to create my content. This means each day I protect two hours for content creation where nobody can interrupt me. I then have an extra hour or so in the afternoons I keep flexible for finishing off any work.
I allow no more than twenty one hours of meetings each week. 90% of the time that is more than enough for the meetings and coaching sessions I have each week.
I know if I allow more than 21 hours, the additional admin cost and lost time for critical work will mean I have to work late nights and Saturday just to catch up. Not something I am prepared to do.
Earlier, I alluded to “negotiating” appointments.
Imagine you’re in the market to buy a Rolls Royce car. (I said imagine). If you call the Rolls Royce dealership, you’re going to have to negotiate a day and time. The “sales process” for buying a Rolls Royce is not your typical process. It’s an experience.
You’re not just buying a typical car. These days, you’re buying a unique bespoke car. The salesperson you talk with will need time to go through all the panelling options, Exterior colours and interior seat fabrics, and even the type of material you want your dashboard made from.
The person you speak with when making your appointment, will negotiate a time to visit the showroom. That’s part of the experience.
Now if you were in the market to buy a Ford, Toyota, Hyundai or VW, and call to make an appointment, you can name your day and time. The salespeople will very likely accept your first day and time.
Now which experience would leave you feeling special?
If you think about your readiness to accept any appointment at any time, what does that say about you?
Negotiating your appointments elevates your status in the mind of the person wishing to make an appointment with you. The harder it is to get an appointment with you, the more likely you will have a favourable outcome. It’s the “you must be important if it’s difficult to make an appointment with you”.
Try getting an appointment with Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai or Satya Nadala. It’s not that they don’t do appointments, it’s just they restrict the number of meetings they are available for each day and the meetings they do attend must count.
So, if you protect 9:30 to 11:00 am each morning, if someone wants to have a meeting with you during that time, you would say could we meet at 11:30 am instead? 9 times out of 10 your suggested time will be accepted. If not, the person wanting to meet you will likely suggest an alternative time.
If you cannot find a suitable time, then you will have to use your protected time. But with this strategy, it will be very rare that you need to do that.
I promise you, if you do this a few times, your confidence will rapidly improve and you will find that your focus time blocks will be protected.
The challenge we all face today is we feel we must be available at all times for whoever wants to communicate with us. If it’s not Teams or Zooms calls, it’s instant messages and email. The trick is to become less available.
Be like the Rolls Royce salesperson. Make getting an appointment with you part of the experience. If it’s a little harder to get an appointment with you, the person you’re meeting is going to be much more open to finding a solution with you there and then, instead of scheduling another meeting with you to “sort the details out”.
Ask yourself, what the worst that could happen if you “negotiate” with the person wanting to meet with you? The worst is they refuse your suggested time and insist you meet them at their preferred time. At that point you can accept.
Yet, I can promise you, the majority of people you negotiate times with will accept your time. The time they chose was completely random anyway. No matter who they are, your boss, your most important customer or whatever, they will thank you for taking the initiative and suggesting a time.
I will end with a recent example of this. I am in the process of changing my car as the lease on my current one is expiring in September. We called the dealership to arrange a test drive in a car I was interested in, and the sales manager informed us that this week they were fully booked up, but they had an opening on Thursday or Friday afternoon next week.
I was both impressed and relieved. Impressed because he did not jump at the chance and suggest we come down that afternoon or tomorrow. I had a sense of scarcity. Relieved because he took the decision for making the appointment out of our hands.
We arranged 1pm the following Thursday and when we arrived, the car was on the forecourt ready and waiting for us. A very impressive experience.
So, there you go, Karen. Don’t be afraid to negotiate your appointments and meetings. Build confidence in negotiating interruptions from your team and protect sufficient time for getting your core work done.
Thank you for your question and and thank you to you too. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Do you feel you have to push yourself every day just to stay on top of your work? Well, this week I’m looking at why this happens and what you can do to prevent it.
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Script | 372
Hello, and welcome to episode 372 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
If you have ever watched a Formula 1 race, it can be easy to believe that from the moment the lights go out and the race starts, the cars go flat out until the end of the race.
Ah, as if it were that simple.
The truth is if a team tried to do this, they would be guaranteed to lose the race.
Even though a race may only last ninety minutes, during the race the teams will need to conserve their tyres and fuel. Going flat out to the finish would degrade the tyres too quickly, which would mean they lose essential grip in the corners, and running out of fuel would be game over for a team.
You are like that Formula 1 car. When you start your day you have a limited amount of energy and your ability to focus needs to be managed through the day.
It’s not physical energy. Your body has a way to utilise your fat reserves to help keep you out of danger when necessary, physically. It’s your mental energy. That is limited. And it’s a lack of mental energy that results in you making mistakes, procrastinating and being unable to make a decision about what to work on next.
It your mental energy that requires careful management each day. Getting home exhausted each day won’t do very much for your relationships. You won’t be in the mood to do very much, and having a conversation with your partner or kids won’t be a top priority.
Yet, your family may have been waiting for you to get home to talk with you, play and just have some quality time.
The good news is it doesn’t have to be that way. There are things you can do to preserve your mental energies so you arrive home feeling relaxed, fulfilled and ready to engage with your family.
However, before we get to how to do that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Matt. Matt asks, Hi Carl, do you have any ideas on how to stop feeling constantly tired and using the weekends just to recover before doing it all again on a Monday?
Hi Matt, thank you for your question.
If you are constantly feeling tired, my first advise would be to go see your doctor. A constant feeling of fatigue or tiredness could have an underlying reason and it’s better to get that checked out first.
If, your doctor reports there are no underlying illnesses, then it’s time to look at your lifestyle.
As I wrote in Your Time, Your Way, there are three areas you need to keep in balance. These are the foundations of any productive life.
They are:
Sleep, movement and diet.
Are you getting enough sleep for you? We are all different when it comes to the amount of sleep we require. Some of you may work well on six hours, while others may require eight or nine hours sleep.
If you want to operate at your best each day, finding out how much sleep you need would be a first step.
For years I thought I only needed six hours of sleep. Yet when I did the test that Matthew Walker, the sleep doctor, suggested, I discovered I actually needed seven hours twenty minutes.
What is that test? I hear you ask. What you do is sleep with no alarm for seven days and calculate how much sleep you slept each night. Then you add the total number of hours you slept and divide that number by seven.
That will give you roughly the number of hours of sleep you need.
I did this experiment while I was on holiday—when I didn’t have to wake up at any particular time. That way I had no anxiety about not waking up on time.
Now I make sure I get seven hours at a minimum.
Movement does not mean you have to go to the gym or out running. If you look back to a time when fewer people were overweight, the 1950s for instance, there were very few gyms—and the gyms then were centred on specialised bodybuilding or competitive sports people.
You didn’t see people jogging round parks either.
Instead, people moved more. They walked, took the stairs, manually cleaned their houses and were more active in general.
The statistics are shocking. In the 1950s, around 10% of the adult US population were classified as being overweight. That number was 6% in the UK.
In 2020, those numbers had increased to over 40% in the US and 38% in the UK.
While I know convenience is wonderful, it’s also destroying our health. Humans were designed to move. We are not designed to spend as much as fifteen hours a day sitting down.
Your brain needs movement. This is why often you will find you come up with solutions to difficult problems when walking down a street or exercising.
Movement does so much more for you. It gives your brain a chance to reset, relax and more importantly these days, gets your eyes off the screen.
And then there is diet.
I am sure you re familiar with how you feel after a lunch high in carbohydrates. You feel drowsy, sluggish and sleepy. It even has a name; the afternoon slump.
If your diet is a mess—full of highly processed foods, sugars and carbohydrates, you are going to struggle to focus. You’ll always be feeling tired, sluggish and exhausted.
Switching your diet to a healthier one, will do wonders for your overall productivity and mental energies.
So, get those three basic fundamentals of a productive day sorted first and you will see a significant improvement in your productivity and focus.
Next, though, is how we apply ourselves each day. In other words, how we manage our workloads.
Constantly switching your attention between designing a presentation or trying to figure out how to ask Chat GPT the right prompts so it gives you the answers you are looking for while a the same time responding to Slack or Teams messages will leave you completely wiped out in no time at all.
Your brain was not designed to be switching contexts in that way all day. It’s called cognitive overload and while, perhaps, in the moment you don’t recognise it, what you are doing is rapidly depleting your brain’s capacity to make decisions, and remain focused on the job at hand.
It’s the most inefficient way to go about your work.
The danger is it becomes addictive. I’ve seen in recent years this called “dopamine addiction”. This is where you have become addicted to the drama of urgent deadlines, the sound of another notification and constant buzz of distractions from breaking news and short videos with flashing lights and rapid changes in context.
It destroys your focus, mental energy and leaves you feeling worn out and exhausted at the end of the day.
To improve your focus and better manage your mental energies, look for ways to group similar work together.
For example, if you find that you focus better in a morning, try to avoid having meetings at that time. Instead, perhaps start your day with a two hour session of work on a particularly difficult project or task. One that requires a fair bit of creativity or skill.
Then give yourself thirty minutes or an hour before you attempt to do another mentally challenging task.
I’ve found that when I suggest to clients that they use these gaps between periods of deeper focused work to get up move around and use their phones to reply to messages using the dictation feature, or return phones calls, they get an instant boost in their energy levels.
If you think about it physiologically, you’ve gone from hardly moving at all—sitting down and focusing on something—to getting up and moving and suddenly your blood is surging again, in a positive way.
More importantly, you’re not context switching in a mentally depleting way.
A quick tip I can share with you here is to keep the first thirty minutes of your work day free. Use that time to get a heads up on your day. Clear your email inbox, have a chat with your colleagues or hold a quick team meeting to discuss the objectives for the day.
What this does is prevents that sense of FOMO (the fear of missing out). It settles your mind, gets you focused on your objectives and gives you time to deal with any unknown emergencies before you settle down to doing some difficult work.
I’, currently reading a book called “In Search of C. The Biography of Mansfield Cumming”. Mansfield Cumming was the founder of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. The British version of the CIA.
The service was founded in 1909—five years before the start of the First World War. The majority of the UK’s workforce at that time were employed either in factories or in service.
In service meant people who worked for the aristocratic landed gentry in their large mansions and palaces.
Very few people worked in offices.
Those that did, didn’t work a nine till five job. It was far more flexible than that. Often the day was spent travelling between meetings. And given that most transport at that time was horse and cart, you can imagine how slow that was.
Then there was large liquid lunches, often taking up to three hours.
It was in the evenings that any work managed to get done. Mansfield Cumming, for example, would spend most of his evenings replying to letters and reading documents.
One time, when Cumming was ill and bed ridden, his superiors send over a typist so he could stay on top of his correspondence.
120 years ago, people recognised the dangers of letting correspondence get out of control on the efficiency of getting work done.
And don’t be fooled into thinking things were very different then. Not only did they get an equivalent number of letters as we do emails, they also got telegrams—the equivalent of Slack or Teams messages today.
It might not have been digital, but the volume was very similar.
Today, we allow ourselves to neglect staying on top of our correspondence and admin. When we do that it creates a low level of anxiety draining our energies. The fear of not knowing what is waiting for us. And the fear that we might be missing something important.
To avoid this, find some time each day to dedicate specifically to dealing with your messages. Try to do this as late in the day as you can. This avoids you getting trapped in email ping pong. That’s were when you reply you give the receiver time to reply to you the same day. That just doubles up the time you need to spend dealing with your messages.
Slowing down your response times, gives you space to get back to doing the work you have identified as being important.
So there you go, Matt. If you want to have the energy to do a days work and have enough left in the evening to spend doing the things you want to do, then first make sure you are taking care of the basics, tough sleep, movement and a healthy diet.
Then avoid getting trapped by context switching. Protect time on your calendar for doing specific types of work that is similar in nature, and allow sufficient flexibility between these sessions for moving and dealing with the inevitable message load.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening.
Oh and one more thing. Yesterday, saw the launch of my summer sale. If you would like to pick up a course, or a bundle of courses, or perhaps join my coaching programme, you can now save up to 25%. All you need to do is visit my Summer Sale page and get all the details. I will put the link in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
How important is it to develop your Areas of Focus? That’s the question I am answering this week.
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Download the Areas of Focus Workbook
Join the Areas of Focus Course
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Script | 371
Hello, and welcome to episode 371 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Why spend time working on your areas of focus when there’s already a ton of stuff to do and not enough time to do it?
While very few people ever overtly ask that question, I recall asking myself that question when I was starting out on my productivity and time management journey in my twenties. It seemed such a waste of time when I had people to call, work to do and a multitude of other commitments waiting for me to deal with.
The trouble was that while I was running around dealing with all the so-called urgent things, I was neglecting what was genuinely important to me. You know things like spending time with my family, reading books, and knowing what I wanted to do with my career. Those things felt like a luxury I just didn’t have time for.
But what was I really doing? I was prioritising the unimportant over the important because I was addicted to being busy. And that’s not healthy.
It destroys relationships, damages your health (mentally and physically) and just leaves you feeling empty and exhausted at the end of the day.
So, with that said, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ben. Ben asks, Hi Carl, I hear you talk a lot about Areas of Focus. What advice would you give to someone who hasn’t got time to write out their areas of focus? To me, that doesn’t honestly seem like a good use of my time.
Thank you Ben for your question.
Let me briefly explain what your Areas of Focus are.
We all share eight areas of life. These are:
Family and relationships
Career or business
Health and fitness
Lifestyle and life experiences
Finances
Personal development
Spirituality
Life’s purpose
They all mean something to us. Yet, how we define them will be very individual. How we prioritise them will also be personal and will change as you go through life.
When you are young your career and business area may be high on your priority list. Once you have a career or run a business, you may find other areas such as your life’s purpose and spirituality will rise up the list.
I remember when I was in my twenties, I felt I was immortal. I smoked and enjoyed a beer or six on a Friday and Saturday night. Health and fitness was not a priority.
When I reached thirty, I realised I was overweight and climbing the stairs was ridiculously hard. It left me puffing and panting embarrassingly. Something needed to change. So I reduced my drinking, eventually quit smoking and began running. Health and fitness shot up my list of priorities.
The thing is, if you do not know how important these areas are to you, you will continue to ignore them. It’s surprisingly easy to develop horrible diseases such as diabetes if you have not prioritised health and fitness.
And, of course, the elephant in the room. How many relationships have been destroyed because a person’s work takes over their life?
Your time is limited. According to Oliver Burkeman, you have around 4,000 weeks. That’s it. And if you’re 40 years old, you’re around half way through those 4,000 weeks. Scary thought, right?
So spending time defining what these areas mean to you is a critical first step to building a life that leaves you feeling fulfilled, energised and in balance with what is important to you.
The way to do this is to download my free Areas of Focus workbook, which you can get from my website. That workbook will take you through the steps to dine your areas of focus and to pull out the actionable steps you can take to keep things in balance.
These will range from simple tasks such as sending an amount of money to your savings each month. A task that will likely take you less than two minutes each month. To having a date night with your partner every Friday evening.
Your health and fitness area is another one that does not require a lot of time. Twenty to thirty minutes a day. Think about that for a moment. Twenty to thirty minutes a day to protect your long-time health, keep you energised and help keep your weight down. That’s a no brainer.
Yet to me, the most useful part of developing your areas of focus is it makes prioritising your day easy.
If you know what is important to you, you know what your priorities are.
For your work, if you know what is important to you in your career, you will be fifty percent of the way to knowing what your priorities are.
For example, if your career goal is to become the CEO or head of a department, you can develop a career path that will take you towards achieving that goal. You will be clear about what experience you need to gain in order to move to the next promotion, what skills you need to develop and which areas you need to improve.
The other fifty percent comes from knowing what your core work is. Your core work is the work you are employed to do. (Not the work you volunteer to do). The clue to this is often in your job title. A salesperson is employed to sell, not spend days in internal sales meetings. A teacher is employed to teach, not waste time dealing with student administration.
Once you are clear about these, you will find planning your days easier and prioritising your work almost automatic.
There is another way knowing what your areas of focus mean to you is it helps you to structure your week.
If you decide that maintaining your health is a priority for you, you can open up your calendar and schedule in your exercise times. Similarly, if you enjoy weekends going on adventures with your friends, that can be managed in your calendar.
With your work, once you know what your core work is, you can ensure you have sufficient time set aside for doing that work. For instance, if you are a software developer, how much time do you need to spend developing software so that you meet your deadlines?
That might equate to four hours a day of undisturbed coding. If that’s the case, you can block that time out and get very strict about accepting meetings.
Yet, none of this will be obvious if you have no idea what is important to you. You’ll find yourself being pulled and pushed into doing things that do not align with your values and areas.
There’s a great quote from Jim Rohn which says:
“If you don't have a plan for what you want, then you will probably find yourself buying into someone else's plan and later find out that was not the direction you wanted to go. You've got to be the architect of your life.”
And that’s what your Areas of Focus do for you. It gives you a blueprint for the life you want to live.
Once you know what your blueprint is, you can begin making changes to build the life you want to live.
It’s funny because as I think about this, Ben, I’m reminded of what my life was like before I sat down to work out what I wanted for my life.
I felt I was drifting. Everything that came at me appeared urgent. I was being pushed this way and then the next day I’d be pulled in another direction. Other people were telling me how I should be living my life. Even down to what I should be wearing, the kind of car I should be driving and the career I should be following.
Yet, none of that was what I wanted. It was what other people wanted me to do. It wasn’t until I read The Ten natural laws of time and life Management by Hyrun Smith that I finally woke up and realised I did have a life worth living and I could build the life I wanted to live.
And that’s when I sat down and worked on my Areas of Focus. The initial ideas were reasonably easy to write out. It became a little harder when I fine tuned them and pulled out the action steps I needed to follow consistently in order to stay on track. In total it took a few weeks to come up with a set of areas I was happy with.
But it was worth it. Almost instantly my life changed. I was more focused, intentional and other people’s opinions about how I should be living my life were listened to, but if they did not align with what I had identified as being important to me, quietly rejected.
Now one thing about your areas of focus is they will change. You will find yourself fine-tuning them from time to time. How you think about family and friends will be different when you have your first child or grandchild.
Your career might be important today, but less so after you retire.
You may not have discovered your purpose in life yet. I didn’t know what mine was until I was in my mid-thirties. But it’s worth thinking about as that one area has the potential to bring you so much joy and fulfilment.
I get to help hundreds of people every day. Nothing can beat the feeling of receiving an email or a comment from someone I have been able to help.
And that’s what your areas of focus will do for you. They give you focus, they show you what to prioritise and brings purpose and fulfilment into your life.
To me establishing what your areas are is the most important part of building any time management and productivity system. Without these, you have no foundations and will be at the mercy of everyone else.
I hope that has helped, Ben. Thank you for your question. And thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
How can you preserve simplicity and work at a reasonable pace in an increasingly complex and rushed environment? That’s the question I’m answering today.
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Script | 370
Hello, and welcome to episode 370 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Two of the challenges we face today are the increasing complexity in our work life. Yet, that has been around forever. New technology requires us to learn new techniques for doing things and, perhaps, the biggest challenge of all is dealing with the speed at which things come at us.
Interestingly, the number of emails we get today is comparable to the number of letters people in the 1970s and 80s received. Yet the number of phone calls we get have dramatically dropped. That’s largely due to the move towards instant messages—which were not around in the 70s and 80s.
The difference is the speed at which we are expected to respond. With a letter, there was some doubt about when the letter would arrive. It might arrive the next day, but there was always a chance it would take two or three days.
And when it did arrive, we had at least twenty four hours to respond. Today, there are some people who expect you to respond to an email immediately—no thought that you may be working on something else or in a meeting with an important customer.
So the question we should explore is how we can navigate the way we work today without letting people down, but at the same time work at a comfortable speed which minimises mistakes and leaves us feeling fulfilled at the end of the day.
So, with that stated, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks, Hi Carl, over the years, my productivity system has changed with technology. I began, like you, with a Franklin Planner in the 1990s, then I moved to Getting Things Done and managed everything digitally. These days, I am struggling to keep up, and it just seems so complicated. Do you have any thoughts on how to keep things simple?
Hi Tom, thank you for your question.
One way to look at this is to remember that the basic principles of good time management and productivity will never change. Those principles are incorporated in COD—Collect, Organise and Do.
No matter how complicated or fast things get, we still need a way to collect stuff and trust that what we collect will be where we want it to be when we process it.
We need an organisation system that works for us. And that means, we can find what we need when we need it.
And finally, we want to be maximising the time we spend doing the work, so we avoid backlogs building.
It’s within this framework we can evolve our systems.
Thirty years ago, we would have been collecting with pen and paper. Today, it’s likely we will collect using our phones or computer.
Thirty years ago we would have had stacks of file folders and a filing cabinet or two to store those folders. Today, those files will likely be held in the cloud—Google Drive, iCloud or OneDrive, for instance.
So while the tools have changed, the principles have not.
I’m a big rugby fan. I’ve been following Leeds Rhinos since my grandfather took me to my first game when I was five years old.
The teams that win the championships and cup games are the ones who get the basics right. In rugby, that is playing the majority of the game in the oppositions half. Being aggressive in defence and ensuring their players are disciplined—giving away silly penalties is one sure way to lose games.
The teams that lose are the ones who don’t get these basics right. They try to be clever, get frustrated, and drop the ball (quite literally) and give away unnecessary penalties, which results in them giving away territory and playing the majority of the game in their own half.
The message is always the same. Get the basics right and the results will come.
This is the same for you, too, Tom. Get the basics right and that’s following the principles of COD.
The problems will start when we begin trying to do multiple things at the same time. Multi-tasking is not a strategy. Sure there are some things you can do at the same time. Walking and thinking about solving a problem, listening to a podcast while doing the dishes or cleaning up the house.
But you are not going to be able to write a report, prepare a presentation and reply to your emails at the same time. These are very different types of work requiring different skills.
A report is well thought out words and conclusions. A presentation is a visual representation of your main points and writing emails is about communicating clearly in words. All requiring different parts of your brain.
This is why categorising the work you do works so well. With categorising, or chunking or batch processing—they all mean the same thing—you are grouping similar tasks together and doing them at the same time. For example, you can collect your actionable emails together and set aside thirty to sixty minutes each day for responding to them.
If you were consistent with that, you would always be on top of your mails and no one would be waiting much longer that 24 hours for a reply.
Similarly if you were responsible for sending out proposals to prospective customers, if you were to spend an hour or so on those each day, you would rarely have any backlogs and your proposals would be going out quickly without errors.
It’s when we stop following these principles we become like the losing rugby teams. We’ve stopped following the game plan and become frustrated, which leads to mistakes which in turn means we lose the game.
Or in the world of work, we create backlogs, deadlines are missed and we feel horrible, stressed out and overwhelmed.
I’ve always found it fascinating to learn how productive people work. I saw recently an interview with Tim Cook, where he mentioned he wakes up at 4:00 am, and the first hour of his day is spent doing email.
I remember reading that Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter and the CEO of Square, who would schedule his days by category of work. Monday and Tuesdays were spend on marketing, Wednesdays were problem solving and Thursdays would be spent at Square and Fridays at Twitter.
They all have some structure to their days. Incidentally, this was the same for Winston Churchill and Charles Darwin. They both followed a strict structure to their days which ensured they spent time each day on the things that mattered.
While the way we work and the tools we use to do our work may change, the way we structure our days doesn’t have to.
Twenty years ago, spending an hour on returning phone messages was the norm. Today, that same hour will likely be spent responding to Slack or Teams messages and email.
If you want to get control of your time and remain productive, it will be helpful to know what is important.
What is your core work? The work you are paid to do? What does that look like at a task level? Working in concepts doesn’t work here. You need to go to the next level and determine what your work looks like at a task level.
An accountant will need to put numbers into a spreadsheet (or something similar) in order to get the information they need to be able to advise their clients. The question therefore becomes how much time do they need to do that each day to ensure they are on top of their work?
As a former Franklin Planner user, you will know the importance of daily and weekly planning. This is about knowing what is important today and this week. It’s about allocating sufficient time to getting that work done and being strict about what you allow on your calendar.
Perhaps part of the problem we face today is the increasing demands on our time. It’s easy to ask someone to jump on a Teams or Zoom call for “a few minutes” Ha! How often does five minutes turn into thirty minutes?
And because of the simplicity of doing these calls, we accept. Perhaps too readily.
I don’t have Zoom or Teams on my phone. If I am not with my laptop, I cannot do a video call. It’s a rule. And a non-negotiable one too.
Where are your rules? What will you accept and, more importantly, not accept?
One way you can manage this is to limit the number of meetings you have each day. If you spend seven hours of your eight hours of your work day in meetings, how will you find the time to do the work you are employed to do?
That isn’t a task management issue. That’s a time issue. It doesn’t matter how many tasks you have to do today if you do not have the time protected for doing them. It’s on you to protect that time and that doesn’t matter where you are in the hierarchy chain.
If your boss expects you to be in seven hours of meetings each day and write reports, prepare presentations and respond to your emails and messages, that’s an issue you need to take up with your boss. No tool or productivity system will sort that out for you.
Even with the help of AI, you will struggle to do your work with that kind of time conflict.
Now when it comes to managing your files and notes, I would say don’t reinvent the wheel.
Several years ago, Microsoft and Apple’s engineers released we were terrible at managing our documents. So, they began rolling out self contained folders for their professional tools such as Word and Keynote.
You no longer need to file these documents in folders you create. Instead you can save them and let your computer organise them for you. For example, if you use Word, all your word documents can be saved to the Word container folder in OneNote. Just like Google Docs. These are all kept together and you can then organise them in a variety of ways.
You can do it alphabetically, the date the document was created or when it was last modified (great for when collaborating with other people). In iCloud and Google Drive, you can also organise by which documents are shared.
Your computer does the hard work so you don’t have to. There’s certainly no longer a need to create sophisticated file folder structures that take forever to keep organised. You don’t have time for that. Let your computer do the work for you.
And not only have these companies made organising our work easier, they have been gradually improving search features too. Now as long as you know a date range, a keyword or a title, you’ll be able to find any document in seconds.
There is no longer any need to manually organise your documents. The only responsibility you have is to ensure the names of the documents you have saved mean something to you. If you’re downloading a document, make sure you rename it. There’s some very strange file naming conventions out there.
And that’s about it, Tom.
Stick to the basics of COD—Collect, Organise, Do. Be strict about what you allow on your calendar (even if that means you need to an uncomfortable talk with your boss) and let your computer do the hard work of filing for you.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to with you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 369
What’s the most effective time management practice you can adopt today that will transform your productivity?
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Script | 369
Hello, and welcome to episode 369 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I’ve often answered questions on this podcast about the best or most effective time management or productivity system, but I don’t think I’ve answered a question about the best practices before.
A practice is something you do each day. It’s just what you do. You don’t need to think about it. It’s automatic. And there is something that the most productive people I’ve come across do each day, that I find people struggling with their management of time don’t do.
In many ways, becoming more productive and better at managing time is a two-fold practice. It’s the strict control of your calendar and being intentional about what you do each day.
Yet to get to those practices each day, takes a change in attitude and the squashing of some pre-conceived ideas.
And that is what we’ll be looking at in today’s episode.
Before we get to the question, just a quick heads up. The European time zone friendly Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming next weekend. Sunday the 18th and 25th May.
If you want to finally have a time management and productivity system that works for you, and have an opportunity to work with me and a group of like-minded people, then join us next Sunday. I will put the link for further information into the show notes.
Okay, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Mark. Mark asks, Hi Carl, what do you consider to be the best daily habits for living a productive life?
Hi Mark, thank you for your question.
This is something that has always fascinated me about the way people work. What is it that the most productive people do that unproductive people don’t do.
Surprisingly it’s not work longer hours. That’s usually the domain of unproductive people.
What the most productive people do is to have a few daily rituals that are followed every day.
Let’s start with the easiest one. Have a solid morning routine. It’s your morning routine that sets you up for the day.
Cast your mind back to a day in your past when you overslept and had to rush out the door to get to work. How productive were you that day? Probably not very. You will have been in a reactive state all day, treating anything and everything as urgent.
The “secret” is to use your morning routine to put you in a proactive state. That means looking at your calendar for your appointments for the day and identifying what you must get done that day.
Then mentally mapping out when you will do your work.
For instance, today I have seven hours of meetings. That does not leave me much time to write this podcast script. Yet, when I began my day, I looked at where my appointments were, saw I had an hour mid morning free and a further hour in the afternoon between 4 and 5 pm.
Two hours is enough to get the bulk of this script written. Now all I have to do is resist all demands on my time today so I can get this script written. That’s the challenge. Resisting demands.
Resisting demands on my time today is reasonably easy. Seven hours of meetings is about my limit anyway. So if someone requests an additional meeting, it’ll be quite easy to tell them I am fully booked today and I can offer them an alternative day and time.
And that’s a mindset shift I would recommend to you. Know where your limits are and to be comfortable offering alternative days and times. If the person demanding your time insists and is in a more senior position to you (does that really happen today?), then you can decide which of your other meetings you could postpone.
If your day is full of meetings, make sure you task list reflects that. What I see a lot of people doing is having a day full of meetings and a full task list. Yeah, right. That’s not going to happen.
For most of us the confirmed, committed meetings will be the priority. Tasks will not be. So, on days when you have a lot of meetings, reduce your task list. That will immediately remove anxiety and give you more focus for your meetings.
Next up, is to not use the excuse of a busy day to not do your communications.
Email and messages build up very quickly. Just one day neglecting these means tomorrow you will need double the time to get back in control.
The goal here is to protect time each day for dealing with your actionable emails and messages. If all you have is thirty minutes, take it. It’s surprising how much you can do in thirty minutes. That’s a lot better than having to try and find two or three hours the next day to get on top of an out-of-control inbox.
Email and messages are the things that are apt to throw you off a well planned day. Yet, it’s surprisingly easy to get on top of these if you were to make it a daily practice to spend thirty minutes or more dealing with your actionable emails.
The next tip I’ve picked up from super-productive people is to group similar tasks together. This technique has a few different names. Batching and chunking are two of them.
What you are doing is grouping similar tasks together and working on them as one task. For instance, if you have a lot of messages to respond to, you would call that your communication time and do them all at once.
This is quite easy with email as you can stay within one app to do the work. You can do this with writing proposals. If you have five or six proposals to write, then schedule time for writing proposals. Don’t look at each individual proposal as a single task. See the activity of writing proposals as one task.
This way you are working with time. You could set aside an hour or two for doing your proposals and after your allocated time is up, move on to the next category.
For example, a sales person, may decide that between 9:30 and 11:00 am, they will do their follow-ups and prospecting, then from 11:30 am do their appointments for the day.
Sure, there may be days when a customer can only see you early in the day, and you can move your follow-up and prospecting time to a little later in the day, but what you want to be doing is trying to set up a structure to you day. It just makes your life that little bit easier.
The problem with most to-do lists is that they are just that— a list of random things that may or may not need to be done today. If you were to allocate time for doing different types of work, you’re going to be pretty much up to date with most things.
It’s unlikely you will be able to avoid backlogs completely. But if you are consistently doing your important work, nothing is going to get out of control.
I think of this very much like running an airport. You’ve got flights taking off and landing all day. Yet, in the air traffic control centre, you can only land one plane at a time. This means around all commercial airports you will see what is called a holding pattern. This is where planes are circling waiting to be given permission to land.
Once a plane is given that permission, it comes into land.
Well, you are like that airport. You can only work one piece of work at a time. Everything else waiting for your attention needs to be held in a holding pattern.
And like an airport, aircraft in difficulties or running low on fuel will take priority over others. You too, will have little emergencies and urgencies, and you can decide which piece of work has the priority while you are working on the category you are currently working on.
This is why ultimately your calendar is your most important productivity tool. That’s directing your day. It tells you where you need to be at what time. It also tells you where you have time for doing your tasks.
If you leave things open, it’s likely to be stolen by low value stuff or other people. Making it a practice to plan your day using your calendar, ensures that you have the time to do what needs to be done and if you don’t do it, there’s only one person to blame—you.
Never ignore your calendar. Reschedule, by all means, but never ignore it. It’s your calendar that will ensure you know when to leave to pick your son up from school, and what time that appointment with an important client is.
The final part is to know what your non-negotiables are. These are the things you will never miss. For example, three things I will never miss are writing my journal each morning, taking my dog for a walk and my thirty minutes of exercise each day.
Start with your personal life. What are you non-negotiables there? Then look at your professional life. What are you non-negotiables at work.
For example, with the exception of my calls days, I will ensure I spend at least two hours working content each day. If you were a designer or engineer, that could be spending a minimum of two hours designing or engineering.
Ensuring you have a few hours each day dedicated to doing the work you were hired to do, will put you ahead of most of your colleagues.
When you have non-negotiables, you find planning your day is easy. I know Louis needs his walk, I know also that when I wake up, after making my coffee, I’ll be sitting down to write my journal. I don’t need to think about these things. The only thing I need to decide is where Louis and I will go today. We try to go somewhere different each day.
I also find towards the end of the afternoon, I begin thinking about what exercise I will do today. There’s no question about whether I will exercise or not. Exercise is a non-negotiable. All I need to decide is what I will do in my thirty minutes.
Non-negotiables can be anything that is important to you. I’ve had clients who would never miss their meditation session, or go to the Synagogue, or temple in the early morning. Others won’t miss their Saturday morning family breakfast.
The key here is to identify what your non-negotiables are and then do them.
I hope that has helped, Mark. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Backlogs. We all have them. But, how do you clear them and then prevent them from happening again? That’s what we’re looking at today.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Getting Things Done With Linda Geerdink
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Script | 367
Hello, and welcome to episode 368 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Organising your work, creating lists of things to do, and managing your projects in your notes are all good common-sense productivity practices. However, none of these are going to be helpful if you have huge backlogs of admin, messages, and emails creating what I call a low-level anxiety buzz.
You’re going to be stressed and distracted and in no place to be at your very best.
What’s more, this can become a chronic problem if those backlogs are growing. This is when critical things are going to get missed.
I’m often surprised to get an email from someone asking me if they can have a discount code for an early-bird discount that expired three or four weeks previously. I mean, come on. If it’s taking you three to four weeks to get to an email—even if you consider it to be a low-value email—there’s a serious problem in your system. (Or more likely, you don’t have a system at all.)
So this week, I want to share with you a few ideas that can help you regain control of these backlogs and, more importantly, prevent them from happening again.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Wyatt. Wyatt asks, hi Carl, how would you help someone who is backlogged beyond belief. I’ve got over 3,000 emails in my inbox, and my team are still waiting for me to finish their appraisals from last year! I feel so stuck. Please help.
Hi Wyatt. Thank you for your question.
Sorry to hear you feel swamped. I know it can be a horrible place to be.
Before we begin, let me explain the three types of backlogs we all have to deal with.
The first is the growing backlog. This one is the worst because it’s getting bigger and unless you take action immediately, it’s going to overwhelm you. These kinds of backlogs will always be your priority.
The next type of backlog is the static backlog. It’s not growing, but it’s there and it’s on your mind. It needs to be dealt with, but the urgency isn’t as big as a growing backlog.
And then there’s the shrinking backlog. These are the best because if they are shrinking, they’ll soon disappear altogether.
Now, one of the most common areas of our work that backlogs is our email. The last statistics I saw show that on average, people are getting 90+ emails a day.
If you need an average of 30 seconds to deal with each email—which I know is low—that’s around forty-five minutes to deal with them.
Do you have forty-five minutes today to deal with your email?
Remember, that’s a small amount of time for each email. It’s likely you’ll need more than thirty seconds for most of those mails.
Now the good news. If you’re starting with a backlog of over 3,000 emails, many of those emails will no longer require a response. The moment’s passed.
What I would suggest is you take any emails older than a month, and move then to a folder called “Old In-box”. While my instinct it to tell you to delete them, I’ve never come across anyone courageous enough to do it.
Although, if you think about it. Deleting them gives you a perfect excuse if someone follows you up—“sorry, I don’t seem to be able to find your email. Could you resend it?”
Doing this means you’ve cut your list by a large margin. What’s left can be processed.
Email is a two step process. Just like we used to do with regular letters. Open your post box, take out the mail and sort it between letters you need to read or respond to and throw away or file anything you don’t need to act on.
And by the way, nobody left their mail in the mail box. Why do we do that with email?
With email, it’s the same process. Clear your inbox. As you clear ask yourself two questions:
What is it?
What do I need to do with it?
If you need to read or reply to an email, then move it to a folder called “Action This Day”. If you don’t need to do anything with it, either delete or archive it.
This is the processing stage. All you are doing is processing. You are not replying or reading. That comes later. This means, with practice, you’ll be able to process an individual email in a second or two—ten tops.
Now, towards the end of the day, set aside some time for clearing your actionable emails. Try to do this as late in the day as possible. This prevents what is called email ping pong.
If you reply in the morning, you’re going to get a reply in the afternoon. If you reply in the afternoon, even if you do get a reply, you can leave it until tomorrow to respond. Genius, yes?
There are two additional things here.
The first is to reverse the order of the mails in your action this day folder. This puts the oldest at the top. If you’re responding to your mails once a day, you want to be working from the oldest first.
That way, no one will be waiting more than 24 hours or so for a reply from you.
The second is to follow this process every day.
I require around forty-five minutes a day for dealing with my actionable email. If I skip a day, then tomorrow I will need ninety minutes. I don’t have ninety minutes to spend on emails. If I do skip a day, I’ve got a backlog building. Not good.
So, it’s an everyday thing if you want to prevent your email from becoming backlogged.
And remember that one is greater than zero. In other words, if you don’t have a great deal of time available today, still do some of your actionable mail. That keeps you in touch with what’s going on in your mail box and it’s surprising how much you can get done in twenty minutes.
Now, let’s move on to your appraisals.
You mention that your team is still waiting for their appraisals from last year. That suggests it’s an annual event rather than a quarterly event. Either way, the same principle works.
For this kind of task, you need to be scheduling time for doing it. Often, with staff appraisals, you need a week to hold one-to-ones with your team before you can write anything. So, if you begin the appraisals in October, I would suggest you go into your calendar now and set up those appointments.
I know we are a good four months away from October, but by getting them in your calendar now, it’s one less task to deal with and you’re not going to be going back and forth trying to get these appointments scheduled into one week. You’ll end up wasting time negotiating the best time. Do it now.
Then, schedule the third week in October to write your appraisals. Depending on how long, on average, this work takes, you could block a whole day—or two if you need it—to spend writing appraisals.
Getting it on your calendar means you are less likely to allow anything else to take that time away.
To deal with last year’s appraisals, it’s the same process. If you have not completed the one-to-ones, schedule those for next week. Make it a non-negotiable part of your week.
Then go into your calendar and block time out for writing the appraisals.
For things like this there’s an element of intentionality. Things don’t get done until you intentionally set aside time to do it and then get started.
Agin, this is two steps. First set aside time—that’s the easy bit—then sit down and do it—that’s the hard part.
Yet, as long as you begin, once you’re in the flow and you know nothing else is coming up to tear you away from doing the work, you will get it done.
Clearing backlogs is one thing. Preventing backlogs from occurring is another.
Email is a good example, if you are not following the process every day, a backlog will occur. This is not something you can wish away. It doesn’t go away. It’s the same with Teams and Slack messages.
If you’re getting a lot of notifications from these channels of communication, you’re not going to get a lot done if you’re responding to these messages moment they come in. It will exhaust you because of the constant cognitive load switching.
I find dealing with messages is best done between sessions of work.
Let me explain. We know about the sleep cycle—where you sleep in cycles of 90 minutes. Well, it turns out you are also awake in 90-minute cycles.
What this means is you can focus on a piece of work for around 90 minutes. After which your brain will tire, and you will need a distraction. That could be a toilet break, or the desire to get up and refresh your coffee or water.
This is your brain telling you that you need a break.
Now, if you use that to your advantage, you could schedule your focused work sessions around 90-minute blocks. For example, your first, and most important block, could be set for 9:30 to 11:00 am. Then you make sure you have a 30-minute gap before you allow anything else that requires a degree of focus.
In that thirty minutes, you could get up and go to the bathroom, refresh your water and deal with your messages. The longest anyone will be waiting for your response would be 90 minutes.
No demanding boss or client can complain at that. I know, I’ve dealt with some very bad, demanding bosses and clients in my time. They can be trained.
If you were to stick with these ideas and processes, I can promise you that you will get a lot more important work done, reduce your backlogs and feel a lot less exhausted at the end of the day.
You’re in effect working with your brain instead of against it.
Preventing backlogs really comes down to how you structure your day. Most people are not doing that. They have no structure, so they are working on the latest and loudest thing. The problem is that the latest and loudest thing is often not the most important thing.
However, if you set aside time each day for dealing with your communications—say an hour and respect that time—and perhaps a further thirty minutes for dealing with your admin—another area that can become backlogged—you will prevent backlogs from happening.
If you run your day by the seat of your trousers, then, yes, you will have huge, growing backlogs. Responding to your email is rarely urgent, so it gets left behind on busy days. And that means you require double the amount of time tomorrow. And what happens if tomorrow is a busy day?
I hope that has helped, Wyatt. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Where would you start if you were to completely redesign your productivity and time management system? That’s what I’m looking at this week.
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Script | 367
Hello, and welcome to episode 367 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the things that can hold you back from creating a solid time management and productivity system is the legacy of your old habits and systems.
It could be you have always done things a particular way, which may have worked well in the past, but no longer does. Yet, the hold of the familiar keeps you wedded to that old habit.
Or, your company may have adopted a new system or piece of software that has a number of possibilities that you haven’t explored yet. And, of course, the elephant in the room where you have so many tools it’s paralysing you when it comes to deciding what to use.
So, how would you go about doing an overhaul on your system so it’s simple, easy and does not require a lot of maintenance to keep working?
That’s the topic of this week’s question and so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Lindsay. Lindsay asks, hi Carl, I recently took your new Time Sector System course and I love it. The trouble I am having is I have so much stuff all over the place, I don’t know where to start to rebuild my system. Do you have any tips that may help?
Hi Lindsay, thank you for your question.
There’s a great YouTube video, where David Allen, author of Getting Things Done spends a day with Linda Geerdink, a Dutch journalist showing her how to get her life organised. (I’ll put the video in the show notes)
It’s quite emotional at times as Linda has never had any kind of system in the past and has lived her professional and personal life by the seat of her pants.
David Allen comes across as being a little cruel at times, yet, I can understand where he is coming from. Sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind in order to help someone get to where they want to be.
What fascinated me about this video is the utter chaos the start of the process of building a system can be. When you gather everything you may or may not need to do into one central place, it can seem daunting.
And when that involves papers, documents and digital stuff, it can feel like you are drowning in an ocean of stuff that must be done.
But, it doesn’t have to be that way.
So, where would I start if I was to rebuild my system?
I would suggest watching that David Allen video. It starts in Dutch, but when David is introduced to the video, it continues in English.
What David gets Linda to do is exactly right. Gather everything you have into a central place. Today, that’s going to be largely digital stuff.
If you have notes in several notes apps, pick one and go through the process of bringing everything together into one. Which notes app you choose doesn’t really matter too much, although I would choose one that is simple to use. The more complex a notes app is, the more time you will need to maintain it in the future. (Which is not a very productive way to go about it)
The good thing about notes is they are rarely urgent. Notes are support materials for meetings, projects and ideas. Most notes apps will allow you to get a URL link so you can link the important notes to tasks in your task manager.
Now with you task manager, again, if you have a few of these laying around, again, pick one—a simple one, and move any tasks from the apps you discard into the one you’ve chosen’s inbox.
Then process your inbox. Use the three questions:
What is it?
What do I need to do?
When will I do it?
And then move the task to the appropriate folder.
Now, I know all this may take a long time. Often it can take a few days. The best way to do this is to take a day or two off and dedicate those days to getting your system sorted out. It can be fun, no really, it can be.
Just be careful when you do this. We can become quite nostalgic when doing this and keep stopping to read through old notes. Now’s not the time to do this. If you do find yourself doing this create a folder called “nostalgia” and drop them in there. You can then go back to that folder when you’re finished.
One tip here is to think elimination not accumulation. In other words focus on deleting as much as you can. Notes can be archived, sometimes your old ideas can spark fresh ideas. With your task manager, though, be ruthless and delete as much as you can.
Your notes can hold as much as you like. You task manager needs to be clean and tight. The less in there the more effective it will be.
I’ve stressed the importance of keeping things simple and this is something you want to be thinking about as you process what you have in your inboxes.
Complexity is the enemy of productivity. It slows you down by adding what I call an administrative cost. That’s the cost in time it takes to maintain your system.
This is why the Time Sector System is powerful. It narrows down you options to when you will do something. After all, it doesn’t matter how much you have to do if you don’t have the time to do it, does it?
Moving forward, you want to be quite strict about what you schedule to do this week. It’s quite easy, when planning your week, to think that’s it. But it isn’t. Once the week begins, new stuff will be coming in daily, and some of that will need to be done this week. You do need to keep some space—white space as I’ve heard it called—for these tasks and appointments.
Now, what about the future? How can you prevent chaos from returning in the future and to put yourself in a position where you are in control and know what you are doing and when?
First accept your human limitations.
You and I have two limitations. We can only work on one thing at a time and the number of hours we have each day.
These are human limitations and there nothing we can do to change them.
Then there is the need to sleep—although you may be able to pull an all nighter occasionally if you must, which I hope you don’t need to do, ever—and eat. Both of which take time.
This means, the place to start would be your calendar. How much time do you need for your personal needs. That would be family and social time, sleep, exercise and anything else you want time for.
You don’t want to be worrying about work at this point.
Your work has a fixed time—usually Monday to Friday, so you can deal with that later.
The benefit to starting with your personal life is it will help you to establish some boundaries between your personal and professional life.
Once you have your calendar of personal activities set up, and I would set these to recur in your calendar. You can always move things around when you do your weekly planning. By setting them up as recurring events, you’re much more likely to stick to them.
Now look at your work.
First where are your fixed meetings? Get them on your calendar.
After that, how much time do you need, on average, to do your core work. That’s the work you’re employed to do.
When I was a teacher, my teaching schedule was fixed. Yet, I also needed to schedule time for class preparation and my admin duties.
When I worked as a lawyer, I required more time to work on the cases, so I made sure I had five hours a day for just working on the cases—that involved preparing court documents, requesting documents from the Land Registry and responding to letters from other lawyers.
That meant I had only three hours available for appointments.
There was no point in me believing I could fit in five hours of meetings and spend five hours on my cases—which I genuinely needed to do in order to keep my head above water—I wasn’t being paid enough to work ten hours a day and sacrifice my social life and my exercise time.
Now, I did allow a little more flexibility at the end of a month, but on the whole I strictly controlled my calendar to ensure I was not trying to do the impossible.
And, for those of you who believe you cannot get control of your calendar, when I worked in a law firm, I never got fired and received my annual bonus for exemplary work each year, and I was the most junior or juniors in my time in the law office. You can do this—control your time. You’re evaluated on your work, not how many meetings you attend.
This is why I always recommend you start with getting control of your calendar. It’s your calendar that controls one of your limitations—available time.
Now, the other limitation, only being able to work on one thing at a time, means you can group similar tasks together and focus your efforts on clearing that list. For example, if you allocate an hour a day for dealing with your communications, you’re not worrying about how many emails you have to respond to, you don’t need to.
All you need to do is begin with the oldest message and do as many as you can until your hour is up. If you consistently follow that process, you’ll rarely have any communication backlogs.
It’s not about the number of emails and messages you have to respond to, it’s about how much time you have available to respond to them. Do them all at the same time and that way you won’t be jumping around inside multiple different apps trying to find what to do.
It’s the same with your admin and project tasks. It’s never about how many you have to do at anyone time. It’s about how much time you have available to do them.
If you’re work is largely project based, make sure you have sufficient time scheduled on your calendar for working on your project tasks each week. If you’re role is mainly admin tasks—for example you’re in customer support, then how much time, on average, do you need to do your work without the build up of backlogs each week?
If you’re focused on how much you have to do, you will always feel overwhelmed. If you focus on how much time you have available for working on different types of work, you’ll be a lot less overwhelmed and you will be getting your work done.
This also eliminates the impossible challenge of trying to estimate how long a task will take. Nobody can do that with any degree of accuracy. This comes back to you being a human being. Some days you’ll be on fire and churn through a lot of work. Other days you’ll be feeling exhausted and find everything you do is like trying to run through treacle.
I hope that has helped, Lindsay. Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, what does it take to be organised and productive?
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Script | 366
Hello, and welcome to episode 366 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One thing you will discover if you begin reading around the subject of time management and productivity is the importance of planning your week and day.
Every successful person i have come across, or read about, never fails to plan their days and week. Every person who is struggling, and not achieving their goals are not.
Instead, they find excuses. “I’m too tired”, “I don’t have time”, “I have more important things to do”, etc, etc.
Yet, there’s more to it than that. It’s not just about having a plan for the day and being clear about what needs to be done. it’s also about protecting time for the important, but not urgent work, and knowing when to say no, when to push and when to pull back and take some rest.
In essence, it’s about understanding yourself and knowing your limits. So with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tammy. Tammy asks, hi Carl, I’m trying to understand what I need to do to become more organised and productive. I know it’s holding me back, but there’s so much conflicting advice out there that I am confused. Can you help?
Hi Tammy, thank you for your question.
As I just alluded to, the best place to begin is to understand yourself.
This means knowing when you are at your most focused, when you are prone to distractions and how much sleep you need.
The chances are, if you stop and step back, you will already know this information. Perhaps you find yourself being able to get quite a lot of work done in the morning, but struggle in the afternoons. Or, you may come alive around 3 pm and can get a lot of work done then.
This knowledge, allows you to better structure your days. You can avoid meetings, where possible, at the times you are at your most focused, and rely on human connection to keep your energy levels up by holding meetings when you are less focused—there’s something about human interaction that raises our energy levels.
You can also ensure you are getting enough sleep, and that means being consistent when you wake up. As I recently learned, it’s not the time you go to bed that matters, it’s waking up at roughly the same time each day as that starts your 24 hour sleep/wake cycle.
If you mess around with your sleep/wake cycle, you will feel dreadful, and that destroys your productivity.
Once you have the basics locked in, you can then move on to structuring your days.
A couple of years ago, I wrote quite extensively about some famous authors. This was inspired by the book Daily Rituals by Mason Curry. In that book, Mason Curry wrote about incredibly productive people and how they got their work done.
One person, not featured in the book, I wrote about was author Jeffrey Archer. He writes a book every year, and he has his year structured to allow him to take care of writing the new book, promoting the book he wrote the previous year and dealing with his publishers, book cover designers and much more.
Archer also loves cricket. So his year is structured so he can reduce his workload in the summer when the cricket season is on.
This works brilliantly. Jeffrey Archer is consistent. Everyone who works with him knows he will be in Majorca between 27th December and the beginning of March writing his next book. They also know he will be available for meetings, promotions and events between March and June. From July to October, Archer is less available, and from October he’s happy to do book tours, interviews and anything else his publisher needs him to do.
It’s simple, consistent and makes working with Jeffrey Archer easy.
Now, I know it’s unlikely you are a multi-million selling author. It’s likely you work in a place where there are multiple demands coming at you each day from bosses, customers and colleagues.
Demands such as wanting to know how you’re getting on with this or that. If you dig a little deeper, though, most of these demands are because people don’t trust that you remember that you committed to doing something for them.
What’s the most common reason you chase someone up? It’s most likely because you’re worried they’ve forgotten they said they would do something for you.
Why is that? The most common reason is because most of the people we work with are inconsistent. And, yes, sometimes things fall through the cracks and get forgotten and we need to chase them up.
So, if you want less interruptions, which equals more time to do your work, be more consistent.
Consistent with your focus work times. Don’t throw your hands up in the air and say “I cannot do that in my job”. You can. You just have to figure out how to communicate your focus work times.
As I was taught, if someone else can do it, so can you. If an airline pilot or surgeon can do their focused work without allowing distractions, so can you. Find the way. What do you have to do to resist interruptions?
So how do you become consistent? You put in place a structure for your day and for your week.
How much time do you need to stay on top of your communications each day? Most people tell me if they could have an hour daily dedicated to responding to messages and emails they would be on top of it. So schedule it.
The alternative is not good, is it? If you don’t spend an hour on your messages today, how much time will you need tomorrow? If you skip tomorrow as well, now, how much time will you need? I’m sure you can find one hour a day, but to find three? That’s verging on the impossible.
If you were responsible for sending out proposals to clients, how much time would you need for proposal writing to prevent a backlog?
You won’t be accurate with your times; you don’t have to be. You are using averages. If you get five proposals to write each day, and each proposal takes around thirty minutes to write, that means to prevent backlogs from appearing you need about two-and-a-half hours each day.
The only way you will be able to take care of your responsibility to send out the proposals would be to schedule two-and-a-half hours each day for doing the work. How else will you do it?
Now look at that from your colleagues’s perspective? If they know you are consistent and are getting the proposals out on time, how likely will they be chasing and interrupting you?
That’s what consistency does. It builds trust with your colleagues. They know once they send you a proposal to write, it will be done. So, they don’t bother you asking if you’ve done it, yet.
My favourite all-time rugby player is Ellery Hanley. He was the greatest player of his generation. What made him so special? You could guarantee that if you made a break, he would always be right next to you, backing you up. This is what made him so good.
Sure he was tough, as all rugby players generally are. He was also fit and strong. But what made him so good was he consistently backed up his players. You knew if you broke your opponent’s line, Ellery Hanley would be right there with you to take the ball and score.
Let’s say you are that person responsible for writing proposals. You need two-and-a-half hours each day for proposal writing and an hour for your communications. That’s just three-and-a-half hours you need to protect each day for your important work.
That still leaves you with four to five hours for anything else you may be required for. Is that impossible?
The final part to this is to plan your week and your day.
Planning the week is about looking at what you have to do and deciding what you will work on the following week. This will be influenced by your deadlines and what you have promised to others.
It will also be influenced by your personal life and your commitments there. If you have kids, they will have a big influence on your weekly plans too.
On a daily level, how many and when are your appointments for the day? what are your must do tasks? Must do tasks are non-negotiable. They must be done. Now, this means you do not want to have too many of these. I generally advise people to have no more than two.
By not allowing more than two must do tasks for the day, you are forced to prioritise. Prioritising is a learned skill. The more you practice it, the better, and faster, you will get at it.
I would also advise using a simple set of tools. A calendar, naturally, and a task manager. If you don’t have a task manager now, choose one that’s built into the devices you use. That would mean Apple Reminders if you use Apple tools, or Microsoft ToDo if you use a Windows system.
Once you have these tools—a calendar and a task manager, learn to use the tools. I see a lot of people regularly switching their tools in an erroneous belief that they will find the “perfect” tool. They won’t the “perfect tool” does not exist.
The real secret is not the tools. It’s how you run your day.
Make sure you plan each day, you are consistent doing the work you are employed to do and you get enough sleep.
Just those simple basic practices will improve your overall productivity. I can promise you it works every time.
Thank you, Tammy for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, how to manage your team (and your boss) productively
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Script | 365
Hello, and welcome to episode 365 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I work a lot with managers and business leaders, where a part of their job is to manage teams of people. This kind of work can be quite different from a self-employed graphic designer, for example, whose main work each day is designing.
There’s an interesting interplay going on in a team environment. Managers need information from their people. To get that information, they need to stop their team from doing their work. Then there is the team who need less distraction in order to get their work done to the highest quality and on time.
In my experience, the most productive teams are the ones who have found a happy balance between the manager’s need for information and the team’s need to work undisturbed.
So, the question is, how do you find that balance and if you are a member of a team with a boss who is interrupting you a little too much how do you retrain your boss?
Two questions from one wonderful listener who has sent in a question.
And with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Sam. Sam asks, hi Carl, do you have any tips and ideas for managing a team productively (I manage a team of eight) and how to manage a boss who is disorganised and never remembers what she’s asked us to do. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Hi Sam, thank you for your question.
It sounds like you’re caught in the middle of a productivity nightmare. A boss who has no idea how to get the most out of their team and as a consequence you are unable to help your team work productively.
Let’s start with the easier of the two. Managing a team.
To help you get to the right place, we need to step back a little. A manager’s role is to support their team. To provide them with clear instructions and the right tools, and then to keep out of the way and let them get on and do what they were employed to do.
At a strategic level that means clear communication—what do you want, how do you want it and when do you want it delivered?
And then to step back and let them get on and do it.
Let me give you an example of this in play.
I record my YouTube videos on a Wednesday. I then create the timeline of the video in Adobe Premiere Pro and send everything to my video editor to do the animations, clean things up and get it ready for publication.
In a Google Doc, I write out what I want—where I want split screen effects and other animations. I also add the date I need the finished video for.
That’s communication part.
I then step back and let my video editor get on and do her thing. I don’t care how she does the animations or what tools she uses—she likes to use something called CapCut, for example. Once I hand it over to my video editor, the task is in her hands and as long as she gets the edited video back to me by the deadline. I’m happy.
If she has any questions, we use a messaging service called Twist—similar to Microsoft Teams and Slack but a lot less distracting—she will message me.
And that’s the support part.
It’s simple, effective and allows my video editor the time and space to get on and do the work without me constantly chasing her.
Now there is another element going on here. I trust my video editor. She’s never let me down and on those rare occasions when she thinks she will be late, she will message me immediately and inform me.
If you don’t trust your team, who’s at fault?
If you want to build a productive team, you must trust your team. It’s that trust that enables you to leave your team alone to get on and do the work you employ them to do. Constantly interrupting them for updates destroys their productivity.
It’s the same if you ask them to fill out activity reports and update statuses on complex software systems.
I’ve worked with companies that required their sales teams to maintain a Salesforce CRM system. This meant many of them stop selling on Friday afternoons to update these complex systems which often took them two or three hours.
When I was in sales, I found the best time to sell was Friday afternoons. People are more willing to close out a sale before the end of the week. Yet, in that company, they were missing out on so much business because management wanted their sales teams to update overly complex information management systems.
Every person you work with is a different person. Trying to shoehorn people into your system can be counterproductive to the overall productivity of the team.
As a manager, it’s your responsibility to find out the best way to support you team members so they can work in the most effective and efficient way. That way you avoid stress building up in the team which will undermine any efforts to improve the team’s productivity.
I recently heard Toto Wolf—the CEO and Team Principal of Mercedes Benz’s Formula 1 team talking about how he manages his team. He implemented a policy of no meetings before 10:00 am.
What this does is allows all people to have at least an hour of undisturbed quiet time each day for doing important work.
Now, he’s the leader—the CEO—yet he understands that the managers reporting to him still need time to do their work before spending most of their days in meetings.
I like another leader from the Formula 1’s world, Red Bull’s Christian Horner’s approach. He doesn’t have an engineering degree or understand the complexities of aerodynamics. He has a team of people who are brilliant at that stuff.
He sees his roll as the barrier remover. While he’s the boss, and needs to know what’s going on, he knows he must protect his team from the board of directors’ demands and if any department requires something, it’s his job to find a way to provide it for them.
Productive teams are built from the top. That means the manager must communicate clearly what they want, how they want it and by when. Then step back and let the team get on and do the work.
I remember another company I once worked for. The director was a highly intelligent person in her field. Yet, she had somehow developed a managerial arrogance where she believed she did not need to learn how to use the company’s database because her project managers could tell her what she needed to know when she needed to know something.
This led to her project managers dropping everything to find the information she wanted whenever she asked for it. It created a horrible atmosphere in the company and the team was very unproductive.
She would hold five hour team meetings every Friday, where everyone was expected to attend. This further undermined the teams productivity and they were often late in completing projects which meant project managers had to work late and into the weekend to catch up.
This director’s staff turnover rate was the highest in the company, worldwide, and it was all created by this one individual who did nothing to support her team.
The solution was to go back to the basics. Communicate what you want, clearly and concisely—you don’t need weekly five hour meetings to do that—and then to step back and let your team get on and do their work. The work they were employed to do.
Never, as a manager, believe that your team is there to support you. It’s not. You are there to support them.
Now, if you are not the manager but have a manager who is destroying your productivity what can you do?
This goes to managing expectations.
It’s very easy to fall into line and say yes to your boss whenever they ask you to do something. Yet, doing so is distorting expectations. Saying “yes I will get this task done today as you ask, boss,” will do nothing for your productivity if on the same day you have six hours of meetings and a proposal to get out before 4:30 pm.
You have to stand your ground and inform your boss of your schedule for the day and explain that you will not be able to do it today.
I understand, if you have always said yes to your boss, doing this will be difficult at first, but how will you change anything if you do not challenge your boss’s instructions when you already know what they are asking you to do will be practically impossible?
In effect you need to retrain your boss and set more realistic expectations.
One tip I often share is to challenge deadlines. If your boss asks you to send them something, reply and tell them you will get it to them by the end of the week (or early next week).
The worst thing that will happen is your boss will push back and tell you they need it right now. That’s great because they’ve saved you a decision. You need to do it right now. So do it.
However, in the majority of cases, your boss will accept your timeline. They’re busy too, after all.
However, the critical part of this is you follow through and deliver what they asked for when you said you will do it. If you don’t, you lose trust. You want your boss to trust you. And if, for whatever reason, you find you cannot do what you said you would do, when you said you would do it, you must inform them as soon as you know—something my video editor will do.
And incidentally, you should be doing this with your customers and clients too. This can be another area where some preconceived ideas about customers and clients can lead to productivity issues.
Be clear when you are communicating with your customers and clients. Set realistic expectations—and telling them that you will always be available if they ever need you is not a realistic expectation. What happens if you’re giving birth when they call (as happened to one of my clients), or you’re in a meeting with another client?
Tell your customers how best to get in touch with you and that if you cannot respond immediately you will get back to them as soon as you can.
I hope that has helped, Sam. Thank you for your question and thank you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 364
What are the solid basics of becoming more productive that anyone can use today? That’s the question I’m answering this week.
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Script | 364
Hello, and welcome to episode 364 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
When I was little, a police officer lived in our village. The police service provided his home, and his job was to look after the local community. Sargeant Morris was my first introduction to the police, and he taught me some valuable lessons—not least about the importance of being a law-abiding citizen.
Yet, a lesson he taught me that I never realised how important it was until later was the power of daily routines. Each morning at 8:00 am, Sergeant Morris would walk up and down the main street in our village, ensuring that the schoolchildren got to school safely.
He was also there when we returned from school at the end of the day. I’m sure there were days he was unable to be there, but all I remember is his presence on the street when I went and came back from school.
He would wear his hi-viz jacket, chat with the parents and children, and make sure we crossed the road at the pedestrian crossing and that the traffic didn’t drive too fast down the street.
I also remember because of his presence, seemingly day and night, crime was almost non-existent in our village.
It was the simple things—things that did not require a lot of effort or knowledge—that made Sergeant Morris a part of my childhood I will never forget.
And that is the same for you and me today. It’s the little things repeated that make the biggest difference to our productivity.
And so, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Mike. Mike asks, hi Carl. What would you say are the basics of becoming more productive?
Hi Mike, thank you for your question.
It’s funny you’ve asked this question as it’s something I have been thinking a lot about recently. What are the absolute basics of being productive?
I would first start with something I wrote extensively about in Your Time, Your Way, and those are the three foundations:
Sleep, exercise, and diet.
How do you feel when you’ve had a bad night’s sleep? Perhaps you only get two or three hours of sleep. How does your day go?
Probably not very well at all. You may be able to get through the morning, but when the afternoon comes around, you’re going to slump.
If that poor sleep continues for a few days, and you’re going to get sick.
Now let’s flip that. How do you feel when you get a solid night’s sleep? What does that do to your productivity?
The difference between the two is huge. On the days you get enough sleep, you’ll focus better and for longer. You’ll make less mistakes and, something rarely talked about, you’ll make better decisions.
That helps you as it ensures that when you decide what to work on next it will more likely be the right thing. When you’re sleep deprived, your decision making abilities sink. You’ll pick up the easy, low-value tasks—because you feel you’re doing something—but it will have little value and the important work will be left until another day.
And then you have a backlog of important stuff to do, stuff that’s probably going To have deadlines which means you put yourself under pressure and a low level of anxiety sets in, distracting you and leaving you feeling exhausted at the end of the day.
Exercise, or as I prefer to call it “movement” is another of those simple productivity enhancers often overlooked.
Sitting at a table staring at a screen all day is not good for you. You know that don’t you? You’re a living, breathing organism that was designed to move.
We know that exercise, and when I say exercise I don’t mean going to a gym or out for a run, I mean some walking, chores around the house or some light stretching in your home or office, helps your thinking and creativity. It also helps to reduce stress and resets your brain after a hard session of focused work.
One of the best things you can do if you’re working from home is to do some of your chores in-between sessions of sit-down work.
For example, do two hours of project work, then stop, and take your laundry to the washing machine or vacuum your living room. Then sit down and do another session of deep work.
You’ll be amazed at how much work you get done with that little tip.
You don’t need to buy expensive standing desks. Just make sure you get up every ninety-minutes to two hours and walk around. Make the bed, tidy up the kids’ toys, wash the dishes, or water your plants.
Firstly you’re getting away from the screen and secondly you’re stirring your energy tanks, elevating your blood flow and engaging your lymph glands, which work to clear your body of harmful bacteria and toxins—which build up alarmingly if you’re not moving.
But the most important part of that movement is it resets your brain so you come back to your work refreshed and focused.
And then there is diet.
I’m sure I don’t have to remind you how you feel after your Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. You eat all that food, then sit down on the sofa and within a few minutes you’re falling asleep.
All those carbohydrates causes your pancreas to go into overdrive producing vast amounts of insulin which in the short term (say twenty-minutes) is a good thing. It’s what comes next that depresses your energy levels—what we call the afternoon slump.
Yet it can be avoided if you keep the carbs to a minimum and choose a healthier option.
The Japanese have a wonderful eating culture called “Hara hachi bu” which translates to “eat until 80% full”. By not over-eating, the Japanese have learned that their energy levels remain reasonably consistent throughout the day, and of course another benefit is you are less likely to gain weight.
And while we’re on the topic of food, I’m not a fan of pre-preparing your meals for the week. You may think this saves you time, but the act of cooking each evening is a great way to give you some movement, and take your mind away from the work you left behind.
That meal break is a great way to reset your brain and if you’re doing it in the evening, you can use it to draw a line under your work for the day and prepare you for family or friends time.
So, Mike, if I was asked to give advice on how to improve productivity, those three things would be first piece of advice. Get these three things right, and your productivity will improve massively.
Yet, there are a few other little things you could do, all of which are simple and anyone can do.
The first would be to plan the day the day before. In other words before you finish your work day, you stop for five to ten minutes and decide what the most important things you need to do tomorrow are.
We’re not talking about reviewing all your projects and going through all your tasks on your to-do list.
If you’re reasonably engaged with your work, you will know what’s important. Write these down somewhere where you will see them when you start the next day and start with the item at the top of your list.
You can do this digitally or use a pen and piece of paper. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is the list is short—no more than five or six things and that it’s the first thing you see when you start your day.
This does three things for you. The first is it prevents you from procrastinating by giving you a list of tasks to get on with that need to be done. It also avoids you wasting your most focused time trying to decide what to work on and then getting pulled into other people’s urgencies and emergencies.
Thirdly, it allows your subconscious brain to do what it’s good at—mixing your education and experience together to come up with the most effective way to do something.
There is also the fourth benefit, which is you will find you relax more in the evening knowing there’s not likely to be any unwelcome emergencies when you begin the day.
Another one I’ve found helpful is to protect time each day for your communications. Now, this one comes from my life-long love of history—particularly 20th century history.
When I read about some the 20th century’s most iconic people, whether that be Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, Agatha Christie, General Eisenhower or Charles De Gaulle, you’’ find that we know so much about what they thought and felt about things because they wrote letters.
It was a habit in the early to mid 20th century for people to spend some time each day writing letters. It’s true they didn’t have the distractions we have today—no TV (or very limited channels), internet or social media so there was time to write.
Today, we don’t protect time for communications, and that’s lead to overwhelming backlogs of emails and messages to respond to. If you were to protect some time each day for your communications, while you may not be able to eliminate your message backlog entirely, you will prevent it from growing out of control.
And we don’t want to be fooling ourselves in to believing people received less communications in those days. That’s not true. They received more. There were telegrams arriving where a telegram boy would wait for you to read the message and then take your reply back to the telegram office.
And on top of that, we had to handwrite our responses, put the letter in an envelope, stick a stamp on it and take it to the post box. It was far more time consuming, yet people did it without complaint.
Sp there you go, Mike. I hope that has given you some ideas. I would strongly recommend focusing on your sleep, movement and diet—it’s there where you’ll find some quick results. The daily planning, and protecting time for communications and admin, will give you results, but will take a little longer to feel the benefits.
Thank you for your question and thank you to your too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
How flexible are you? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Script | 363
Hello, and welcome to episode 363 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
You may have heard this week that my Time Sector System is five years old. And to celebrate, I updated the whole course.
Now, before I start to update a course, I go into Evernote and review all the comments I have collected from students and see if there are any common issues or difficulties that I could improve or explain better.
The Time Sector System works. It’s based on timeless principles that have been used by some of the most productive people who have ever lived. As with all solid principles, there needs to be a degree of flexibility to accommodate the different ways we all work and the type of work we do.
The way authors, for example, will protect three to four hours a day for writing might not be practical for a customer support assistant or a manager managing a team of twenty salespeople. Similarly, an architect will work differently from a doctor in an emergency room.
Yet, there are still some timeless principles that work no matter what role you have.
For example, it doesn’t matter how much you have to do if you don’t have the time to do it. Makes sense, right?
I could decide to write my next book today. That’s the easy part. The difficult part is finding the time to write the book. I’m not sure how many hours I spent writing Your Time, Your Way, but from the first day I sat down to begin writing the first draft to when it was published in May last year, it was three years and I know every week, I spend at least ten hours on it— so roughly 2,000 hours.
Given that each week only has 168 hours, it would not be possible to write a book in a week.
One of the most productive companies I worked for was an advertising agency in Korea. The manager, Patrick, was smart. He realised that for his team to get the campaigns completed on time, he had to protect the time of his copywriters and graphic designers. They needed quiet, undisturbed time to do their work.
Yet the account managers and social media planners needed to be talking with each other and external companies to arrange space for the billboards, and media companies.
The account managers and planners generally had a meeting with each other each day.
The creative team only had two meetings per week. The Monday planning meeting where they planned out the work to be completed that week and the Friday morning team meeting where everything was discussed.
This meant the creatives (as they were called) had the quiet time to focus on their work.
In the four years I worked with that team, I never recall a time where they missed a deadline or even felt under pressure to complete a campaign. I’m sure there were occasions when they were under pressure—clients can be very demanding—but it was never noticeable.
What made this team so productive was that each person knew the objectives for the week. They knew what needed to be finished and ensured that they had the space and time to get on and complete the work. Patrick, as the boss, protected the time of his team.
He knew if he was constantly asking his creatives for updates, he would be slowing them down. He trusted his team and they trusted him. If they had a difficulty, or discovered that a piece of work would take longer to complete than initially anticipated, they could go to Patrick and tell him.
This comes back to something I learned from Brian Tracy—one of the world’s best self-development teachers—that if you want to be successful at anything, you first need to establish what you need to do to be successful at it.
Once you know that, you can dedicate enough time to doing that and eliminating everything else.
There’s the famous advice that Warren Buffett gives about managing your work. Write down the twenty-five things you feel you should do, then put a star next to the five most important, delete the rest and focus all your time and effort on completing those five.
So, where does flexibility come into this?
Well, if you have an overflowing inbox with emails and messages piling up by the hour, you are constantly interrupted by people asking you questions about this and that, and you have no idea what needs to be completed this week, you lose all flexibility.
There’s too much for your brain to decide what to work on next. You’re overloaded and stress and anxiety will freeze you—slowing you down even further.
Take a copywriter working for Patrick. She knew what needed to be completed that week—it was agreed at the Monday meeting—and she had the freedom and flexibility to get on and do the work in her own way.
And that all came down to knowing from the beginning of the week what was required. Next week wasn’t important. That could be discussed at the Friday meeting.
And that’s one of the strongest concepts of the Time Sector System. Only focus on what needs to be done this week and not worry about next week until you do your weekly planning session at the end of the week.
We need to be flexible enough to modify things for the way we work. One aspect of the Time Sector System I recommend is working with projects.
Task managers, or todo lists, are not the best places to manage projects. Projects are information hubs. There’s likely to be emails, plans, meetings, deadlines and what is called conditional tasks—where something cannot be completed until something else is completed first.
Then there’s likely to be files and documents being worked on which need to be accessed from time to time.
Projects are best managed in your notes apps. Notes apps have greater flexibility to store all this information. You can also create checklists which do not remove completed tasks which makes it easier to quickly see what has been completed and what remains to be done.
I recommend that you add a single task in your task manager saying “Work on project X” and connect that task to your project note. Some people mentioned that this seems cumbersome if the task is simply to follow up with someone.
I agree, and in these situations, I would suggest adding the follow-up task to your task manager.
Be flexible.
Similarly, some projects are simple and easy to do. I have a project right now to get the terrace outside the office ready for the spring. When I come to do that project, the most effective way to complete it would be to schedule an afternoon on my calendar to go outside with the jet washer and get on and do it.
I do not need to create a project note for this. I just need to find some time on my calendar. This “project” doesn’t even need to be on my task list. It’s two or three hours protected on my calendar when it’s not raining.
The principle to work from, is if something needs doing, then it will require time. So the questions is when will you do it?
Once you know what needs to be done, and are clear about what the desired outcome is, and you know when you will do it, the how will largely take care of itself. And it’s how flexibility is your best friend.
Another area where I found people struggle is with the daily planning session. Daily planning is a critical part of being more focused and productive. When you have a plan for the day, you more likely to get the right things done. With no plan, you’ll end up drifting through the day doing this and that and getting caught up in everyone else’s crises and urgencies.
But not accomplishing very much.
Daily planning is five to ten minutes at the end of the day, deciding what you need to do the next day. Doing it the evening before allows you to let go of the day so you can relax and enjoy the evening.
Sounds simple, right?
So why do so many people struggle to do it? Exhaustion. They are exhausted at the end of the day and cannot bring themselves to do it, so it doesn’t get done.
And guess what happens the next day? They drift and get caught up in everyone else’s work. And what does that do to them? It leaves them exhausted at the end of the day.
However, some people are early birds and like to wake up early. If you are an early bird, planning in the morning before the day begins works perfectly well.
This is another example of being flexible. Work to the way you work.
I remember when I used to wake up at 5:00 am (I did that for 18 months), and I would plan my day as part of my morning routine. It was only when waking up at 5:00 am became unsustainable after my coaching programme grew and I needed to be doing coaching sessions late into the evening that I stopped and started doing my daily planning in the evening after I finished my coaching sessions.
Different circumstances require different approaches, yet the principles remain. Plan your week so you know what’s important at a higher level, then give yourself five to ten minutes to adjust your plan each day to allow for the unknowns that will inevitably have come in as the week progresses.
Protect time for doing your important work. If you need to prepare a proposal for an important client and you know it will require three to four hours to complete, then protect that time on your calendar and don’t let anyone steal it from you.
If you allow someone steal that time from you and you find yourself under enormous time pressure at the end of the week, whose fault is that?
There was something I once heard Brian Tracy say and that was “take responsibility”. He was talking in terms of your life—take responsibility for your life. You can easily adopt that same approach for your time. Take responsibility for it. Be ruthless, yet flexible when you need to be so you can get your important work done.
I’m reminded of the East Asian saying: “be like bamboo”. It’s strong, yet flexible enough to adapt to the wind, the snow and the rain and still not break. That should be your approach to your management of time. Be strong—say no when necessary—yet be flexible enough to adapt to the conditions.
I hope you found this helpful. Thank you for listening.
Don’t forget, if you want to build a time management system like bamboo, then the new Time Sector System course is now available. The link is in the show notes. And if you are already enrolled, this is a free update for you and it’s waiting for you in your Learning Centre dashboard.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week, I’m exploring where much of our overwhelm comes from and how to sharpen up your inbox processing.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
Subscribe to my Substack
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 362
Hello, and welcome to episode 362 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
How often do you feel overwhelmed? It’s a good question to ask because some of that overwhelm is caused by what has been called “open loops” or in other words stuff to do that has not been looked at to see what is involved.
A lot of this will come from your inboxes. We throw all sorts of things in there without much thought about what needs to be done. With our email and messaging inboxes, we don’t have any control over what arrives in there—that’s out of our control.
The issue here is we have it collected, and that’s often a weight off our minds, but there’s a sense of anxiety because we don’t know for sure what needs to be done and how long it will take us to do it.
If we are not processing what we collected frequently and correctly, then there is a gaping hole in the system that needs filling in. If not, there will be a lot of things that need to be done that gets missed. And that then leads to a distrust in your system which creates its own set of issues.
This week’s question is how to develop the right habits and processes to make sure that our inboxes are cleared and what gets into our system is clear, actionable and with realistic timelines.
So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Stephen. Stephen asks, Hi Carl, could you walk us through how to best clear a task manager’s inbox as well as some “best practices” for clearing email and other inboxes?
Hi Stephen, yes I can and thank you for your question.
This is a place that I feel I must tread very carefully. On the one hand I want to encourage you to stop trying to remember everything in your head and to externalise it so you reduce the stress of trying to remember everything.
On the other hand, I also want to encourage you to maintain a clean and tight task management system. By that I mean that your task manager only contains genuine things you either must or should do and anything you think you’d like to do can be put into your notes app.
Email and messaging services are reasonably straightforward.
There’s a two step process. The first is to clear the inboxes. This part is about speed. The faster you can do that the better.
When processing your inboxes here you want to get into the habit of asking the questions: What is it and what do I need to do about it?
An email rom a customer asking for some information about their account, for example, would give you the answers; it’s an email from a customer that requires me to answer a question.
So, it’s actionable and you would then send it to your Action This Day folder for action later in the day.
The temptation is to deal with it immediately. It’s from a customer! I must reply immediately. I get it. I know there’s a sense that anything from a customer must be dealt with instantly.
Unfortunately, doing so will create challenges for you in the long-term. The first is you set an expectation. Instantly replying to a customer means they expect you to reply instantly next time too. And next time may not be as convenient as it is now. You might be at your son’s sports day, or having a romantic lunch with your partner.
It’s not very romantic if you have to pause the conversation while you respond to your customer is it?
The second challenge is it rarely ever is just one. It’s often several emails or messages like that. Each one will likely take you five to ten minutes. Just six of those and you’ve eaten up forty-five minutes of your processing time. What about the six other emails you need to clear from your inbox.
This is how inboxes fill up and become overwhelming. If you have sixty to seventy emails in your inbox you should be able to clear those in around twenty to twenty-five minutes. Stopping and dealing with individual emails because you think it will only take a few minutes to deal with them lengthens the processing time, which means you won’t have time to clear it.
Your customers are in the same place as you. Swamped with stuff to do with a shortage of time to do it. The chances are they’re going to hate you for responding instantly. Now you’ve given them more work to do.
And let’s get real here, if something’s genuinely urgent, they’re not going to email you are they? They’ll call you.
The second part of this process is to set aside time each day for dealing with your actionable messages.
This is where you open up your email’s Action This Day folder and begin with the oldest one and work you way down the list. It’s at this point you will thank yourself for not responding to all those quick and easy emails.
If all you have in your Action This Day folder are emails that require a lot of thinking and work, it’ll be a painful experience. If instead you have a wide variety of emails to deal with you build momentum and and plough through them quickly.
And that’s it. A two step process. Through out the day, between sessions of work, clear your inbox by asking two simple questions: What is it, what do I need to do with it. If you need to reply, read or review something, throw it into your action this day folder.
Then later in the day, settle down and go through your Action This Day folder and clear as many as you can. As long as you are starting with the oldest first, you’ll never be very far behind.
Next up is your tasks inbox.
This is a little different from your messages or email inbox because you control what’s put there. Unlike emails and messages where you have no control. You cannot control who is sending messages to you.
The challenge here is to be ruthless about what gets into your system.
Throughout the day, it’s easy to throw all sorts of things into this inbox. You may have heard someone recommend a book that sounded interesting, so you throw that in there. You may have seen someone with a colourful umbrella and you decide it’s time for you to get yourself one.
Then there are all those ideas about redesigning your kitchen, or cleaning up your notes app or a thought about getting some Christmas cards printed with your name on them--I’m not sure if that’s still a thing.
Your inbox is the gateway to your system, so it’s perfectly fine to throw anything and everything in there. Where you want to be ruthless is what you allow into your system.
Processing your task manager’s inbox again has a few questions.
The first is: what is it? Then, what do you need to do with it?
For example, you may have realised that your passport expires in the next ten months. So you have a task in there that says “renew passport”.
That’s good. But is it enough. I know if I come to a task that says renew passport I’m going to ignore it. Why? Because behind that simple “renew passport” is a lot of stuff I don’t know about.
The last time I renewed my passport was ten years ago. The passport office will undoubtedly changed the system since then. So what’s the real task here?
It’s to find out what I need to renew my passport.
So, I would change the task to “find out what I need to renew my passport” and then decide when I will do that. Do I need to do it this week? Next week? Or perhaps next month?
And that’s the third question, when will I do it?
Once decided, I drop it into its appropriate folder.
You will often have some obvious tasks in there too. It could be something like sending a quote to a prospective customer. So you add a task “send quote to Drax Enterprises into your inbox.
Yet, is it that simple?
This might be a potential big multi-million dollar contract. One you need to discuss with your boss first. So, what is the task? It’s to talk with your boss about what discounts to offer. So you can change the task to “Discuss with boss Drax Enterprises quotation”, add a date you will do it—perhaps tomorrow—and place the task into your This Week folder.
The danger of not rewriting tasks with the real next step is you will ignore the task because you are unclear about what really needs to happen next. When you process your inbox, you have an opportunity to get clear about what needs to happen next.
Once you know that, you will be less likely to skip it.
I know this all sounds complex, but if you step back and look what you are doing, you are asking yourself three simple questions.
What is it? What do I need to do with it? And when will I do it?
I’ve found that if you apply these questions every time you are in an inbox, it quickly becomes natural.
You also get better at triaging your task manager’s inbox. This helps you to keep your task manager clean and tight. The less you allow in there, the more focused you will be and much less susceptible to picking the easy tasks leaving yourself with only the more time consuming ones later in the day. (Something you want to reverse—remember “Eat The Frog”)
And that’s it, Stephen. Keep things simple, run through the questions and be ruthless about what gets into your task management system.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me no to wish you all a very very productive week.
This year, the Time Sector System is five years old! For thousands of people it has changed their relationship with tasks and time in so many positive ways. Today’s question concerns the basics of the Time Sector System and its philosophy.
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Script | 361
Hello, and welcome to episode 361 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I still remember the day that the Time Sector concept came to me. I was walking to the gym one sunny afternoon and was reflecting on my overwhelming task list waiting for me at home. I remember thinking to myself that all these tasks hitting me day after day was not sustainable.
I was organised and knew where everything was, but I felt trapped in a cycle of never-ending tasks and emails. Whenever I feel this way about anything I always tell myself that there must be a better way.
And then it hit me.
I think it was the word “unsustainable”. The number of emails I was getting was never going to reduce. It was going to increase. The amount of work I had to do was equally never going to reduce. At some point I would reach breaking point.
It wasn’t the work itself. It was time. I just didn’t have enough time. That was the clue.
You cannot control the number of tasks, messages, and emails you receive. It’s a random number. Yet, the one constant—a constant not controlled by you or me, but by science, and in particular physics, is time. Time is our constraint.
If I could allocate time for doing the different categories of work I had to do and decide when to do the tasks in those categories, it would not matter how much work I had coming in. Everything would get done in due course.
And that was the seed that sprouted into the Time Sector System five years ago.
So, with the history told, it’s time now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Elaine. Elaine asks, “Hi Carl, I recently came across one of your videos where you talk about the Time Sector System. Could you explain its philosophy and how it differs from other time management systems?”
Hi Elaine,
Thank you for your question.
The thinking behind the Time Sector System is that we are limited not by what we can do—we can do a lot—but by how much time we have to do things.
We need to eat, sleep and move (exercise), at our basic level. On top of that we likely have family commitments, school runs, doctor appointments and friends that need seeing. Then we have our work to do.
The limiting factor is time. It’s fixed. We only get 24 hours a day.
Now you can manipulate time by hiring people to do stuff for you. For example, you may be fortunate to be able to afford a nanny to take care of your kids when you are at work. Or, you may be able to hire an assistant. But no matter how you manipulate time, it’s still only 24 hours.
So the philosophy behind the Time Sector System is, it’s not about what you have to do, it’s about when you will do it. After all, that’s the only thing you have control over.
At a wider level, that means organising your tasks into tasks that need to be done this week, next week, this month, next month or long-term or on hold.
When you divide your tasks up into when you will do them you narrow down the decisions you need to make on a day to day basis. When a new task comes in, you only need three questions:
What is it?
What do I need to do to complete it?
When will I do it?
So, for example, imagine I get a notification from my health insurance provider informing me I need to book myself in for a medical check-up.
What is it? It’s a request for me to make an appointment with the doctor.
What do I need to do? I need to make an appointment with the doctor.
When am I going to do it? That depends.
It depends, in my case, on when is convenient for my wife. We go together to the clinic for our annual check-up. In Korea it’s a six-hour ordeal, some turn it into a family outing. So, before I can make the appointment I need to consult with my wife.
So, back to question 2. What do I need to do? Consult with my wife. So, there’s the task. When do I need to do it? This week would be good because if I don’t it will sink to the bottom of my list/ So. I choose today when I see my wife.
When you are processing your inbox, that’s the process. What is it? What do I need to do? When am I going to do it?
Another example might be I have a project that is due for completion at the end of the month. As I am looking at the project, I know what it is—it’s a project. What do I need to do? I need to talk with my colleague about how she is getting on with the graphics for the landing page. That will give me an estimate on when I can finish the landing page. So, when am I going to do it? I’ll send her a message on Monday, so I can add that task to my This week folder.
It could be that as I return from a business trip, I notice my passport will expire in eight month’s time. Now, I know the government won’t be reminding me that my passport needs renewing, so it’s something I need to do.
What is it: It’s a passport renewal.
What do I need to do? I’m not sure. The last time I renewed my passport was nine years ago. The system’s probably changed since then. What can I do about that? Go to the government’s website and find out the process.
Okay, I need to do some research. When will I do it? I’m busy this week, so I can drop the task: find out how to renew my passport into my next week folder.
I don’t need to add a date to it at this stage because I will be doing a weekly planning session on Saturday and I decide then.
It’s brilliantly simple, and takes next to no time to develop the habit of asking these three questions.
There are a few other little things you can do to make this seamless.
For instance, have separate folders for your routines and critical recurring tasks. Routines are those little things that just need to be done. Watering the house plants, cleaning actionable emails, and basic admin tasks.
Your Recurring Critical tasks are those tasks that come from your Areas of Focus and your core work. I won’t go into the Areas of Focus here. These are your life level tasks such as planning your exercise, staying in touch with family and friends and self improvement.
Your core work tasks are the tasks you are employed to do. At a basic level, these would be things like talking with customers if you’re a salesperson, preparing materials and teaching if you are a teacher, etc.
What you do is pull out the tasks you need to perform each day, week or month, and se them to recur as frequently as they need to.
Another one is when you first adopt the Time Sector System, the temptation will be to throw everything into your This Week and Next Week folders. This results in them filling up which causes overwhelm.
When you first begin using the Time Sector System, you want to be learning what is realistic and what is not. This involves monitoring what you can and cannot get done each week.
For example, I know my limit, when I begin the week, is thirty tasks in my This Week folder. Any more than that and I won’t be completing the excess. This does not include my routines and Recurring Critical Tasks.
If I am to get my most important work done each week, anything more than thirty tasks in my This Week folder and something will break.
It will take you a few weeks to find your limit.
And then it all comes down to your daily planning.
While you can plan the week, you will find that you are picking up tasks that need to be done in the week you are in. Before you end your day, you should look at your calendar for the next day. Look to see how much time you have available to do your tasks.
You’re going to have a very challenging day if you have seven hours of meetings and thirty tasks to complete. Something’s not going to get done.
It’s during the daily Planning Sequence that you plan out a realistic day. Perhaps you can move some meetings, or reduce your task list.
And to finish, you select your two most important tasks, flag them and make sure they are your must-do tasks.
And that’s it.
As I go through this, it sounds complex, but when you are doing it, it is not.
New tasks go through the three questions—what is it? What do I need to do? When will I do it? And you can then move those tasks from your inbox to their appropriate folder.
Then, on a daily basis, you check to see how much time you have for tasks, based on how many meetings you have, and create a prioritised, realistic list.
At the end of the week, you get to look at your other folders—next week, this month, next month and long-term and on hold to see what can be brought forward to your this week folder.
The good news is, this approach, helps you to delete tasks that no longer need to be done.
Now what about projects? If they are not in your task manager, where are they?
You manage your projects from your notes app. That could be Apple Notes, Evernote, Notion, OneNote or any kind of notes app that allows you to create links to documents, articles, images and emails.
You notes is a natural place to manage your projects. After all, a project is a big hairy thing that needs managing. You will likely have documents and meeting notes to keep together.
So, keep them together in a notes app. That way, when you’re working on a project you’re not distracted by all the little, easy tasks you could be doing. You can get yourself focused on the project and work from your project notes.
All you then need is a single task in your task manager telling you to work on a specific project. Depending on what tools you are using, you will also likely be able to create a link directly from the task to the project note.
Now the good news. If you are curious about the Time Sector System, I am in the process of updating the online course. It’s the fifth anniversary and it’s a big update. We are in the final editing stage and I hope to get launch the update in the next ten to fourteen days.
I’ve also done a lot of YouTube videos on this—you can see the playlist on my YouTube channel.
Thank you Elaine for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Is self-discipline overrated? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
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Script | 360
Hello, and welcome to episode 360 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
We hear a lot about self-discipline and how we should develop our discipline to achieve our goals or become more productive. But is this true?
Self-discipline is hard—more so these days with all the instant gratification distractions—and anything that is hard is going to be tough to do consistently. Whether you are trying to accomplish a goal or become better organised, if you rely on self-discipline to get you through there’s going to be a good chance you will fail.
There are some people who thrive on self-discipline. The most famous being David Goggins—he’s a tough cookie. Pain, discipline and a never die mindset are what he appears to live for. But, people with that mindset are rare and you don’t need it.
There is a better way. It’s not easy—nothing worthwhile ever is—but with practice, a little determination, persistence, and consistency, you soon find you don’t need discipline to achieve these things.
Now, before we get to the question, Here’s a little reminder about this week’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop.
If you have not yet registered, you can still do so, there’s a link in the show notes or you can visit my website—carlpullein.com— to register.
The workshop will cover how to transition from an unsustainable task-based productivity system to a more sustainable time-based one. I will show you how to manage your work, how to time block effectively and how to prioritise your work so you know you are always working on the right things at the right time.
For those of you already registered, I will be sending out the first workbook in the next day or two so keep an eye out for that. I will also include the joining instructions.
If you want a less hectic and overwhelming life, then this workshop is a must. It’s your chance to create a time management and productivity system that works for you.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ryan. Ryan asks, hi Carl, do you have any tips on getting better with self-discipline? I’ve never been very good at being disciplined but as I get older, I feel I need to do better at this.
Hi Ryan, Thank you for your question.
I’ve always found the concept of “living a disciplined life” interesting. You see, the word discipline suggests “punishment” of some kind. When we’re at school if we do something wrong, we are “disciplined”. That was my first introduction to the word. (Or perhaps my parents disciplining me for whatever reason.)
And yet, when we talk about living a “disciplined life” it’s often spoken of in positive terms. Yet, there’s that underlying sense that it’s bad.
I recently wrote about Charles Aznavour, the prolific French singer/songwriter. Aznavour wrote over a 1,000 songs and recorded many more. He lived until he was 94, exercised every day and was still touring when he passed away in 2018.
In interviews he was frequently asked about his productivity and how he created such a disciplined life. Yet Aznavour never thought he was disciplined.
He woke early every day, and spent his mornings writing songs. For him it wasn’t discipline, it was his passion, his purpose. He couldn’t wait to get started each day. And on those rare days he wasn’t in the mood to write, he still wrote.
Why? He didn’t need to. He wrote because that was what he did. It was a habit.
Have you ever tried starting your day without your morning coffee or not brushing your teeth? How did you feel? Probably uncomfortable and little self-conscious.
You don’t need discipline to brush your teeth or make your coffee in the morning do you? It’s just what you do.
And there is where you will find the answer to living with a little more discipline. Don’t think of it as discipline. It isn’t. It’s just what you do.
Take planning your day at the end of the day.
Last night, I spent three hours in a recording studio recording the audiobook of Your Time Your Way. That was after a full day recording and editing videos. I was exhausted. My voice was ragged. Yet, after getting home, I got my Franklin Planner (Yes, I’m still using it), sat on the sofa and planned today.
There was no discipline involved. I also had a great excuse. I’d been on the go since 8:30 am and it was 11:45 pm. I could easily have skipped it. Yet I didn’t.
Why? Because that is what I do in the evening. I give myself five to ten minutes to plan the day.
I love the quote from Jim Rohn: “each day you get to choose between two pains. The pain of regret or the pain of discipline”.
I know what happens if I don’t plan the day—the next day starts out of control. I have no focus and anything loud and “urgent” becomes the priority—even when it isn’t a priority.
Most people’s problems with time management and productivity is because they skip the five to ten minutes planning the day. If you don’t have a plan for the day, you will end up on someone else’s plan and they don’t care about how you feel—a bit harsh, I know, but it’s true.
For most things you don’t need discipline. It’s a choice. Do you scroll social media or read a book? Do you sit on the sofa watching TV or go out for a walk? Do you eat a chocolate bar or a banana? That’s nothing to do with discipline. It’s a choice.
Reading a book is easy. Get a physical book, not an ebook, and place it on the coffee table near your favourite armchair or sofa. Then give yourself ten minutes each day to sit and read it. If you place a bookmark in the book, you can see the bookmark gradually falling to the bottom (the end of the book).
And as the book is on your coffee table, you will see it every time you sit down.
More often than not, you will read more than ten minutes.
Ultimately, those people you think are living a “disciplined life” just have certain habits. Getting up early and writing a journal is a habit. It doesn’t need discipline if it’s a habit.
My wife writes her journal every evening before she goes to bed. She uses Day One, the digital journal, and writes on her laptop. She sits on the sofa, opens her laptop and writes. Some days she’ll only write for five minutes. Other days she’ll write of over an hour. For her she sees it as winding down at the end of the day. Absolutely no discipline is involved.
It would be strange not seeing her on the sofa writing a journal.
Yet for many sitting down to write a journal requires discipline. Ask my wife if writing her journal requires discipline and she’ll laugh at you.
You don’t need discipline if you have the right habits.
How do you develop habits. Well, firstly I would recommend you read James Clear’s Atomic Habits. It’s a brilliant book.
Secondly, identify the habit you want to develop. I always suggest your morning routines are a good place to e to start. These are the easiest kind of habits to develop. What would you like to do first thing in the morning?
You may want to read, meditate, exercise or write a journal. Pick one thing.
For example, if you choose to write a journal, start by making yourself your favourite morning drink, then sit down somewhere comfortable and begin writing. Give yourself five to ten minutes to write.
You can help yourself by putting your journal next to your kettle or coffee maker before you go to bed. That way when you wake up, turn on the kettle you see your journal there waiting for you.
Something James Clear mentions in Atomic Habits is to reduce the friction. This is akin to those who wish to exercise in the morning, putting out their exercise clothes next to their bed before going to bed. It reduces the friction of choosing what to wear. I think of this as minimising the risk of finding an excuse.
These are all great tips. Yet, the disciplined life that Charles Aznavour lived didn’t need tricks. It appeared disciplined, yet it was just how he lived his life. And that’s the goal here; to build daily habits that are effortless because that is what you do.
Most people eat their breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same time? Why? It’s because that’s what they do. When I commuted to the office, I would catch the 8:05 bus each morning. I knew what time to leave the house because I knew how long it would take to walk to the bus stop. It was simply what I did.
I should give you one little tip I’ve used in the past. If, say, I want to read a book each evening but find myself watching TV instead, what I will do is tell myself I must read for ten minutes before rewarding myself with turning on the TV.
The advantage of this little trick is you still get to do the thing you want to do—watch TV—but you also get to do the other thing you struggle doing. Eventually, it just becomes a habit. Watching TV without reading becomes uncomfortable.
So there you go, Ryan. It’s not really about being disciplined. It’s more about choosing what you want to do and carrying it through.
Your calendar can help you there. Remember the saying, what goes on your calendar gets done. With this, the key is if you don’t or cannot do something you must remove it from your calendar. That act of moving it from your calendar reminds you about you haven’t done. It acts a good incentive.
If, for example, you schedule going for a walk after lunch, but keep skipping it, because you are removing it every day, you will begin asking yourself what’s wrong and re-assess things. Perhaps you will be more consistent if you go for your walk in the morning or evening.
I hope that has helped, Ryan. Think about what you want to do, when you want to do it and do it. Sooner rather later it will be just what you do.
Don’t forget to get yourself registered for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop. The first session is on Friday evening, it will be something you will never regret.
Thank you for your question Ryan and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode, what’s the best way to manage projects?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Script | 359
Hello, and welcome to episode 359 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
From time to time, something comes along that sounds great when first described but then turns nasty.
In the productivity world, that something is Getting Things Done and in particular the definition of what a project is.
This is not the fault of David Allen, Getting Things Done’s author; this is how his description of a project has been horribly misinterpreted.
At its essence, Getting Things Done is about categorising your work into contexts. That could be work you can do on your computer or phone. In your office or at home. It is, and never was about “projects”. Projects, at best, are a sideshow. A simple way to organise your work. Nothing more.
Yet for some reason, a few early readers misunderstood GTD, wrote about it and now there’s a whole generation of people believing anything that involves two steps or more is a project and must be organised as such.
And there, is the source of overwhelm, time wasted to organising stuff instead of doing stuff and huge backlogs of things to do.
Before we get to the heart of today’s podcast, it’s important that I clear this misunderstanding up.
If you ever bought one the fantastic GTD setup guides that was, and may still be, sold on the GTD website, you will notice that whatever task manager you are using, you set up the lists, folders or projects (depending on which task manager you are using) as contexts. Those contexts usually related to people, places or things. For example, your home, or office. Your computer, printer or car. Or your partner, boss or colleagues.
You then dropped any task related to these contexts into its appropriate context.
Your projects were organised in a file folder system that you kept in a filing cabinet. Current projects—the things you were working on this week or month—were kept on or near your desk for quick access.
In those folders you kept all the details of the project. Notes, documents, outlines, etc. Perhaps you also had a checklist of what needed to happen next.
Today, you can use your digital note app for that purpose.
The key thing about GTD was it was task context driven—ie, you could only do something if you were in the right place, with the right tool and with the right people. It was never about projects.
So, now you have the background, I think it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Benjamin. Benjamin asks, How do you best manage projects using your task manager, notes app, and calendar together?
Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question.
I think the first place to start is to avoid looking for a way to treat any new input as a project. Most things are not.
Theoretically, this podcast is a project. I need to choose the question, write the script, set up the studio, record the podcast, edit it, then publish it and hand it over to the my marketing manager for sharing on social media.
That’s seven steps. Well within the definition of a GTD project. Yet, if I were to treat each podcast episode as a project, I’d waste hours just organising it.
A podcast episode is something I do every week. It’s not a project. It’s just part of my work.
Usually, on Thursday I will write the script. That means I go into my list of questions which is in a single note in Evernote, select a question, then begin writing the script.
Then on Sunday morning, after my coaching calls have finished, I set up my little studio, and record the podcast. Once recorded, I edit it and then publish it.
The only tasks on my task manager are a task on Thursday that reminds me I need to write my script and a task on Sunday that reminds me to record the podcast. Two tasks. That’s it.
I don’t need a project folder for any of this.
There is one other thing I do that relates to your question, Benjamin. I have a two hour writing block on my calendar on a Thursday for writing the script and a two hour block on Sunday for recording it.
So, there in essence you have all three tools working together.
- I have a single note in my notes app with the title “podcast questions”. That makes it easy to search for.
- My task manager reminds me when I need to write the script and record the podcast.
- My calendar protects enough time each week to ensure I get each part of the process completed.
If you want to simplify things I would suggest looking at how you define a project.
In my eyes, a project is something unique, something you either have not done before or rarely ever do. Typical projects would be:
Moving house
Buying a new car
Planning a vacation
Setting up a new payroll system
Starting a business
Finding a new job
Doing the work you are employed to do is not a project—well not unless you are a project manager.
An advertising agency isn’t going to treat each new client as a “project”. An advertising agency creates advertising campaigns every day.
The graphic designer has a list of designs they are working on and when they begin their day they only need to choose which campaign they will work on that day.
Designing is their job.
The same goes for the copywriter. When they begin their day they choose which campaign to work on and that is dictated by when the next client meeting is.
What is the work you are employed to do?
A teacher doesn’t treat each new class as a project. They have a process or system for preparing their materials and when the teaching time begins they teach.
It’s possible that a lot of your work does require a place to keep meeting notes, plans and links to documents you may be working on. That’s what your notes app is for.
Your notes app has replaced the filing cabinet today. Filing cabinets were static—they never moved. Your digital notes app can go with you wherever you go.
If you do have any projects, that is where the information and resources go.
All your task manager needs to do is tell you what you should be working on today.
You may have tasks like:
Work on new payroll system project
Finish proposal for Universal Exports
Follow up Mr Oddjob at Auric Enterprises
Clear Action This Day folder
Your calendar tells you if your task list for the day is realistic. If you have six hours of meetings today and you plan to work on your payroll project and finish the proposal for Universal Exports, you’re likely being a little ambitious.
You calendar tells you if you have time to do the things you’d like to do that day.
You can go further, though and use your calendar to protect time for doing your key work.
If, for example, you want to (or need to) spend two hours working on the Universal Exports proposal, then you can block time on your calendar for doing that work. There might be some time sensitivity involved there. Getting the proposal to Universal Exports might be the most important thing you need to do that day. That would be flagged in your task manager as a non-negotiable task that day.
The daily and weekly planning is where I would decide what I will be working on that day or week.
The planning sessions are where you can step back and look at the bigger landscape of what you have to do and decide where you will put your time that day.
Right now, I do have a project. I am in the process of recording the audiobook version of Your Time Your Way. This is not something I can sit down a real off as a single task.
I need to book the recording studio and sound engineer and my voice will only last for around 3 hours before I begin sounding like an out of tune frog.
The only thing I need in my system each week is when I need to be at the recording studio. Currently that is Wednesday nights at 7:30. We record until 10:30 pm. I don’t need a task for any of that. That’s on my calendar.
The next day, the sound engineer sends me the recordings and I go through them to make sure everything sounds right. I have a task in my task manager that pops up each Thursday reminding me to review that previous day’s recordings.
I have a project folder for the Your Time, Your Way book. That contains all my notes, meeting notes and any information I may need. Right now, though, I don’t need to reference that. I just need to turn up at the recording studio on Wednesday nights, record the audiobook and review the recordings the next day.
The important thing is not to confuse your core work with projects. Core work is the work you are employed to do. Designers design, teachers teach, managers manage, truck drivers drive a truck.
All you need is a list of tasks you want to complete each day and get on and complete as many as you can. The majority of those tasks will be related to your core work.
A project, on the other hand, is something unique, often outside of your core work, that needs additional time for doing. You may need to utilise your unique skills to complete that project, you may only have a small say in the project. Either way, on a day to day basis, the only thing you need to decide is what your next task is and do that.
This year is the fifth anniversary of the Time Sector System course. I am currently in the process of re-recording and updating that course.
Is it a project or just part of my core work.
I know from experience that if I treat it as a project things will get complicated.
Yet, I’ve create many courses over the years. I know the process.
For an update, it’s to review and update the course outline. Then schedule time on my calendar for recording and editing it. There will be some additional tasks related to marketing, but I am not there yet. I’m recording, so the driver is my calendar.
Hopefully that has helped, Benjamin. The key is to simplify things as much as possible. Try to avoid creating projects and instead ask if there is a process you can follow. Most things you frequently do has a process.
Processes speed everything up.
As the Formula 1 season is about to start, I’m reminded of one of the sports best leaders, Ross Brawn’s comment on running a team.
The new car for the new season is never considered a project. It’s a process. There’s a time to begin work on the new car, there’s a time to test the new car, etc. Yet none of that is considered a project. Aerodynamicists do the aerodynamics. Engineers work on the chassis and engine and the logistics people work on the logistics. It’s what they do every day.
Yet, building a new wind tunnel, or engineering factory, that would be a project. These “projects” are rare and need specialist inputs.
Don’t forget, we’re two weeks away from the first Ultimate Productivity Workshop of 2025. This is your opportunity to take a live workshop with me where I help you to create and build your very own productivity system, A system that works for you.
Thank you Benjamin for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Where are you spending most of your time? Are you planning or doing? That’s what we are looking at this week.
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The Ultimate Productivity Workshop
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Script | 358
Hello, and welcome to episode 358 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Podcaster Chris Williamson has recently caused a bit of a stir in the productivity world with the phrase “the productivity rain dance”. Cal Newport picked this up and it’s something I’ve written and spoken about for many years.
If you are obsessing about productivity tools—apps, techniques and systems—you’re not doing the work. You’re doing the productivity rain dance. It’s organising, planning and searching for new tools in the hope that somehow the work will get done.
It won’t. And while you are wasting all that time planning, and playing, the work continues to pile up.
This week’s question is linked to this in that it’s about tools and organising work and I hope, my answer will help you find the balance between collecting, organising and doing.
Before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question, I’d like to mention that the first Ultimate Productivity Workshop of 2025 is coming.
On Fridays 14th and 21st March I invite you to spend two hours with me learning how to create a time management and productivity system that’s focused on doing the work so you have time for the things you want time for.
In the workshop, we will cover getting control of your calendar and task manager . Then in week two, I will show you some simple techniques to get control of, and more importantly, stay in control of your communications—email, Slack/Teams messages AND the all important daily and weekly planning sessions.
Places are limited so, if you would like to develop a personal productivity system that is focused on doing rather than organising and planning, get yourself registered today. The link to register is in the show notes.
Okay, back to this episode. Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alastair. Alastair asks, hi Carl. I recently came across your work and wonder how you avoid getting caught up in the wonderful world of productivity apps. I never seem to able to stick to anything and I know I am wasting time.
Hi Alastair, thank you for sending in your question.
I’m not sure you are necessarily wasting time looking for the right tools. If you are at the start of your productivity journey, finding the right tools is inevitable and yes, it can be confusing. There are so many.
However, there comes a point when you need to stop and settle down with a set of tools.
Those tools are: A calendar, a notes app and a task manager.
The good news is the built in tools that comes with your computer will do. You don’t need expensive subscriptions to so called AI enabled tools or collaborative project management tools.
What are you trying to do when you decide it’s time to get organised and be “productive”?
It’s not about getting more work done. That’s a bit of a misnomer about productivity. It’s about getting the important stuff done and eliminating the less important.
Getting your kids up, dressed, fed and ready for school each morning is important at 7:30 am. Checking email and messages is not. There’s a time and place for those messages, but 7:30 am is not the time.
The world we live in today has made communication incredible fast and easy. Forty years ago, the only forms of communication were letters and telephone calls. (Although some offices had fax machines too).
If you were not next to a telephone, no one could contact you. And if you were not in the office, you didn’t know what surprises were contained in the correspondence waiting for you.
It was therefore easier to compartmentalise your days. Today, it’s much more difficult because you can be alerted to problems instantly, and those problems can derail your day very quickly.
The challenge therefore is to be able to quickly sift through all the stuff coming at us and to decide what is important and what is not.
When things are coming at us all day, they appear loud and urgent. But urgent is not necessarily important.
If you have a thousand emails backlogged in your email system and your boss is demanding you send in your employee evaluations by the end of the week, your employee evaluations are the more important task. The backlog will have to wait.
And let’s be honest, if someone’s been waiting three months for you to reply to their email they’re not going to be bothered if they have to wait a further week.
If you consider that scenario for a moment, your productivity tools are not going to help you.
The only thing you need to know is that writing your employee evaluations must be done. Shuffling that task around your productivity tools won’t do that for you. You are, in effect, procrastinating.
I like the analogy to the rain dance here. A rain dance is performed to persuade God or the gods to bring rain to water the crops. Yet, the dance doesn’t produce the rain. You can dance as much as you like, you can wear elaborate costumes and involve other people. None of that will give you what you want—water to feed the crops.
You can download as many productivity tools as you like. You can organise your notes in such a way that finding stuff is quick and easy and you can spend hours curating your notes and tasks so they look pretty. Yet, none of that gets the work done.
Doing the work is the only way the work will get done.
So, all you need each day is a list of things you have decided are important and you get done and do them.
For that, you don’t need expensive apps. A single sheet of paper would do that.
I’ve always found it interesting how productive people get their work done. The common thread is they do the work, not organise it.
If you Google Albert Einstein’s desk you will see a mess. Papers and books strewn all over the place. If you search for Jeff Bezos’ desk from the early days of Amazon, you’ll see something very similar.
These guys got a tremendous amount of work done without the need for clean and tidy systems. They got on with doing the work that mattered and cleaned up when they were finished.
Sadly, unproductive people don’t achieve very much so we cannot see their workspaces, but I’ll bet they were beautifully neat and tidy with bookshelves of neatly organised books and papers lined up perfectly on their desks.
A few years ago I got into watching YouTube videos of minimalist desk set ups. (Weirdly, these videos are still popular!). I remember at the time wondering how they ever got any work done. It must have taken hours to keep their workspace so clean.
The key to all of this is knowing what is important and what is not. This is why I recommend doing two exercises before you begin developing any kind of system.
The first is to establish what your areas of focus are. These eight areas around your family and relationships, career, finances, health and fitness, lifestyle and personal development are important because they define what is important to you as an individual.
The next is to get clear what your core work is. This is the work you are employed to do and directly effects your promotional prospects and ultimately your income.
Being quick to answer your phone, respond to a message or email or being on time to every meeting is not your core work. Well, not unless you work in customer support.
Once you know what your areas of focus are and your core work is, you have a pre-defined set of priorities on which to base your decisions about what you should be doing each day.
For example, one of my areas of focus related to my work (career) is to help as many people as I can become more productive and less stressed. To do that, I produce several pieces of content each week.
Creating and publishing that content is always a priority for me.
I don’t need a lot of tools to to do that.
A calendar protects time each week for creating that content—I have twelve hours a week protected for this.
I have a very disorganised list of content ideas in a single note in Evernote—a notes app I’ve been using for almost 16 years now.
And, of course, I have an app for writing and producing that content.
Are there better calendars, notes apps and writing tools out there? Possibly, but how much faster would I be able to create content with those new tools? Probably no faster because using them would be unfamiliar to me.
The tools I use I’ve used for over ten years. I know them inside out and they are boring. And that’s good because I’m not tempted to organise them, or even look for new apps. They do the job I need them to do and I can focus on creating the content.
If you want to become more productive and get the important things done on time every time, the only way you will do that is to do the work. There are no shortcuts and no productivity tool will do it for you. Only you can do that.
- If you need to write a report, open up Microsoft Work or Google Docs and write the first paragraph.
- If you need to prepare a presentation, open up PowerPoint or Keynote and create the first slide.
- If you need to wash your car, go to the car wash centre and wash your car.
- If you need to do your taxes, download the documents and write in your name and national insurance number.
Funny how none of those things requires you to add a task into a task manager. You just need to decide when you will do them and do them.
So there you go, Alastair. Focus less on the tools and more on what you need to do to get the job done. You really don’t need elaborate apps, complex organisational structures or a minimalist desk.
You just need time protected to get the work done.
Thank you, Alastair for your question and thank you for listening. Don’t forget to get yourself registered for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop where will cover many of these concepts (and much more).
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, why managing your time is better than managing tasks.
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Script | 357
Hello, and welcome to episode 356 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
There is a scene in the movie Apollo 13 where astronaut Ken Mattingley, played by Gary Sinese, is trying to find a way to power up the Command Service Module to bring the three in danger astronauts through the earth’s atmosphere and safely back to earth.
All they had to play with was 16 amps; that’s it. Sixteen amps isn’t enough to boil a kettle. And we’re talking about life support systems and navigation that was critical to bring Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise back to earth safely.
In the scene, we see Ken Mattingley testing every switch in every possible combination so they do not exceed 16 amps . It’s painstaking; it takes a lot of time, but eventually, they devise a sequence that the astronauts can use to power up the command service module within the 16-amp limit.
We know that Apollo 13 landed, or splashed down, safely to earth after five days.
Each day, you, too, are dealing with a similar situation. You have a limited resource—time—and that’s it. You get the same 24 hours every day that everybody else gets. How you use that time is entirely up to you.
The problem is you don’t have 24 hours because some critical life support measures require some of that time, including sleep. If you don’t get enough sleep, that will have a subsequent effect on your performance that day; you won’t be operating at your most productive.
This is one of the reasons why it is crucial to have a plan. No flight ever takes off without a flight plan. They know precisely how much weight they are carrying. They can estimate to some degree of accuracy the weight of the passengers, and they know precisely where they’re going and what weather conditions to expect.
Yet many people start their day without a plan; they turn up at work and email messages. Bosses, customers, and colleagues dictate what they do all day, and they end up exhausted, having felt they’ve done nothing important at all. And that will be very true. Well, not important to them.
This week’s question is about getting control of your time. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tina. Tina asks, Hi Carl, I am swamped with all the stuff I have to do at work and home. It’s never-ending and I don’t have time to do it all. Do you have any tips on getting control of everything?
Hi Tina, thank you for your question.
There’s an issue when we focus on everything that we have to do. We forget that ultimately, whether we can or cannot do something will come back to time. Time is the limiting factor.
There are other resources—money, ability, energy, etc but if you have all those resources, and you don’t have time, it’s not going to get done.
Things get even more messy when we consider that as humans we are terrible at estimating how long something will take to do. There are too many variables.
For instance, as I am writing this script, my wife is messaging me and Louis, my little dog, is looking at me expectantly, hoping I will give him his evening chewy stick early.
When I began writing, I thought it would take me a couple of hours, I’ve already spent an hour on it and I am nowhere near finishing it.
One place to start is to allocate what you have to do by when you will do it. This helps to reduce your daily lists which in turn reduces that sense of overwhelm.
I recommend starting with a simple folder structure of:
This Week
Next Week
This Month
Next Month
Long-Term and on Hold.
When something new comes in, ask yourself: What is it? What do I need to do and when can I do it?
The questions what is it and what do I need to do will help you to classify the task.
Classifying a task is helpful because it will allow you to group similar tasks together.
For example, if you walk into your living room and notice the windows are looking dirty, you may decide to create a task to clean the windows.
The next question is when will you do it? The best time to do this kind of task is when you do your other cleaning.
Grouping similar tasks together work to prevent procrastination.
When I was growing up, my grandmothers and my mother all had what they called “cleaning days”. This was a day, once a week when they did the big clean. Vacuuming, dusting and laundry. It was a non-negotiable part of their week.
And if you think about it, you don’t pop out to the supermarket to buy food individually. It’s not like you run out of broccoli and go to the supermarket to buy only broccoli. You would add broccoli to your shopping list and buy it when you do your grocery shopping.
Well, we can adopt the same principle here.
Like most people, I get email every day. The problem is, you and I have no idea how many emails we will get. It’s a random number. This makes it practically impossible to know before the day starts what you will need to do.
However, what you can do is have a set amount of time to deal with your actionable email each day.
I have a process. Before the day starts I clear my inbox, filtering out the stuff I don’t need and archiving things I may need. The actionable email goes into an Action This Day folder in my email app and later in the day I dedicate an hour for clearing that folder.
I have my Action This Day folder set up so the oldest email is at the top of the list and I start there. It doesn’t matter if I have fifty or eighty actionable emails. I give myself an hour work on it and once the hour is up I stop.
I repeat this every day, so my emails are not backlogging. Most days I can clear them all, some days I cannot. But as I always begin with the oldest email, nobody will be waiting more than 24 hours for a reply.
This means it really doesn’t matter how many messages I get each day. While I can’t predict how many I will get each day, I have been able to pin down how long I spend on it each day (around an hour and twenty minutes) and that’s it.
Another thing you can do is to default all new tasks to next week, not this week. It’s tempting to throw everything into this week, but if everything goes into this week, you’re going to be swamped.
Much of what we are asked to do doesn’t need to be done straight away. It can wait. The advantage of waiting is many things end up sorting themselves out.
There’s a story about former Israel Prime Minister Yikzak Shamir, who would take every letter, memo and document he received and put it on a pile on a side table. He wouldn’t look at it for a week or ten days.
When he did go through the pile, he found 90% of what he was being asked to sort out had sorted itself out and the remaining 10% needed his attention.
Of course, today not touching something for a week to ten days might not be practical, but it does highlight another issue we find ourselves in—rushing to do something that if left alone will sort itself out.
The final piece of this puzzle, is how you organise your day. This is where your calendar takes priority and where the time limit comes to play.
We have twenty-four hours. From that we need to sleep, eat and take care of our personal hygiene. That’s going to take up around nine to ten hours of your day. So, in reality you have around fourteen hours to play with.
Where will you do your most important work? This is where your calendar comes in.
Most of us have meetings and often we have no control over when those will be. However, what you can do is block your calendar for doing your most important work.
For example, you could protect two hours in the morning for doing your critical work. And then an hour in the afternoon for dealing with your communications—the action this day folder.
That’s only three hours. If you’re working a typical eight hour day, that still leaves you with five hours for meetings snd other stuff that may need to be done.
If you can consistently follow that practice, you’ll soon see a lot of that work that’s piling up getting done.
One thing to keep in mind is the work will never stop.
There’s a story that on Queen Elizabeth’s final day, she still had to deal with her official documents and messages. It’s likely you will too. Stuff to do will never stop coming.
All you have are your resources and of those time is the most limited. The question is—how much time are you will to give to those tasks?
So, Tina, the best advice I can give you is to sort your tasks by when you will do them. This week, next week, later this month or next month.
From there, categorise your tasks into the type of work involved. That could be Writing time, communications, admin, chores etc.
Then. Look at your calendar and see where you can protect time for doing that work.
And that’s it. If you are consistent in following your calendar, you will find the right things are getting done on time and you’ll feel a lot less frazzled and overwhelmed.
Thank you, Tina for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.
This week, Dr. Kourosh Dini returns to the podcast to discuss how we can ensure that the goals we set are achieved.
Here's how you can learn more about Dr Dini's work.
Newsletter:
https://wavesoffocus.com/Your-First-Step-to-Breaking-Free-from-Force-Based%20Work/
Waves of Focus
https://wavesoffocus.com/
on SMART goals
https://www.kouroshdini.com/lay-off-the-goals-a-bit-would-you/
Should you take up journaling, and if you do, will it help you with your time management and productivity? That’s what we’re exploring this week.
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Script | 355
Hello, and welcome to episode 355 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
This year is the 10th anniversary since I took up consistent journaling. And it’s been one of the best things I’ve ever taken up.
Not only is it one of the most therapeutic things you can do, it’s also one of the best ways to organise your thoughts, work your way through problems and vent your anger towards those who really wind you up.
Over the years, I’ve also found that journaling has helped me to achieve my goals because each day I am writing about how I am doing and if I find myself making excusing, the act of writing out my excuses exposes them for what they really are—excuses.
So, this week, I’ve chosen a question related to journaling and I hope it will inspire you to invest in a quality notebook and pen and start doing it yourself. And if I can inspire just one of you to take it up and become a Samuel Pepys, I’ll be very happy.
So, to kick ups off, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks, hi Carl, I’ve heard you talk about your journaling habit numerous times. Do you think writing a journal has helped or hindered your productivity?
Hi Tom, thank you for your question.
To answer your question directly, I can say with certainty that journaling has contributed to my overall productivity.
To explain further, I write in my journal every morning, no matter where I am. And one of the things I always write down is my two objective tasks for the day. Those objectives are the two non-negotiable tasks for the day and by writing them down at the top of my journal entry, I have a way of ensuring I did them when I write my journal the next day,
But more powerfully, writing them down each morning focuses my mind on what needs to be done and how and when I will do them.
Those tasks are also in my task manager, but it’s the act of writing them out by hand that gives me the focus.
Writing a journal is much more than being an aid to productivity. It’s also a form of therapy.
Like most people, I feel frustrated, overwhelmed and stressed at times. Those feelings need an outlet. A negative way to do that is to get angry, shout, and scream. Sure, that blows off steam, but it also transfers your negative feelings to others—your colleagues and family. Not great.
Instead, if you have a way to write about these things, you start to find ways to solve whatever the underlying issues are. Writing slows down your thinking, and if you were to step back and analyse why you sometimes feel stressed, frustrated and overwhelmed, it is because you feel—incorrectly—everything has to be done right now.
That slowing down helps to bring back some perspective and you can decide when you will do something and what can be left until another day.
When it comes to achieving your goals, a journal is perhaps the best way to track progress. It can also help you establish new, positive habits.
When I developed my morning routines around eight years ago, I chose to track them in my journal. I always draw a margin on left of the page, and I list out the six items I do as part of my morning routine: make coffee, wash face and teeth, drink lemon water, write my journal, clear my email inbox and do my shoulder stretches.
I write them down at the top of my journal entry for the day in the margin. And, for the dopamine hit, I check them off too.
I exercise in the late afternoon and, again, I will write out what I did in the margin of my journal.
Now, I could spend a lot of money on habit-tracking apps, but with my journal, I’ve found no need. I have my record and can review it at any time.
Over the years, I’ve been asked what I write about and if I use any prompts.
The answer is no. Well, apart from writing out my objectives for the day.
Now, prompts can be helpful when you first start—you can think about them as those little stabilisers we put on kids’ bikes to help them learn to ride. Sooner or later you want to take them off so you can experience the freedom of riding freely.
I write whatever’s on my mind that morning. If everything’s going great I write about that. If things are not so great I write about it and why I think things are not going as well as I want them to. I often find as I am writing about an issue, a solution begins to form in my mind and I will continue writing.
If a task comes from that solution, I can put that in its appropriate place later.
As a general rule, I will write for around fifteen minutes. However, if I don’t have much to write about, I will give it ten minutes. The weather’s a good subject to write about when you have little to write.
If there’s a lot on my mind, I’ll keep going until I’ve emptied my thoughts. That’s very rarely more than thirty minutes, though.
Over the years, I’ve tried both analogue journaling—with pen and paper and digital journaling using an app called Day One.
On balance, I’ve found that pen and paper journaling works best.
I spend most of my working time in front of a screen. I type a lot. So, opening up a nice notebook and picking up a fountain pen is a lovely break from the constant screen time. It also feels a lot less rushed and more relaxing.
One thing I noticed when I was writing my journal in Day One—a popular digital journal—was I never went back to my old entries. I read enough typed documents on screen all day. I have no desire to read through more, even if it’s my journal.
I keep my old paper journals on my bookshelf and often skim through pages when waiting for a call to start. It’s incredibly nostalgic and leaves you realising you have accomplished a lot.
I was recently asked if I am worried about people reading my journals. Hahaha, that’s the point.
One of the inspirations for me to start writing a journal was how the journals of people like Samuel Pepys, Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton are still around.
These journals were written hundreds of years ago and, in the case of Samuel Pepys, are a snapshot of how we lived in the 17th Century.
Pepys was very open about what he did. Some good things and a lot of bad things. But does he care we are reading them today? Of course not. He’s been dead for 320 years.
I have the same attitude. I’ve nothing to hide from my wife, and the journals are kept in my study—home office. If I lost my journal when travelling, so be it. There’s nothing scandalous in there—well, not yet anyway hahaha.
There are a few tips I would share with you if you are thinking about journaling. Start on paper. Buy yourself a nice notebook. You’ll find bound notebooks with a hard cover are best. Choose A5 or B5 size. You’ll find an A4 notebook a little daunting at first.
Hardback notebooks will last a long time, and the hardcover will protect the pages better than a soft cover.
I would also suggest investing in a fountain pen. You can pick up a refillable one for less than $20 these days. Lamy Safaris are excellent pens, and so are the Pilot Metropolitans and Platinum Preppys.
If you invest in a fountain pen, ensure the paper you buy is fountain pen-friendly. Rhodia Web-books and Clairefontaine notebooks are good choices, as are many Japanese notebooks such as Midori’s MD notebooks.
When you start journaling, think of it as if you were meeting a stranger for the first time. You will naturally be a little reserved at first. You might only write about the weather and perhaps what you did yesterday.
As long as you remain consistent with it, you will soon open up. You’ll start writing a few thoughts and feelings after a few weeks. Let it roll and don’t hold back.
I would also recommend writing in the morning. You will likely be much more consistent that way. Evening times can be difficult because you will sometimes be tired. You may even have had a few too many G’nTs, and you won’t write.
Tie writing your journal to your morning routines. You don’t have to write for long. Give yourself ten minutes.
And if you want to be more focused, after writing the date at the top, write out your two must-do tasks for the day. That way, you have a method to hold yourself accountable. If, for whatever reason, you didn’t do your must-do tasks, dedicate a sentence or two to writing about why you didn’t do them.
This helps you because over time you may see a pattern developing. You might discover that afternoons are terrible for doing your focused work because your boss always wants to have meetings then. You can then use that information to change your structure.
If you draw a margin on the page, you can use the margin to track other data such as a food log, exercise and even your energy levels. I track my weight there. Each Wednesday, I weigh myself and write my weight in the margin (in a different coloured ink).
And there you go, Tom. Yes, journaling has helped me to be more productive. It slows me down and gets me to think better, leading to better focus on the day ahead. It also gives me a place to consider new ideas and play around with possible solutions.
I hope this episode has inspired some of you to start journaling. It’s a fantastic way to bring perspective on chaotic days and weeks. It also slows you down—always a good thing in a fast-paced world, and gives you a place to express your thoughts.
And who knows, you may be the next Samuel Pepys or Leonardo Da Vinci in three-hundred years or so.
Thank you, Tom, for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.
Do you feel you are rushing from one task to another while not getting anything important done? Well, this week, I’m going to share with you a few ways to change that.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
Subscribe to my Substack
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Script | 353
Hello, and welcome to episode 354 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
What’s the rush? This is one of those powerful questions you can ask yourself when processing the things you have collected in your inboxes.
It’s easy today to feel that everything you are asked to do must be done immediately. While there is a category of tasks that require quick action, most of what comes across your desk (or pops up on your screen) does not fall into that category.
The trick, of course, is knowing which is which. This is where developing confidence in your judgement and abilities helps. But that can only come from establishing some “rules”. In a way, automating your decision-making.
I recently heard an interview with President J F Kennedy, in which he said as president, the kind of decisions you make are always high-level. Anything smaller will be dealt with at a lower level and rarely reach your desk.
That’s an example of government in action. The president or Prime Minister cannot decide everything. Lower-level, less urgent things can and should be handled at a department level.
That’s the same for you. Most of your decisions should be automated. What kind of emails are actionable, and what can be archived or deleted, for example.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Edward. Edward asks, Hi Carl, I recently read your newsletter in which you wrote about slowing down. Could you explain a little more how to slow down and still be productive?
Hi Richard, thank you for your question.
One of the disadvantages of technology and how it has advanced over the last twenty years is the speed at which tasks can now be done.
While technology has speeded up incredibly, our human brains have not. That causes us many issues.
The biggest issue is because everyone knows how quickly we can reply to an email, they expect almost instant replies which ignores the fact we might being doing something else.
For example, when I am driving or in a meeting or on a call, I cannot reply to an “urgent” email or message. I am doing something else.
In the days before email, there was a natural delay. I remember when I was working in a law firm, email was very new and lawyers didn’t trust it. So, we continued writing letters. This meant, if we received a letter in the morning, we had until 4 pm to reply—that was when the mail went to the post office.
If we missed the post, that was okay, we could blame the post office. And that was accepted.
Other lawyers knew this as did our clients and the clients of the other lawyers.
This also meant we had time to think about our response, talk to a colleague if necessary or escalate to our boss if the issue was complex.
Today, we often don’t feel we have that time. The truth is you do.
One thing I’ve learned is when someone sends you something they are secretly hoping you do not respond quickly. They’re snowed under with work too. If you reply quickly, you’ve just given them more work to do today. You’re not going to be their favourite person.
One of the easiest ways to reduce some of this anxiety is to put in place some rules.
Let me give you an example. I receive around 100 to 150 emails a day. Most of the mail I receive comes through the night. I therefore process my inbox each morning before I start my work. The goal of processing my inbox is to clear it as fast as possible.
There’s no time for applying the legendary two-minute rule (where anything that can be done in two minutes or less should be done). All I need is ten emails where I could apply the two-minute rule and I’ve lost twenty minutes.
No thank you. I want a cleared inbox as quickly as possible. I’ve applied this rule for over ten years now and can clear 150 emails in less than twenty minutes. My record is 380 (ish) emails cleared in 36 minutes.
Then around 4 pm, I will go to my email’s Action This Day folder. Begin with the oldest email and work my way through that for an hour. I aim to respond to any actionable email within 24 hours. And I would say I have a 95% success rate with that “rule”.
It’s a process I repeat every day, and it’s ensured I never have an overwhelming backlog in email at any time.
Now, I do have some rules. For example, anything involving money, whether that is issuing a refund, or sorting out a discount code, I will deal with as soon as I see the issue—people are sensitive when it comes to money.
Also, questions from my Membership Community have priority as well as people who may have forgotten their password or are experiencing other difficulties getting into their learning centre dashboard.
Fortunately, these instances are rare. Perhaps three or four a month.
You can also apply rules for your core work—the work you are employed to do. Because your core work is work you have to do regularly, it’s easy to set up processes to do the work.
Once you have a process set up, you can protect the time on your calendar to ensure you have the time to do the work.
Because a process is something you repeat, you soon get fast at doing it. It’s a human form of automation. If you can fix it for the same time and day, it gets even better because you can start to accurately predict how long it will take you. And your colleagues learn your routines and will leave you alone.
My wife knows that between 9:30 and 11:30 every morning, I am doing my creative work and to leave me alone. That took a lot of training hahaha.
There is a trick I learned from former Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir was Prime Minister between 1986 and 1992, so before the proliferation of email and instant messages.
Whenever a letter or memo came into his office, he would move it to the side and leave it there for a week or ten days. What he discovered was that 90% of what had come in had resolved itself. The ten percent that was left was where he needed to apply his attention.
Rushing to respond or complete a piece of work often leads to unnecessary work. How many times have you responded to an email a few days after receiving it, only to be told the issue has been resolved?
Now you may not be able to sit on something today for a week, but it is possible to pause for 24 hours. All you need is a little confidence in yourself.
Slowing down is a great way to reduce the amount of work you have.
I remember when I used to pounce on an email from a student asking for help logging into their account, only to find a subsequent email come in telling me they had resolved their issue.
Now I wait an hour before responding. That way if a student does resolve their issue I am not wasting precious time resetting passwords that don’t need to be done.
I’m reminded of this question: What the rush? With 2025 goals.
It doesn’t matter what you have done on the 31st January. A 2025 goal is about what you have accomplished on the 31st December. The start will always be messy and inconsistent.
It’s likely you original ideas don’t work, but with a little patience and a few adjustments you will find the right strategy. The result you want will come on 31st December, not 31 January. You have plenty of time.
This idea of slowing down is at the heart of the Time Sector System. In the course, I recommend you default all new inputs to your Next Week folder. Something would have to be genuinely urgent to go into the This Week folder.
By applying the default to your Next Week folder, when you do the weekly planning it’s fantastic to discover that thirty to forty percent of what’s in there no longer needs to be done.
My wife is a get it done now person. Everything is urgent, even when it’s not. Out accountant in Korea is the opposite. Our accountant will ask us for the bank and credit card statements around six weeks before she needs them. When my wife receives that message, everything stops, and she rushes around trying to collect everything together in one afternoon.
It leaves her exhausted, and inevitably, something’s missed, and she then has to repeat the stress the following week.
You want to be like our accountant. Work from your calendar, and ensure that you give yourself sufficient time to collect information. You don’t need to rush around panicking then.
Slow down, protect sufficient time for the bigger tasks and default all new tasks to next week. You will find you have less to do, and what you do have to do can be done slowly, more meticulously and with fewer mistakes.
Thank you, Edward, for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week, how to reduce procrastination and why you don’t want to completely remove it.
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Script | 353
Hello, and welcome to episode 353 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
We recently asked what’s the biggest thing that ruins your productivity on my YouTube community page. 58% of participants said procrastination.
In a way, that doesn’t surprise me. When you see the statistics on how many people spend time planning their days and weeks, I am actually surprised that the number isn’t higher. I’ll explain shortly.
Now, procrastination has been around for a very long time. Leonardo Da Vinci only managed to finish a small number of paintings. Of the twenty paintings attributed to him, around five were finished.
Leonardo was a serial procrastinator. Yet, it was that procrastination that led to many of his inventions. If he had not procrastinated as much as he did, we would have many more of his paintings but very few of his notebooks full of drawings and diagrams.
The good news is, there are a few practices you can do that will reduce procrastination and enable you to be more internal about your days.
To get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Carlos. Carlos asks, Hi Carl, what advice do you have for overcoming procrastination?
Hi Carlos, thank you for your question.
As I alluded to, procrastination and daily and weekly planning are linked. When you are clear about what needs to be accomplished you will procrastinate less.
The problem when you have no plan is you waste a lot of time trying to decide what needs to be done. And then, it’s likely you will pick the easiest thing to do in the hope it will get you started.
It’s true, you will get started, but you will be doing low value tasks leaving behind the higher value ones. The ones you don’t know what needs to be done or what the first action is because you don’t have a plan.
And that leaves you at the end of the day looking at a list of important, high value things you didn’t do.
One way to overcome this is to be very clear about what the next action is. In my next YouTube video, coming out on Thursday, I explain why “think about” tasks are not really tasks and will be the ones you will sacrifice the moment your day becomes busy.
The reason why these get put off is because it’s not clear what the real action is. For example, if I had a task like “think about what to buy mum for her birthday”, I would procrastinate. It’s too much effort and is not the real task.
The real task might be to talk to my brother and sister about what they re getting my mum. Or I could talk to my father and ask him what he thinks she would like.
Which task would you most likely do:
Think about what to buy mum for her birthday, or, call my brother and ask him what he’s getting mum for her birthday?
One is actionable the other is wishy washy. The wishy washy task is the one you will procrastinate on.
You will procrastinate because it’s not clear what needs to be done.
This is where planning comes in. When you have a plan for the day and are clear about what needs to be done, you will be less likely to procrastinate because your brain is subconsciously planning ahead for you. You’re doing one task and your brain is thinking, subconsciously, about what you will do next and how to complete the task.
This prevents your brain from going offline and procrastinating.
However, when you don’t have a plan for the day, none of that happens. Instead, you procrastinate. You are always on the lookout for something interesting to do, and anything that does not fit the mood you’re in will be skipped for something more interesting.
So, the first practice to develop is to plan your day.
This does not take a long time. It can be done in five minutes. And the ideal time for maximum procrastination protection is to do it before you finish the day.
There’s something more intentional about starting your day knowing exactly what it is you want to get accomplished.
Now, there is a caveat here. If you are an early riser, you can do your planning for the day as part of your morning routine. After all, it’s only five minutes.
So how do you effectively plan your day?
Step one. Look at your appointments for the day. How much time do you have left after your meetings and meal breaks?
Step two is to look at your task list and choose actionable tasks that you can do in the time you have available.
Step three is to prioritise those tasks. Which ones are your non-negotiables? The ones that must be done today?
And that’s it.
To give you an example, Today, I have six hours of meetings. I also need to take Louis to his groomers for his haircut. In total, I have around seven and a half hours of commitments today.
That leaves me with around two hours for everything else. This means, the only task I can confidently complete today is this podcast script. So that’s what I have on my list of tasks.
There’s no point in me having twenty tasks on my to-do list. It would be impossible to do them all in two hours.
Now if I began the day with twenty tasks and seven and half hours of commitments, I would waste so much time trying to decide what to do—ie procrastinate. No! The only thing that matters is getting this script completed.
So, that’s my plan for the day.
Now there are other factors involved in procrastination. If you are sleep deprived, for example, you’re not going to be focused and you will procrastinate. All those shiny objects, social media feeds and click bait news will be attractive. Your brain’s tired and it won’t want to be doing anything that requires thought or creativity.
Similarly, if you eat a high carbohydrate lunch, you’re going to find staying on task in the afternoon challenging. The insulin spike that results in you feeling groggy and tired will cause you to procrastinate.
I would also add that if you are not moving enough you will catch yourself procrastinating. A good tip here is to get up after each session of work or meeting and go for a walk around your workplace for ten minutes.
While you’re walking, think about your next task and how you will do it. You will find when you settle down to get back to work, you are more focused and ready to go.
None of these reasons mean you are a serial procrastinator. It just means you’re tired. Fix that issue first. Get enough sleep, be careful what you eat at lunch time and make sure you move for ten minutes between sessions of work.
Do those four things: plan you day, get enough sleep, avoid carbs for lunch and move and you will see a significant reduction in the procrastination.
Now when talking about procrastination, we do have to be careful. Sometimes procrastination can be a good thing.
I mentioned Leonardo Da Vinci earlier. His procrastination is what led him to invent things hundreds of years before anyone else thought about them.
You see procrastination is really all about exploring ideas. The trouble today is there are far too many things we can procrastinate on.
You’re thinking about your summer holidays and remember you need to buy a new suitcase. So, you head online and search luggage. Yet, it’s eight months before you go on your holiday. You don’t need to buy or research new luggage now. Yet, that’s more interesting than whatever else you should be doing.
And because it’s so easy to do a Google search, you do that.
Now, had you added a task to research new luggage and added it to your long-term and on hold folder, it’s unlikely you would be thinking about luggage today. It collected, processed and in your system.
There’s a time for procrastination—the exploration of ideas, but it needs to be controlled.
A tip here is to keep a part of your day as free as you can. For instance, you could try to keep your afternoons as free as possible so if you do slip into procrastination, you’ve got your most important work done in the morning and your procrastination can be made useful.
This means when you plan your day, you make sure your most important work gets done in the morning.
Which comes back to ensuring you have a plan for your day.
So you don’t want to be eliminating procrastination completely. It’s your creative brain wanting to explore. It’s more a case of controlling it.
Which means it’s a good idea to monitor when you procrastinate. When I’ve done this, I find I procrastinate most in the early afternoons. Knowing this, I have designed my schedule to allow me time to take Louis for his walk. I know my brain wants to explore ideas at that time. What better way to do it than to be walking in nature and thinking about all these distractions and ideas?
What it comes down to is having a realistic plan for the day. If you find yourself staring at an impossible day, you will inevitably procrastinate. Then you will get annoyed with yourself. Yet, you can fix it. Be very clear about what your non-negotiable tasks for the day are.
Your brain will then take over and give you that sense of urgency to get the non-negotiable tasks done.
I’ve never been a fan of website blockers or forcing yourself to turn off your devices. I find those become a distraction in themselves because you are now worried about what you are missing.
What I’ve found works for my clients is to have that plan, be aware of how tired you are and if you are tired, take a nap, if you can, or get up and go for a walk. That way you softly remove the temptation to procrastinate and once back you can get on with your high-value work.
I hope that has helped, Carlos. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
What happened to my 2020/21 minimalist project, and where am I today? That’s the question I am answering today.
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Script | 352
Hello, and welcome to episode 352 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Towards the end of 2019, I decided that in 2020, I would go all in on a minimalist project. I had played around with it for a number of years, but it wasn’t until 2020 that I formally turned it into a project and began the process of clearing out a lot of stuff I had collected that was no longer benefiting me.
And yes, four or five years ago, minimalism was a thing. Everyone was talking about it, and there were thousands of videos of people showcasing how bare and minimal their workspaces were.
It was a trend, and while that trend appears to be forgotten, I learned many things that I still practice today.
So, it was a nice surprise to find a question about it in my inbox a few weeks ago. I realised it was a good time to tell you about what I learned and what I am still practising today.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question… Which I realise I’ve already told you.
This week’s question comes from Milos. Milos asks, hi Carl, I remember a few years ago, you mentioned that you were about to start a minimalist project. How did it go, and are you still a minimalist?
Hi Milos, thank you for your wonderful question.
Like most projects, or goals, designed to change how you do things, once you complete them, it’s easy to forget you ever did them. My minimalist project was such a project.
I changed a lot of things that I do automatically today, so your question caused me to reminisce on how things used to be.
I should point out that I wasn’t into extreme consumerism. I would replace my phone, iPads and computers when they stopped functioning in a way I needed them to do.
For example, my old Intel computer became very slow over a year when Apple switched from Intel chips to their M series. So much so that it took up to an hour to render a fifteen-minute YouTube video. When I changed my computer to an M series one, that time came down to around six minutes.
However, I think I am a bit of a hoarder, and I had boxes of old papers from my teaching days I no longer needed. I was always reluctant to throw away old clothes, believing one day I might regain the weight I had lost and would require those bigger sizes again.
My wardrobe, drawers and other cupboards were full of stuff I no longer needed and would never need again.
So that was where the project began. Clearing out old clothes and papers I no longer needed.
As with all endeavours like this, I did go a little extreme. My desk, for instance, was stripped of its soul—well, it felt like it. All I had on there was my computer, keyboard and trackpad. I found it became an uninspiring place to work.
So, gradually, I added some things back. An analogue clock—a tool I use to prevent time blindness when I get into a focused zone and a few little mementoes to bring some character back.
The biggest part of the project was clearing out drawers, cupboards and my wardrobe. That was liberating and I was surprised how much space I had once everything was cleared and either thrown away or taken to the recycling.
I moved house at the end of 2021, and that was an opportunity to complete the project—well, the clearing out of the old part of the project.
However, the biggest change was in the way I approached purchasing.
I stopped buying electronic gadgets. I am in the Apple ecosystem and Apple’s products, on the whole, last a long time. For example, I have an iPad mini for reading ebooks, magazines and the newspaper. I’ve had the same iPad mini for the last five years. And I have no intention of replacing it any time soon.
Another change was to apply some rules to my purchasing. This was inspired from how the British gentry in the early 1900s approached buying clothes and personal consumption items.
In the 1920s (and 30s), aristocrats bought clothes and necessities once. For instance, a young aristocrat would purchase a set of luggage that would last a lifetime.
If something broke or the leather tore, they would fix it. A new suitcase was not necessary.
These repairs added character and gave these items a unique look.
It was also a much more environmentally friendly way to treat possessions than we do today—throwing away items once they are either out of date or have a minor problem and buying new ones.
It’s easy to tell ourselves that life was much simpler in those days. It wasn’t. People had just as many problems as we do today. They did not have the conveniences we have: no food delivery services, no Google or ChatGTP to find something out instantly, and no technology to make doing our work better and faster.
The clothing rule I applied was built around the principle of less is better. This translated into buying better quality and less of it. It also allowed me to apply a rule of only buying natural fibres. So that meant mainly cotton and wool.
I do have some un-natural fibre clothing. My exercise gear and a heavy winter coat, for example—it gets very cold in Korea. But apart from that, I stick to natural fibres.
Much of what I do today is inspired by the pre-consumerism days. Only buy what you need and buy the best quality you can afford.
I also learned something from Winston Churchill. Choose your suppliers. What this means is you use the same stores to buy your clothes and anything else you may need.
Winston Churchill, for instance bought all his suits from H W Poole—a London tailor in Savile Row. His shirts were bought at Turnbull and Asser, and his iconic cigars came from James Fox.
If you think about that for a moment, if you use the same suppliers for all your clothing and other things, you know your sizes and precisely what you want, which means you don’t need to research or waste a lot of time trying to find what you want. You reduce the paradox of choice and get back to living life.
Now, I cannot afford to buy suits from H W Poole or shirts from Turnbull and Asser, but I do have my own favourite suppliers.
I buy socks from Peper Harow, my sweaters from N Peal and Cordings of Piccadilly and coats from Barbour. Yes, they are expensive, but the clothing last a very long time and are all made from either cotton or wool.
Another lesson I learned from my minimalist project was the importance of rules and routines.
If you’ve read Around The World In Eighty Days or the books by P G Wodehouse and his characters Jeeves and Wooster, you may have noticed the main characters had strict rules and routines. Wake up times and when they expected their morning cup of tea. Dinner time was a social occasion with pre-dinner drinks and formal clothing.
Perhaps part of the reason for the increase in mental health issues today is because we no longer have these important daily rituals. It’s all go go go. No time to stop and appreciate sitting around a table with family and friends or going out for a daily walk, or even doing what in Around The World in Eighty days is called your “toilet”—which means washing and bathing.
These were deliberate activities, not rushed or forced. It was just what you naturally did each day.
There was a time for everything.
Another area of this period that has fascinated me was the way people approached writing and replying to letters. This was considered a joy and most people spent time each day doing it.
And there was a mix of personal and business letters that needed to be done and the volume was comparable to what we receive in emails and messages today.
The biggest difference was rather feeling they had to reply to everything each day, they focused on the amount of time they had available to write. I have adopted this approach myself. I don’t look at how many emails I need to reply to, I look at how much time I have and once that time is up, I stop.
If you do that every day, you will remain on top of your communications reasonably consistently.
I often hear about people doing a digital detox. One change I made, was to again take inspiration from the 1920s and 30s. In those days people bought their favourite newspaper and read the whole paper.
Now, many successful people still do this today. Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase Bank and Warren Buffett for instance. They subscribe to their favourite newspapers and allocate time each day to read them.
This stops you from getting caught up in clip bait headlines and being “triggered” by low quality reporting.
So now I read the same newspaper every day and only look through my social media later in the evening when I have finished my day.
So the lessons I learned was to buy less stuff but better quality. That’s ensured my wardrobe is clean and not over-stuffed with clothes I won’t wear.
I have also structured my days better. There’s a time for doing my communications, eating with family and friends, and my favourite of all, going out for what we call our family walk. That’s with my wife and little Louis. He loves it, and my wife and I get some quality time most days.
All of this was inspired from reading history books and biographies and realising that minimalism isn’t about stripping everything out of your life so all you are left with is a soulless screen. It’s about removing things that no longer serve you, and leaving the things that mean something to you and living life by a set of rules you set yourself.
I hope that has answered your question, Milos. Thank you for asking it and thank you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all very very productive week.
What one thing could you do this month that would transform your productivity? That’s what I’m answering this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
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Script | 351
Hello, and welcome to episode 351 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
It’s one of the strange quirks of human nature to overcomplicate things. This is particularly so when things start to go wrong.
In my favourite sport, rugby league—as in most team-based ball sports—the basics of winning a game are possession of the ball and territory. If you can consistently complete your sets in your opponent’s half of the field, you will likely win the game.
Drop the ball or give away silly penalties by overcomplicating moves, and you’ll make it very difficult to win the game.
Teams that lack confidence are particularly guilty of these mistakes. Watch any winning team, and you will see they stick to the basics and never panic when they go a try or goal behind.
You can see this in any workplace, too. Those people who rarely appear stressed or overwhelmed stick to the basics. They have processes for getting their core work done—the work they are employed to do.
Top salespeople dedicate time daily to prospecting and following up with their customers. CEOs ensure they have time for meeting with their leadership team weekly so they are aware of what’s going on and know where the potential issues are.
So, what can you do to ensure you stick to the basics each day to avoid those pernicious backlogs?
Well, before I answer that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from George. George asks, hi Carl, are there any strategies you know of that guarantees someone will always be on top of their work?
Hi George, thank you for your question.
I’ve always found it fascinating to look at occupations where mistakes can lead to a loss of life—airline pilots and surgeons, for example.
Before any flight, a pilot goes through a checklist to ensure the plane is in working order. They check the weather and the weight of the cargo—both of which can affect how the aircraft will fly.
They calculate the speed they need to reach before taking off and plot their flight path to avoid storms or dangerous weather fronts.
No pilot would ever consider not doing these checks. Indeed, not doing them would be an act of gross negligence and could potentially be career-ending.
Similarly, surgeons follow a checklist. They check the patient’s name, the type of surgery being carried out, and, if necessary, which side they will be operating on. They also check the patient’s blood pressure and other measurements.
Again, failure to do so would be considered gross negligence, and a doctor could be fired for not doing them.
Now, perhaps lives do not depend on you doing your job correctly, but approaching your work in the same way a pilot or surgeon does can ensure that your work gets done without missing essential tasks.
The first step is to identify your core work. The work you are employed to do at a micro-level. For example, if you manage a team of people, what do you need to do at a task level to manage your team?
That could be to prepare for and hold a weekly team meeting. It may involve setting aside time each month for a thirty-minute one-to-one session with each team member. That would translate into weekly tasks for preparing for the team meeting and scheduling appointments with your team.
A journalist’s core work may be to research a story and then write the story before the deadline. Imagine their deadline is 1 pm on Thursday; then the journalist could ensure sufficient time is protected before Thursday to get the story written and submitted before the deadline.
What are your core work tasks?
Next comes the all important communications and admin tasks. We all have them. The problem with these tasks is we cannot accurately estimate how much will come in.
Each morning, when I start my day, I have no idea how many emails I will have. Some days, it’s 80; other days, it can be as high as 150. Yet, one thing I can guarantee is that I will have email to deal with.
So, I protect an hour a day for dealing with communications. This way, I know that no backlogs will ever build, and nobody is waiting longer than 24 hours for my response.
Somedays, I need the whole hour; I may only need thirty minutes on other days. Yet I still protect an hour.
It’s no good “hoping” you will find the time to respond to your communications. You won’t find the time, and if you do not have a consistent amount of time to do it, backlogs will soon build.
You mentioned strategies, George, and the strategy is ensuring you have enough time protected for the key work you need to do.
This may mean you need to cap your meetings each week. Now, I know whenever I mention this, people recoil in fear. Yet, if you work an average of forty hours a week and spend thirty hours in meetings, how will you ever get your work done? How will you prevent backlogs?
Let me give you an example how being strategic with your time.
I limit my coaching hours to twenty each week. Think of my coaching sessions as meetings. Following each session, I write feedback, which takes an average of twenty minutes to write.
I know I can dedicate an hour each day to writing feedback, so my limit is three feedbacks per day. That works out at twenty-one per week.
If I allow more than twenty hours for coaching sessions in a week, I will either have to reduce my other work or work longer hours. It would not be sustainable. While the money would be good, my health and effectiveness would suffer. So, it would only be a short-term benefit.
I’ve learned over the years that the only thing you control is what you do in the time you have each day. You cannot control time itself. That is fixed. When you realise that you see that you can only build strategies around what you do, that means getting comfortable saying no.
You cannot say no to your boss and your customers, right? Well, yes and no.
You see, it comes back to that time issue. Twenty-four hours. That’s it. Now, if you are happy using all twenty-four hours running around for your boss and customers, that’s fine. But if you accept that, I would suggest you gain some self-respect.
I know that might be a bit harsh. But you are a valuable person. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, has the right to demand all twenty-four hours of your time.
Sometimes, you do need to say no. You cannot do everything because everything takes time. The question then becomes how much time are you willing to to give to your boss and customers?
Let me give you an example. I protect two hours each day doing my focused work. Work that ultimately benefits my clients and customers. I also protect an hour for communications and thirty minutes for admin. In total, I protect three-and-a-half hours a day for meaningful work.
If I were working a typical eight-hour day, that means I still have four-and-a-half hours available for my boss, customers and clients.
Would four and a half hours be enough for you?
The “guarantee” that puts you on top of your work is consistency with your strategy.
Over the last few days, I’ve travelled back to Korea from Ireland. Door to door, it’s a thirty-hour trip. We set off at 2:00 am on Sunday from the west coast of Ireland and arrived back at our home around 30 hours later.
Between checking in, waiting for flights and flying, I stayed on top of my email and admin. The last thing I wanted when I got back home was a backlog of stuff to do.
Then, after some sleep, I went into my office and spent around three hours catching up with everything else.
Had I ignored my messages and admin, I could have lost a whole day trying to catch up. No, thank you. I’ll take advantage of the downtime when travelling to stay consistent.
By the way, a quick tip David Allen (author of Getting Things Done) gave me a few years ago is to block the whole of your first day back to catch up. If it’s a short trip, you can get away with half a day, but a whole day is always better.
Whatever work you do, there will always be tasks that are core to what you do. Those tasks need to be embedded into your days and weeks as must-do tasks. Must-do tasks are non-negotiable. Because they are non-negotiable, you allow no one—not your boss or customers—to steal that time from you.
Offer alternative times and days, but never negotiate on your core work times.
That’s the only strategy that’s ever worked and will be the only one that will work in the future.
Whatever industry you look at, the top performers know this and stick to it. It’s not just industries either. Top athletes, elite soldiers, and entertainers remain at the top of their field by being consistent with the basics—their core work.
So, spend a little time establishing your core work—the micro-level tasks you need to perform to stay on top of your work. Then, protect time for doing that work. Fix it in your calendar, and never ever let anyone steal that time away from you.
I hope that helps, George. Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive New Year.
This week, I've delved into my archive to bring you an episode first published on the 1st of January this year. This will help you prepare yourself for an outstanding 2025.
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Script | 305
Welcome to episode 305 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
So, 2024 is here. A New Year with a lot of potential new opportunities and plans. The challenge you will face (because we all face this challenge) is executing on all the ideas and plans you have for this year without a loss of enthusiasm or energy.
And that will happen because no matter how well you have planned the year, things will not work out as you imagine. Some things will go exactly how you expect them to, but most will not. And that’s the same for everyone. If you deliver all your plans and projects exactly as conceived, you are not ambitious enough to move forward. You’re making things too easy.
So how do you avoid the loss of enthusiasm and energy that you will need to see you through the year? Well, that’s the topic of this week’s question, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for the question.
This week’s question comes from Carrie. Carrie asks, hi Carl, every year I get excited about all the things I want to do, and when it gets to February or March, I lose all my enthusiasm because I haven’t done anything I had planned to do. Do you have any advice on avoiding this?
Hi Carrie, thank you for your question and Happy New Year to you too.
One thing I can tell you straight up is you are not alone. It turns out 92% of those who set New Year goals or resolutions have given up by 16th February. Only 8% manage to achieve some of their goals.
This means we need to learn what those eight percent do that is different from the 92%.
The first thing I discovered about the 8% is they have no more than three goals for the year. And those three are very specific. For example, they may have a financial, a physical and perhaps a career goal. And that’s it.
If we use these as an example, the financial goal is possibly the easiest. Imagine your financial goal is to save $5,000 this year. You can break that down into twelve months and send $417.00 per month to your savings account. On the 31st of December, you will have a little over $5,000 in it.
On a task level, this is a 30-second task once a month where you send the $417.00 to your account.
Now, if your finances are tight, you may have to review what you are spending money on and make some changes to what you spend, but the action to take is just thirty seconds per month.
Physical goals can be a little more complex. Not everyone does exercise to lose weight. Some just want to improve their overall health; others would like to challenge themselves physically by running a marathon or climbing a big mountain. However, whatever the purpose or “what” the goal is, physical goals mean you need to find time for regular exercise. The essence of the goal is to find the time and do the exercise, and that will almost certainly achieve your goal.
The difficulty with these types of goals is the starting point. If you have not exercised for a number of years and are not in great shape, it is going to be hard. This is like pulling a large truck. The hardest part of pulling a truck is the start. When the rope you are attached to takes the strain to get the truck moving, it takes an inordinate amount of strength. However, once the truck begins to move, it gets easier and easier. The difficulty then becomes stopping the truck.
Starting an exercise programme is the same. It’s incredibly hard to begin with. The first session’s never that bad until you wake up the following morning. When you step out of bed, your muscles scream out in pain, and you’ll wonder how on earth you will be able to repeat your exercise again today.
The thing is, getting fit and staying fit is the same. It’s all about turning up and doing the exercise. But it doesn’t have to be the same exercise each day. Jog one day, walk the next. Then perhaps go for a swim or do some light weights in the gym on other days. Fitness is all about movement, so find time each day for movement.
What I’ve discovered about fitness is that it’s all about routine. It needs to be built into your day, and the time of day you do it needs to work for you. Once it becomes a routine and you get through the first fourteen days, it becomes much easier, and there’s rarely any muscle soreness (and when you do get sore, you feel a sense of achievement because you know you had a good session the day before).
What about a career goal? This is likely to be the most complex of goals. There are likely to be multiple different parts to it. Skills acquisition, experience and time are all involved. So, finding out what skills you need to move up the corporate ladder would be one task. Arranging a meeting with your boss or HR to discuss your goal would be a first step.
Once you know what you need to do, you can then formulate a plan to make it happen. If you need to go back to school, then you can research how best to do that. Then you will need to find the time to study. Again, like exercise, this needs to be scheduled. You won’t achieve educational goals by winging it. You need to set aside dedicated time for studying.
A number of my coaching clients have dedicated days for learning. Two of my clients use the weekends for studying and taking courses or having coaching sessions. Saturday mornings seem to be the most common time for this, but it will depend on your own schedule.
Just one piece of advice here, avoid Sunday nights. These are not the best times for studying. You’ll be distracted by what you have to do next week and likely be tired from all your social activities. The thought of sitting down to study after an eventful weekend would be off-putting for most.
Ultimately, if you want to successfully achieve your goals in 2024, then you will need to establish some habits and routines. This does not need to be overwhelming. You can do as much or as little as you feel capable of. For example, if you plan to read twenty-five books in 2024, that’s one book every two weeks. If you spent an average of forty-five minutes reading each day, you would easily accomplish that goal. This means the only question you need to answer is, when? When will you do your reading?
Perhaps you could include this as part of your morning routine, or instead of watching TV late at night, you read a book.
I will confess that in the last six months, I have spent far too much time watching TV in the evenings. In 2024, instead of watching TV, I intend to read. I have already prepared a comfortable corner to read. It’s a place Louis, my little dog, likes to cuddle up to me in the evenings, and I’m already looking forward to it.
I will still watch TV. However, I have created a list of TV shows and YouTube videos to watch, and I have allocated Saturday evenings to TV watching. If I find I have the urge to watch something, I will add it to the list, and then on Saturday, I can open the list and choose from that list.
What about daily and weekly planning? This is something that will bring you so many rewards. Having a plan for the week is a no-brainer for me. I know what happens when I don’t have a plan. The week goes south very quickly and then I am in overwhelm territory just trying to keep up with silly little things.
When I have a plan for the week, I am more focused. The right things get done, and I have the mental space to deal with the unknowns and urgencies of others without losing focus.
This is something I would recommend to everyone. Make it a habit in 2024 to do both the weekly and daily planning sessions. This one habit will do so much for you when it comes to achieving your goals in 2024.
One thing I must stress, though, is to keep your list of goals as short as you can. Two or three goals is about the right number. Any more than that, and you will be overwhelmed and unable to stay focused on what needs to be done.
Remember, we are all a work in progress. You do not have to change everything in twelve months. Pick the two or three things that are most on your mind right now.
I neglected my fitness in 2023, and regaining my fitness is my number one goal in 2024. Today, I will be heading out for a run, no matter what the weather is. It’s the first day of the year, and it’s not about how well or far I run; it’s about re-establishing the habit of exercising each day. Get the 1st of January in the bag, and tomorrow I can do a few push-ups or go for a long walk.
My goal in January is to do some form of exercise every day. I’m not worried about February right now. If I get through January having done exercise on 25 or more days, that’s a result I will accept. It’s not perfect, but it’s 25 days of exercise—that’s something to celebrate! I can then decide what I will do in February to maintain my momentum.
And that’s what setting and achieving goals is all about. You are not going to be perfect every day or week. But that does not mean you failed. It just means you had a bad day. You can pick it back up the next day or week. It’s not what you achieve in one day; it’s what you have accomplished over 365 days. (Or 366 days this year)
So there you go, Carrie. Keep your list of goals short, and look for habits and routines you can build so that the action you need to take becomes automatic. And remember, just because you had a bad day or week doesn’t mean you failed. You can pick yourself up at any time and get moving again.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive 2024.
This week, why it’s important to know what kind of person you are.
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Script | 350
Hello, and welcome to episode 350 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
WOW! 350 episodes. I never thought this podcast would still be going strong after six years. Thank you to all of you for following me and this podcast and to everyone who has sent in questions. Please keep them coming in—they are the fuel of this podcast.
So, back to this episode.
One way to destroy your efforts to become better organised and more productive is to fight against yourself. This can manifest itself when you are a deadline-driven person trying to be a carefully planned out person.
Let me give you an example: if you struggle to find the motivation to begin a project because the deadline is six months away, yet you pressure yourself to start now. You’ll likely find yourself losing interest and giving up after a few weeks.
Then you beat yourself up.
But, perhaps you’re not doing anything wrong; you’re just trying to do something you are not wired to do.
That’s why it’s important to know what kind of person you are and to figure and what works and what doesn’t.
Okay, before we go further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Matthew. Matthew asks, Hi Carl, What do you recommend to someone who finds it difficult to get motivated unless there the deadline is right on top of them?
Ho Matthew. Thank you for your question.
I’ve witnessed something like this very close to home.
My wife struggles to start work on a project or a task until the deadline is right in front of her. She then pulls out all the stops pulling all nighters if necessary. Yet, she always meets her deadlines.
In the twenty + years I’ve known her, I cannot recall a time she missed a deadline. Ever.
My mother, on the other-hand is the complete opposite. She will begin getting her holiday items together sever months before she travels. I know, when we travel to visit my family over the Christmas holidays, he will be wanting to plan her next trip to Korea with me. Six months before she’s likely to travel. She even gets her suitcase ready.
It would be fruitless to encourage my wife to be more like my mother or vice versa.
My mother hates stress—it gives her a headache. My wife doesn’t see the point in over preparing.
Yet, we shouldn’t be looking at the methods, instead look at the results. Neither my wife nor my mother miss deadlines. They have different approaches, but still achieve the same results.
Some of my coaching clients wake up very early 4:30 - 5:30 am and like to plan their day before they finish their morning routines end. Others find it more beneficial to plan the day the evening before. Yet, as long as you begin your day with a clear idea of what needs to be accomplished that day, does it really matter when you do your daily planning?
I recommend if you are an early bird, do your planning in the morning. If you are more of a night owl, do it the evening before. What matters is you plan the day. The benefits of having a clear idea of what you want to get accomplished that day, far outweighs the timing of your planning.
I have clients who see Ali Abdaal’s productivity recommendations and wonder how he gets any work done with so many tools being used to organise something as simple as what to do and when. Yet, I have other clients who love using the tools Ali recommends.
There’s no right or wrong way to do this as long as you are getting the results you want.
In your case, Matthew, the productivity tool that you should master is your calendar. If you are motivated by deadlines, you will need to be very clear about when you deadlines are. Having your deadlines on your calendar in the all-day section and in a colour you cannot fail to see will ensure you know when your deadlines are.
All my project deadlines are in my calendar in red. These are hard deadlines and when I am planning my week, all I need to do is look ahead two or three weeks to see what’s coming up.
You may also find it helpful to have a Master Projects list in your notes app so when you are planning the week you have a central place where all the information you need is. On your Master Projects list you can have the deadlines, and what needs to happen next. That way you can judge how much work is still required to meet your deadline.
That’s something I’ve learned from my wife. While on the surface she looks a disorganised mess, underneath that disguise is someone who’s looking at the calendar on her phone every evening to see what’s coming up over the next few days.
Last Monday, while we were sitting on the sofa, my wife reminded me that Louis had a grooming appointment on Thursday and she wanted to check I was sill okay to take him.
And there I was thinking she was scrolling social media, yet, she was looking at her calendar for the week to see if she needed to to do something.
Did she need to know about that last week? No.
I did, though. My system’s different from hers. Yet both our systems produced the same result. Louis arrived for his grooming appointment on time.
However despite having very different methods for getting our work done, there are some principles that will never change. Writing your commitments down somewhere you trust is critical.
While my wife does not use any kind of task manager, she does use, and trusts, her calendar. And I’ve seen this with many other people who don’t use a task manager—they still use something they trust.
A former boss of mine, would have his secretary print out his Outlook calendar for the week each Monday morning. He would then fold that calendar up into his pocket diary.
Throughout the week, he would add to-dos and appointments to that printed calendar as required and on Friday afternoon update his Outlook calendar so the up-to-date version would be ready for him the following Monday morning.
Again, he never forgot anything as far as I could tell. It was an unorthodox system, but it worked.
This is why it can be dangerous to copy other people’s systems. They are not you.
Earlier, I published my latest Todoist setup on YouTube. I do this twice a year, and I suspect I do it more for me than for anyone else. I have been doing this since around 2019, so now I have five years of set-ups I can refer back to and see my evolution.
The biggest change came in May 2020 when I launched the Time Sector System. That was a result of struggling to make Getting Things Done work for me in the digital age. I remember walking to the gym one day and being hit be a sudden realisation that really the only thing that mattered was “when” I would do a task, not what I needed to do.
It doesn’t matter how much you have to do if you don’t have time to do it. What matters is what you do when you do have time.
This realisation solved so many struggles for me. It caused me to limit the number of meetings I was available for each week, and if I could not restrict my meetings, then I had to restrict the number of tasks I was trying to do.
Perhaps I am more aware of the limits time imposes on us than others, or others knew all this before I became aware of it. Either way, it helped me to begin working to my strengths rather than fighting against them.
This also applies to when you are at your most focused. Most people will find they are at their most focused in the mornings but not everyone is.
Some people will find they are at their best in the evenings. This is one reason why flexible working times work for some and not for others.
If you are more a night owl, working for a company that allows you to work to your own schedule will help you thrive. Working for a company that keeps strict 9 till 5 hours will create all sorts of difficulties for you.
Doist, the parent company of Todoist, works flexible hours. Because they are a 100% remote company, their team is spread throughout the world. They have people on the west coast of America, and people here in Korea. That’s a seventeen hour time difference. Insisting everyone worked a 9 till 5 day would not work.
Doist has an unenviable staff turnover level. I believe over the last ten years only four or five people have left the company. That’s incredible for a company that employs over one hundred people.
I’ve discovered more on this with my pen and paper experiment this year—well, it began as an experiment. It’s hard to call it an experiment now.
Returning to pen and paper has helped me to rediscover the art of thinking and the importance of slowing down from time to time.
Digital tools are great, they make storing and finding documents easy. They all help manage quick notes and ideas. Paper, though is different, there’s no batteries and if you grab an A4 pad of paper, and a Bic ball pen, and disappear to a cafe, you could spend all day there and never have to worry about recharging your device. That bit ball pen will draw a 3 kilometre (about 2 miles) line before it runs out. And of course, there’s no notifications or beeps and buzzes.
Yet, pen and paper doesn’t work for everyone. There’s a lot of people who do love them, there’s also a lot of people who hate them. And that’s fine.
So, Matthew, look at how you prefer to work. If you need deadlines to motivate you, the only thing that matters is you meet your deadlines. If that causes you to have to work later than you want to, perhaps you could create a false deadline. You could say this piece of work must be finished tomorrow by 5PM so I can hand it in the next day.
False deadlines are great. I generally have most of my projects finish at the end of the month, so my “fake” end of the month is the 25th. This gives me around a week before the real deadline hits and ensures I am not scrambling to finish things late into the night.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Matthew. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, the question is on how to reduce the time it takes to complete a solid weekly planning session.
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Script | 349
Hello, and welcome to episode 349 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One issue that frequently comes up in my YouTube video comments and email messages is the subject of weekly planning and it taking too long.
It’s taken me a while to see how this might be happening, but a recent coaching call pointed me in the right direction.
The issue is the difference between what David Allen calls the Weekly Review and planning a week.
The Getting Things Done Weekly Review is, about looking backwards. You spend a lot of time looking at what you have done on individual projects.
Given that in GTD, anything requiring two or more steps is a project and that by following that definition, you are going to have between, and I quote from the Getting Things Done book, thirty and hundred and fifty projects at any one time, is it any wonder weekly reviews take so long.
This is why I do not call my planning session a weekly review. Instead, I am planning the week, not reviewing my work. The word “review”, at least to me, suggests looking at something that happened in the past.
Yet, planning is about looking ahead. What’s happened has happened. What matters is what you do in the following seven days, and that will be contingent on appointments and commitments you have in those seven days.
So, without further ado, let me turn you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, hi Carl, I’m struggling with doing my weekly plan. I’ve taken your advice to do it on a Saturday morning, but it still takes me almost two hours. Are there any secrets to getting it down to less than an hour?
Hi Greg, thank you for your question.
The question I would start with is, “Are you planning the week or looking back at the week just gone?
If you are following the Time Sector System, one routine task I recommend is to give yourself ten minutes before you close out the day to process your task manager’s inbox.
Processing your inbox is about asking three questions:
What is it?
What do I need to do?
When will I do it?
The second question, What do I need to do? May give you the answer, nothing. In that case, you can delete the task altogether.
When you do a task, will depend on its urgency. It may be something that doesn’t need to be done this week, in which case you can move it directly to your next week, this month or next month folder.
If it does need to be done this week, when will you do it this week? You then add the date.
Doing this routine task everyday, means when you sit down to do your weekly planning on Saturday morning, you only need look at your next week and this month folders and move anything to your This Week folder if you must or want to do it in the next seven days.
In my experience, that only takes ten minutes.
Now what about all those projects?
Well, if you are still trying to manage you projects in a task manager, good luck. Weekly planning is going to take a long time. You will have to go through each project and make sure nothing has been missed. That’s going to take a long time if you have between thirty and 150 projects.
However, if you manage your projects in your notes app, then these won’t need reviewing. Every time you touch a project you update the project note. You can, if you wish, move the next task to your task manager, although if you create tasks that tell you to work on a given project, you should not need to do that.
I don’t define a project in the same way as David Allen does. A project for me is something that will take at least three months to complete and will have a lot of tasks to complete.
In the Getting Things Done world. My upcoming trip to Europe is a project. Yet, for me, it’s a single task. Book flights. Once that task has been done, I will know exactly what needs to happen next. Do I need to book a hotel? This year, no, but I will need to book bus tickets once I arrive in Dublin. So the next action is to book the bus tickets.
The thing is, I didn’t know if I needed to book a hotel or a bus ticket because that depended on what time we arrived at Dublin airport. And I didn’t know that until I had booked the flights.
I do have a note in my notes app called “Ireland 2024” and in there, I have my packing list and a list of things I want to purchase while there. I also save my flight tickets and anything else I may need.
Another way to look at it is if you were a HR manager, and a colleague asked you to hire a new team member, that would not necessarily be a project. As a HR manager, hiring people is a part of what you do. It’s probable you will be hiring many different team members, and managing the process of hiring is just a part of your core work.
Yet if you were tasked to overhaul the payroll system or to organise the seamless move of all employees to a new location, given that you wouldn’t ordinarily do that kind of work, they would be projects.
When would you review those projects? Perhaps when you know you have a management meeting coming up, or you have a one to one with your boss.
But, reviewing is not planning. Reviewing is a task by itself.
Planning is about deciding what you will do. A weekly plan is about setting yourself objectives for the week. Daily planning is setting objectives for the day.
Last night, as I planned today, I made writing this script an objective. Once I knew that I would be writing this script, I checked my calendar for my committed events for today, and mentally decided when I would write it.
It did not mean I had to go through all my previous scripts or review the list of questions I keep. That was a task I set on for Saturday afternoon—decide what topics I will create content around next week.
When I was writing Your Time, Your Way, it was obvious what needed to be done each week—set aside one or two hours a day to write the book. How much reviewing was needed for that? Zilch, nada, zero. To complete that project required me to sit down and write the book five days a week.
Every two weeks I had a meeting with my publisher. These were usually Friday evenings for me. This meant I had a task on Friday to review what I had written over the previous two weeks and to add any questions I had for the publisher.
Often my publisher would ask me to do something. Perhaps he wanted me to send him a profile picture, approve the cover designs, or update the chapter list. During the meeting I added those tasks to the meeting note and afterwards, transferred the tasks to my task list.
This meant, when I did my weekly planning, I did not need to go and review the whole project. What needed to be done was already in my Next Week list. All I needed to do was to decide when I would get the information requested together and send it.
The reason planning the week takes so long is likely because you are not planning, you’re reviewing and cleaning up.
Cleaning up your task list, your notes or anything else is not planning. It’s cleaning up. That’s a completely different category of task.
If you’re spending five or ten minutes at the end of the day clearing your task manager’s inbox, deciding what something is, what you need to do, and when you will do it, you won’t have very much cleaning up to do at the end of the week.
When the special forces plan a mission, they start with the objective—take that hill—they then set about working out how they will get to the top of the hill. They don’t waste time looking at what they did or didn’t do this week or how they got to where they are.
They focus their attention on getting from where they are now to where they need to be.
And that’s the approach you want to take when planning your week. You have seven days to accomplish a set number of objectives. The question is what do you need to do to get there?
And just like the special forces, your plan will break—it always does. It’s at that point you pause, look at where you are, and figure out what needs to happen for you to reach your target.
And for us, that’s what we do when we do the daily planning.
I should have written half of that report by now, but I haven’t started yet. What do I need to do in the remaining 48 hours to complete the report by the deadline. Perhaps I need to cancel two meetings tomorrow, so I can use that time to write and get myself back on track?
It’s not going through the project again, and finding excuses for not accomplishing your task. You’re behind, what do you need to do to get back on track? That’s planning.
If you are putting deadlines on your calendar in the all-day section, when you are planning the week, you can quickly see what deadlines you have coming up over the next two or three weeks and that can guide you towards what you should be working on.
If you use task start and due dates in your task manager, then, of course your weekly planning is going to take you longer. You will need to review all your tasks to ensure you haven’t missed anything. Good luck with that approach.
So, when do you review you projects? Personally, I review my projects when I work on them. I have a master projects list table on my notes app that shows me all my projects, their deadlines and what needs to happen next.
Every time I finish working on a project, I update that table with what I did and what I need to do next.
Going back to writing Your Time, Your Way, there was very little updating required. I had five two-hour writing blocks in my calendar each week for writing the book. The next action was easy—continue writing my book.
Now, if a project becomes a complete mess and you don’t know where you are or what needs to happen next, the task is to review the project. That will then help you to get it back on track. But that’s not part of the weekly planning. That’s just a task you need to do, and you may add it as a task to do next week.
Another question, I get asked is what about follow-ups and waiting for’s?
Again, that’s not part of your weekly planning. That’s a separate task. Personally, I check my follow-ups folders once a week or when I am working on a project and I can see I am waiting for something. It’s certainly not part of my weekly planning.
So, if when you sit down to set out your weekly plan, you are also reviewing all your tasks and projects, yes, it’s going to take you a long time. But you are not planning. You’re reviewing.
If you’ve read Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or any time management book prior to 2001, none of them had you reviewing “open loops” and “projects”. That’s regressive and means you waste a lot of time focused on the past.
These books—books that helped millions of people—focused planning on what you will do next week, this month, quarter or year. They were forward thinking. That’s what planning the day and week is all about.
What will you accomplish next week? What needs to be done? And when will you do it? That’s it.
And if you are consistent with this, you will find weekly planning will take you between thirty and forty minutes.
I hope that helps, Greg. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, I’m going to show you how to design your “perfect” day.
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Script | 348
Hello, and welcome to episode 348 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
What would a perfect day look like for you? I’m not talking about drinking sangria in a park, feeding animals in the zoo, and later, a movie.
I’m talking about how a typical day would go.
- What time would you like to wake up?
- What would you enjoy doing for the first hour of your day?
- What would you like to do in the evenings?
- And what time would you like to go to bed?
These questions are all part of what I call designing your perfect week. It’s an exercise that helps you to bring some structure into your day. Once implemented, this reduces the number of decisions you need to make each day and makes planning less demanding and a lot faster.
Not taking control of your calendar means others will take control of it. If not your boss or customers, it’ll be your family and friends. This leaves you being pushed and pulled all over the place.
When you wake up in the morning, you have no idea what will happen or where you will end up. More dangerously, you will have no idea whether you can get your work done, and inevitably, you’ll find yourself with huge backlogs and a lot of accumulated stress.
Not a great place to be if you want to be better organised and more productive.
So, let me show you how you can regain control of your calendar and start putting what you want first.
This means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Megan. Megan asks, hi Carl, I’ve tried designing a “perfect” week but found I don’t have enough time to do everything I need to do. Do you have any tips to fit everything in?
Hi Megan, thank you for your question.
That you have discovered you don’t have enough time for everything you want to do is part of why I recommend people do the Perfect Week calendar exercise. The purpose is to help you see what you do and don’t have time for.
But first, how do you set up the Perfect Week calendar?
First, open up your calendar—it doesn’t matter whether it’s a Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar. What you are going to do is create a new calendar and call it “Perfect Week”.
I recommend you do this on a larger screen. It is possible to do it on a phone, but you won’t see the bigger picture of the week. A laptop or tablet works better when you do this.
Now, begin with your personal life. How much sleep do you want? What time will you go to bed? Block those times in first. For instance, if, in your perfect world, you go to bed at 11:00 pm and want seven hours of sleep, then you would block 11:00 pm to 6:30 am. (Allow yourself thirty minutes to fall asleep).
Now, how long do you want for your morning routine? Perhaps you want the first hour of your day dedicated to you. To exercise, read, plan, meditate and/or write a journal. All you need to do in your perfect week calendar is block the time you want for these activities on your calendar. Call it your Morning routine time. (The details of what you do in that time can be added as a checklist in your notes later.)
Next look at the evening. What would you like to do?
Be careful here; you may wish to block time out for family and friends. When you do this, you are involving other people, and they will have a different agenda to you.
You could, for instance, protect 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm for family time, but be flexible. Your teenage daughter will unlikely want to spend much time with you. Your partner, on the other hand, may wish you to sit with them and talk or watch their favourite TV show.
Consider “family time” as being flexible. If no one wants to spend time with you, be available. Perhaps you could read in the same room as your family or do some chores around the house.
Next, what would you like to do later in the evening before you go to bed? Put that on your calendar.
Many of my clients enjoy playing a musical instrument, others use that time for self-study and some go out for an evening walk. Whatever you want to do, put it on your calendar.
Now, your work.
A couple of questions you can ask here are: how much time do you need to do focused work? Work that if you are consistent with will prevent backlogs and ensure you meet your deadlines.
And how much time will you allow per week for meetings?
Limiting your available meeting time is a great way to control time.
Imagine you work a forty-hour week and you want three hours a day for focused work; that would leave you with twenty-five hours each week for everything else.
If you were to limit the time you were available for meetings to fifteen hours a week, that would leave you with ten hours for all the unexpected demands that inevitably pop up. Would that be sufficient time?
Play around with these numbers and see if you can find a happy balance.
With the meeting limit once you have filled the limit for that week, you only offer meeting times for the following week.
As this is your perfect week, you can fix times when you are available and when you are not.
Once you have completed your perfect week, does that look like a week you would be happy living?
One adjustment I made to mine was on a Monday. My calls begin early—well, early for me—meaning I need to wake up at 6:15. That’s much earlier than usual. I discovered I was not able to work effectively after around 11:00 am. So, I added a ninety-minute nap window from 11:00 am. That worked perfectly for me.
Now, once you have created your perfect week, turn on your other calendars. Where do things align? You will probably find some activities already aligned, but some will be wildly out
Your mission now—should you choose to accept it—is to align your real calendar with your perfect week one.
This mission will not happen instantly; aligning things may take several months, but it gives you a purpose and goal.
What happens if, after doing this exercise, you discover there are not enough hours in the week to do everything you want to do?
Most people find this after completing this exercise.
It is worth remembering you do not have to do everything all at once.
You could take a course on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and go to your Pilates class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings. Perhaps you could do your weekly planning on a Saturday morning instead of a Sunday evening.
This is about completing a puzzle. How do you fit everything into your 168 hours a week?
You can also consider making things seasonal. In the winter months, you do one activity, and in the summer, you do another type of activity. After all, the weather is generally nicer in the summer, and the days are longer.
You may even wish to use the Spring as the cleaning-up season. I do.
Designing the perfect week calendar is not about locking you into a strict structure every week. Its purpose is to help you become realistic about what you can and cannot do each day. It’s from here that you can design the kind of life you want to live.
Over the five or six years since I first did the Perfect Week exercise, I have modified it many times. For example, when I did it the first time, I had this rather ambitious idea: I would go to bed at 11:00 pm and wake up at 6:00.
That didn’t last very long. Many of my coaching calls happen late at night, and I often don’t finish until after midnight. Now, I go to bed at 1:30 am and wake up at 8:30 am (except for Mondays). That has worked for me for over a year now.
I’ve also learned that while I’ve always believed that I am a night owl, I am more focused and creative in the mornings. This led to me protecting 9:30 to 11:30 am five days a week for my focused work.
One thing you don’t want to do, Megan, is to try and squeeze everything in. That will leave you feeling exhausted. Always remember you are a living, breathing human being, not a machine.
You need breaks, you do need to stop and enjoy nature and the environment you live in. It gives your mind a rest, and it elevates your creativity and fulfilment by giving you something different to look at other than a screen.
While I am very structured, I like it that way—I still keep my afternoons free for activities I want to do in the moment. Taking my dog, Louis for his walk, doing the grocery shopping and reading, for example. Whatever needs my attention, the afternoons are when I can do it.
Learning those things was a result of doing the Perfect Week exercise.
David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, often says, “You can do anything, but you cannot do everything”, and I’ve found that’s true. That means the question becomes, what will you do?
I would also say that the end of the year is a perfect time to do this exercise. The start of a new year gives you a motivation to try things and develop the kind of week you want to live.
Thank you, Megan, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week, why you should not be copying other people’s systems.
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Script | 347
Hello, and welcome to episode 347 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
There is a lot of advice on managing your to-dos, organising your notes and controlling your calendar. And it can be tempting to copy whatever you have seen, believing if it worked for someone else, it must work for you.
Well, not so fast.
One thing I’ve learned from coaching hundreds of people is that no individual is the same. We think differently, have different jobs, and have different family lives and interests.
One example is Tiago Forte’s PARA method. It’s a great way to organise your notes, and many people swear by it. However, it never worked for me. I’m a goal-orientated person. Goals motivate me. I also define Areas of Focus differently from how Tiago defines an area.
This is why I settled on GAPRA (Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive.)
This does not mean that PARA does not work. It works, for some people. Similarly, I have coaching clients who find GAPRA works better. It all depends on how you think, like to organise things and do your work.
So, what can you do with so much conflicting advice? How can you find the methods for you? Well, before I get to that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Frank. Frank asks, hi Carl. I’ve been a life-long follower of productivity systems and have struggled to find a system that works for me. How would you advise someone to find a way that works for them?
Hi Frank, thank you for your question.
Around 20 years ago, I began my career as an English teacher in Korea.
I had come from working a typical 9 til 5 office job and suddenly I was on the other side of the world, working from 6:30 am to 12:00 pm and 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm. It was tough.
I’m not a natural morning person—never have been—so waking up at 5:00 am was a shock to my system.
It wasn’t long before I began taking naps. I would get home at 12:30, and go straight back to bed for two hours.
For the next ten years, that’s what I continued to do.
I had learned about the power of taking naps from none other than Winston Churchill. He believed that if you took a solid 90 minute nap every afternoon you would be able to get at least a day and half’s worth of work done in a day.
He wasn’t wrong. By taking an afternoon nap I found I was full of energy when teaching in the evening and was able to spend an hour preparing for my next day’s classes when I got home in the evening.
Yet, I knew Churchill took his naps between 3:30 pm and 5:00 pm. That didn’t work for me. So I adapted it to work better for me.
Likewise, back in 2016 or so, I read Robin Sharma’s brilliant 5 AM Club book. I was sold. I thought, okay, let’s give this a try.
For those of you not familiar with the 5 AM Club, this is where you wake up at 5:00 AM and do twenty minutes of exercise, then 20 minutes planning and finally 20 minutes of learning. It’s solid way to begin your day.
Yet, I had a problem. I’ve never been comfortable exercising in the morning. So, I adapted it. I did twenty minutes journal writing, then ten minutes planning the day and finally studied Korean for thirty minutes.
And it worked. I was consistent for around eighteen months and I loved it.
But then I hit a problem. My coaching business began taking off and I was doing coaching calls late at night—sometimes not finishing until midnight. This meant I was trying to survive on four or five hours of sleep. Not a good thing if you want to be productive.
It then occurred to me, the “secret” to the 5 am club is not waking up at 5 am. It’s what you do immediately on waking up that matters.
Today, I wake up around 8:00 am, and start my day with a solid set of morning routines that include journal writing, some stretches and learning my email inbox. It works perfect for me. It sets me up for mostly productive days.
And that’s the key point. Whatever you learn about productivity, time management and living life doesn’t have to be followed exactly as described. We all live different lives and it can be modified to better work for you.
However, there are a few caveats here.
The first is you will not be able to break basic principles.
For instance, if you want a solid way to manage your life, you will need to collect stuff into a trusted place and not rely on your head to remember things. You will then need to spend a little time organising what you collected and finally, you need to do the work.
Yet, how you collect things and where you collect them is entirely up to you. You could use a pencil and notebook, or a sophisticated task management system. Both work.
Another principle I see people trying to break is scheduling far more than the number of hours in the day will allow.
You get 24 hours a day. That’s not going to change. The only variable you have is what you do in the time you have.
This is not as simple as you may think. Sure, it’s easy to schedule seven hours of sleep, an hour for a gym session, four hours for deep work, another three hours for spending with your family and an hour for dealing with your communications and further hour for learning.
All that looks great on a calendar. But what if you didn’t sleep well, you woke up with the start of a heavy cold and had a fight with your teenage daughter?
Yep, that’s real life hitting you in the face.
Now, hopefully that’s not going to happen to you every day, but events will always get in the way of your perfectly planned day.
It’s rare to see any kind of time management or productivity system building in buffer time. Yet, buffer time—time you keep free for the unexpected—is critical if you are to avoid becoming overwhelmed.
One way you can approach the day is to treat it as a puzzle:
Here are the twenty-four hours you have. That’s your constraint. Here’s a list of things you need to do or attend in those twenty-fours hours, now how are you going to fit everything in?
Now, it could be that I am weird, but I love solving this puzzle every day. I love it so much I do it the day before.
First, I look at my confirmed appointments—these are the fixed stakes in the ground. They help to give my day a little structure.
Then, I look at my tasks for that day. Where can I fit these in?
It’s important to know your own natural biorhythms here. When are most likely to be focused? Perhaps you find focusing on deep work in the morning easier than trying to do in the afternoon. If that’s the case, then try to protect two hours in the morning for dedicated focused work.
I should say at this point, every productive person I’ve come across does this. They protect time each day for their most important work. Authors, CEOs, top salespeople, the most successful lawyers and Olympic athletes.
The difference is no matter where they are in the command chain, they are ruthless about protecting time each day for their critical work.
Unproductive, stressed out and exhausted people don’t do this. They don’t protect time. Instead, they have a false belief that they have to be available all the time for their customers and bosses. Well, good luck with that approach. It doesn’t work, never has, and never will.
I remember a sales training session I was on, and the trainer was a former top salesperson—I believe he was formerly the number one car salesperson in the country.
He told us, we could call him at any time if we needed help. But, not before 11 am. He would not answer his phone before 11 am.
When asked why, he explained he needed those two hours in the morning to do his follow ups, and contact his customers who were due to change their car in the next three months and make sure he had appointments scheduled for the rest of the day.
I suspect this was why he was the number one salesperson. He understood how to solve the daily puzzle.
Another area that can disrupt you overall productivity is the tools you use.
There are a lot of fantastic time management and productivity tools available to us today. Many promise the impossible, but ultimately, it will always come down to how you solve the daily puzzle. In that respect, no tool will help you beyond a calendar and a list of tasks that need to be done.
I get questions every day from people asking me if it’s possible to do this or that thing. What they are really asking me is “how do I complicate things?”
Let’s be clear, all you need to know each day is what appointments you have and when and what your critical must do tasks for the day are.
Once you know this and you know you have sufficient time to complete everything, you’re good to go.
The more organising you do, the more lists you create and the more tools you use, the less time you have to get on and do the work.
I mentioned Tiago Forte’s PARA method earlier, and I remember the popularity of this when Tiago launched his book on the subject. There was a frenzy and YouTube lit u with people doing videos on how to set up this notes app or that one with the PARA method.
I could see immediately why it was so popular. It was another way to reorganise things. It gave people something to play with. In other words it gave people an excuse not to do their work.
PARA is great, but it’s not going to make you more productive or better at managing time. I use Evernote and it’s a complete mess. When I need something, I use Evernote’s powerful search.
Whether I’m looking for a client note, a reference to an idea I had several years ago or my book notes from a book I’ve read on Kindle, all I need do is type a keyword, a date range or person’s name and in less than a second I have the information in front of me.
I could spend hours each week keeping my notes up to date, summarised and organised, or I can rely on search and give me those hours to get my work done. I know what I choose.
Over the last three or four months, Todoist has introduced a calendar and start and due dates. I use neither. They don’t help me get my work done and both of those features just add more complexity to what should be a simple list.
You don’t need to use all the features an app has. Use the ones that help you to focus on your work and leave alone the ones that add more organising work.
I hope that has helped, Frank. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, I have a special episode for you.
A second interview with Dr Kourosh Dini.
In this episode, we talk about rationalisation and how to change our approach to many of the false beliefs that come from it.
We also discussed pens and paper and a little more about managing ADHD.
Here's how you can learn more about Dr Dini's work.
Newsletter:
https://wavesoffocus.com/Your-First-Step-to-Breaking-Free-from-Force-Based%20Work/
Waves of Focus
https://wavesoffocus.com/
on SMART goals
https://www.kouroshdini.com/lay-off-the-goals-a-bit-would-you/
Is it possible to expand time? Literally, no. But there is a way to find more time if you’re willing to use these techniques.
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Script | 345
Hello, and welcome to episode 345 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Common phrases you will hear are “I don’t have time” or “I wish I had more time”, and yet you already have all the time you need.
The problem is not time, the problem is often the amount of things we want to do in the time we have.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, life was simple. Find food and water, make babies and stay safe. Neglecting either of those three things would result in some serious issues—the biggest of which would be death.
Given that human evolution is slow, we are not best suited to deal with hundreds of emails and messages, requests from bosses, finding child care, commuting to and from work and all the other modern-day accessories we’ve chosen to add to our lives.
We cannot expand time, yet if we are unwilling to reduce what we want to do, we will feel overwhelmed and that more modern ailment, the fear of missing out, or FOMO.
However, there are a few techniques you can use that will give you enough time for the things you want to do if you are willing to try them.
But before I get to how, allow me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Giles. Giles asks, Hi Carl, I’ve done your “perfect week” exercise and realise that my problem is I want to do too much. There isn’t enough time in the day. Do you have any tips on fitting in hobbies and still get enough sleep?
Hi Giles, thank you for your question.
The good thing is you’ve discovered that no matter what you want to do or feel you must do, you will always be limited by the amount of time available.
And, now that you’ve done the Perfect Week calendar exercise, you can see what you have left after taking care of your work and family obligations.
One of the first realisations about finding time was when I learned of Ian Fleming’s writing routine.
Ian Fleming wrote a new book each year from 1952 to his death in 1964. He never missed a year, even in the year he had his first heart attack in 1961.
In the early years, Fleming worked For The Sunday Times as their foreign editor, yet he negotiated a two-month vacation each January and February. During those two months, he would fly off to his Jamaican home, Goldeneye and almost from the first day, would begin writing the next book from 9:30 to 12:30.
After lunch, he would nap, and then the day’s socialising would begin.
Around 4 pm, he would go back to his writing desk for an hour to review what he had written that morning, and that would be it.
Four hours a day for six weeks. That produced the first draft of his next book.
For the rest of the year, he worked his regular job in London. Dealt with any rewrites and began marketing the book that was being published that year.
If you were to analyse how Ian Fleming managed his time, he wasn’t looking at the day-to-day. He looked at the year as a whole.
He knew he needed six weeks to write a new novel each year, so he made sure those six weeks were blocked out in his diary before the new year began.
That’s just six weeks out of fifty-two.
This is similar to blocking time out for your core work. If you know you need ten hours a week to do your core work, hoping you will find the time is not a sustainable strategy. You won’t, so it will be more a case of hoping you will find the time.
Those ten hours need to be locked in each week.
Ian Fleming would never have written fourteen James Bond novels if he had “hoped” to find the time to do so. He had to find the time and then protect it.
You have 168 hours a week and twenty-four each day. Squeezing everything into those twenty-four hours will be tough—almost impossible. Yet, if you were to schedule for the week, where you have 168 hours, things become possible.
I see many people anxiously trying to find family time every day. It would be nice if you could do that, but you are dealing with other people and your 6 to 9 pm might not be convenient for them.
Instead, you could agree with your family that certain days or evenings are for family time. For instance, my wife and I ensure that Wednesday afternoons and Saturday evenings are protected for family time.
It’s lovely because while it is flexible, there’s no need for us to be trying to schedule time. It’s already protected.
This is all about expanding time. Looking at an individual day is tough; there are a lot of emergencies and unknowns that pop up. However, if you were to establish what you want time for each week (or month), block the time out so you know you have the time to do it, you will always have the flexibility to move things around if things change.
For example, this week, my wife had an exam to do on Wednesday afternoon, so we rescheduled our family day out to Thursday. All I needed to do was to move a few of my other commitments around so I could still get all my work done that week.
You can apply the same principles to your work commitments. If you require ten hours a week to get your core work done—the work you are employed to do, not the work you volunteer to do—you can pre-protect that time on your calendar.
Now, I know many people will object and say they cannot do this because they have to attend meetings.
That’s fine. Let me ask you a question. What will do more to get the project completed? Having a meeting about the project or working on the project?
If the project objectives have been communicated clearly and roles defined, meetings should not be needed.
One of the best ways to regain time is to become less accessible. Most people’s time management problems start by being too accessible. Of course, this will depend on the type of work you do. A salesperson, for instance, should be accessible to their customers. But perhaps not necessarily be as accessible to their admin departments or even their sales manager. If you’re producing the results, I can promise you your sales manager will leave you alone.
When I first began teaching time management and productivity, I was available on all social media channels. I was on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and email. Just to stay on top of all those channels was taking me three hours a day. I don’t have three hours a day to manage all those channels.
So, now I push everyone towards email. I have a process for dealing with email. Over the years, I have refined it to a point where I can handle over a hundred emails in less than an hour.
And the final point to make here, Giles, is you don’t have to do everything now.
Imagine If there’s a period each year when things go a little quiet at work. Perhaps in the summer, it’s quieter than at other times of the year. Maybe July and August is a good time for you to do some of the bigger projects. Then, when you enter the busy times of the year, you can work on the smaller projects.
One way you can do this is to use a tool such as Todoist, Asana, or Trello that allows you to create boards. You can then create four columns and spread out the activities you want to do.
For example, in quarter 1, I focus on my biggest projects of the year; I like to kick off the year with a bang. Q2 is focused more on processes and making them more effective and efficient.
Seeing everything I want to accomplish over the year organised in quarters stops me from becoming anxious about all the things I want to do.
This also gives you a plan for the year, which in turn helps you to be more focused.
Again, you can be flexible here. Feel free to move projects around the year so you are working on the right projects at the right time.
Time can be your friend or enemy. If you don’t harness it, it will be your enemy. If you take control of it, you will find you do have sufficient time for the things you want to do. Perhaps not this week or next, but when you look at things over a quarter or a year, many things become possible.
I know some of you would like to build an exercise programme into your life. Yet the thought of joining a gym, or yoga class puts you off because you have go to the gym, spend an hour exercising, then shower. After all that it will have eaten up two hours of your time.
You don’t have to do all that—certainly not initially. You could do some bodyweight exercises at home or go out for a walk. That won’t take up much of your time. I do twenty minutes every day at home.
As your fitness improves, then you may wish to add a few gym sessions. But that’s not a requirement of being fit and healthy.
I hope that has helped Giles. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you, too. It just remains for me to wish you a very very productive week.
Backlogs… A rather bigger part of life that we probably wish wasn’t. Did you know that there are three types of backlog, two of which you don’t really need to worry too much about? Let me explain.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 344
Hello, and welcome to episode 344 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Let’s be honest: somewhere in our carefully organised lives, backlogs will build. It could be email, the ever-increasing list of house repairs, or the daily admin life generates.
With everything going on in our lives, it would be easy to believe that finding the time to stop these backlogs from growing is impossible.
Yet, when you understand the three types of backlogs, you can develop a process that stops the backlog from growing.
The three types are the growing backlog, the stalled backlog and the shrinking one.
You don’t need to worry about the shrinking backlog. It’s doing what you want it to do—shrinking. That could be getting your receipts together in preparation for doing your taxes. You’re gathering and sorting them, so the backlog is shrinking. This generally happens when the tax submission season is almost upon us.
The stalled backlog is also a little less urgent. It’s not growing, but you need to watch it carefully because this kind of backlog can start snowballing—house or car repairs, for example, often do this.
The most dangerous backlog is the growing one. This often happens with email and admin tasks and can occur when you try to expand your business too fast without adding resources.
Before we go any further, let me first hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Janice. Janice asks, hi Carl, I’m trying to get my life organised but don’t have time because I have so many things to do. My email’s a mess, and every weekend, I spend all day cleaning up my home. How do you get on top of things when you are far behind?
Hi Janine, thank you for sending in your question.
This is a tough one. It can feel like we are stuck between wanting to get ourselves organised and realising that we have such a big backlog of stuff to do that it would take several months to break even—so to speak.
The strategy here is to first determine what kind of backlog you’re dealing with. Is it growing, stalled, or shrinking?
If it’s shrinking, keep doing what you are already doing. It’s shrinking, so it’s doing what you want it to do. Don’t stop.
The one that needs immediate attention is the growing one.
Imagine that you have over a few thousand emails in your inbox. It’s making finding important emails slow and cumbersome, and you want to get it cleared.
The challenge is that more emails appear every day, and that number is not fixed. Some days, you may receive 150+ new emails, while other days, perhaps it’s eighty. Either way, until you can achieve a net gain—i.e., processing and clearing more emails than come in—the backlog will continue to grow.
With email, I would first clear out the older emails. There will be a point where you’ve ignored an email for so long that it would be embarrassing to respond to it now. Where is that point?
For me, that’s two weeks. It would be embarrassing for me to respond to any email that’s been sitting around for two weeks or more. You may be more tolerant than I am. You may be happy responding to emails older than a month or two. Where is your limit?
Once you know your limit, take any email older than your limit and move it to a new folder in your email program called “Old inbox”. This way, nothing has been lost, and you can go through that list when you have time. That list will no longer be growing. You’ve put a stop to it.
Now, to prevent the backlog from growing, you will need to clear whatever emails remain in your inbox first, so you start from zero.
Now, here’s where you will need to be cautious of FOMO—the fear of missing out. This can paralyse you because you are fearful that you might be deleting something important. Fear not. Always remember with email if you have been sent something there will be a copy of it somewhere.
If for whatever reason you do need something you’ve deleted, you can reach out to a colleague and get a copy.
One of disadvantages of digitalization is we no longer see things piling up. Back in the day when most of what came across our desks was paper, it was very easy to see backlogs growing. The pile was physical and you could see it. With digital, it’s very easy to go into Ostrich mode. (Although ostriches don’t really bury their heads in the sand)—this is the out of sight, out of mind theory.
When I was working in a law firm in the late 90s, the majority of communications were through letters. Each day I would get in the region of a hundred to hundred and fifty pieces of mail. That needed processing. The advantage was I could see it all in my physical inbox and my goal was the clear that by the end of the day.
With email, the only way to see it is to open my inbox. That makes it easy to ignore it—which surprise surprise creates backlogs.
Admin is another area where backlogs can grow. Like communications, admin will grow each day if you are not dealing with it consistently.
This can be keeping your receipts organised, maintaining your company’s CRM system or, in the medical profession, keeping patient notes up-to-date.
If you are not protecting time for these each day, backlogs will grow.
If you’ve watched the brilliant film, Apollo 13, or read about that incredible story, one thing that will strike you is the astronauts followed checklists and routines to ensure everything was working as it should be.
The cause of the catastrophic explosion on board Apollo 13 was a simple routine task of stirring the oxygen tasks.
Astronauts are highly intelligent people. Yet, they know they cannot rely on remembering to do important routine tasks. They use checklists.
The same goes for pilots, surgeons and the military.
Each have checklists for daily mundane tasks that if not done will result in backlogs or something much worse.
You too can do something similar. Think of a shift at work as having a few key parts to it. Meetings, focused work and then routine work. Your routine work will likely be responding to actionable emails and messages, updating any internal customer management systems and your own admin.
This means estimating how much time you need for each of these activities.
The good thing here is you already have the data. How long, on average does it take you to update your company’s internal client relationship management system? How much time do you need to stay on top of your communications?
You can only work with averages here, but averages are enough. Some days you will get more than your average, yet other days you will get less.
If you’ve never measured how long it takes you, give yourself a week to track how much time you need in these areas. Again, you can only work with averages but that will give you an indication of how much time to protect each day for getting your work done.
One area I find people resisting this change is work they perceive as being more important. Meetings for example, seem to have a disproportionate level of importance. Sure, if you have a meeting with an important client, that will likely be more important than staying on top of your admin. But what about all those internal meetings? Are they really important or are you just showing up to show your face?
I cannot imagine a pilot or surgeon skipping their pre-flight or pre-operation checklist because they have an internal meeting. That would be a firing offense. So why do you do it?
We all will be different here, but I find if I spend an hour a day on my communications and thirty minutes on admin, I will, on the whole, end the week with no backlogs—certainly nothing overwhelming. That’s just ninety minutes a day. Ninety minutes that prevents stress, anxiety and missing something important.
Now, there will be some days when that will not be possible. Days when I am travelling, for instance, often mean it’s difficult to sit down and deal with my communications and admin. However, it’s worth working on the principle that one is greater than zero, so spending twenty minutes on communications and perhaps ten minutes on admin helps to keep things from spiralling out of control.
Yet, perhaps the most important thing is to identify where backlogs occur in your life. That would be the first step.
One area I never thought of was household chores. It’s easy to ignore that pile of washing in the corner of the bathroom until you find you have no clean underwear. Then it becomes an issue.
Now, on Tuesday’s and Saturdays, I do the laundry. It’s only fifteen minutes, but ensures I have a supply of clean clothes at all times. Plus, I can do it in between sessions of work. It gets me away from the screen and is far better for my eyes.
And I hate coming into the office and not having a clean coffee mug. Now, before I leave the office for the day, I will ensure the cups and tea pot are washed and ready for the next day. That’s less than five minutes a day.
One tip on dealing with the stalled backlog. Because it’s stalled you don’t have the same sense of urgency. Yet, it still needs to be dealt with. What you may find works is to identify it when you do your weekly planning and allocate a little extra time the following week to deal with it.
For example, if you have a pile of documents that need to be processed from last month, give yourself thirty minutes or so around you lunch time or mid-afternoon to work on it. Depending on how big it is, you will find that within a week or two that backlog has gone.
I hope that has helped Janine.Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
What can you do to simplify your productivity system to keep you focused on what’s important each day? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
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Script | 343
Hello, and welcome to episode 343 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Oh dear, I seem to have opened up a storm with some people with one of my recent YouTube videos on managing a task manager.
That also resulted in a few questions about keeping a system simple.
The question is, what is a time management and productivity system meant to do for you?
The answer is easy—to inform you of what needs to be done and ensure you are prepared and in the right place at the right time.
When you strip productivity systems down to their basics, as long as your calendar is accurate and tells you where you need to be and when, and you have a way to see what tasks you should be working on today, you have a system that works.
Yet, it can be tempting to want more. A way to organise tasks by your energy levels or to know how many days are left until the deadline is reached, for example.
The problem here is that you have no idea what your energy levels will be, and deadlines change… A lot… and for the most part, they are arbitrarily added, which means you know they are not real deadlines—ah, more fiddling.
While all these extras are nice, there is a danger of becoming dependent on them. That’s when it becomes a slippery slope. They pull you into fiddling with your tools, which prevents you from doing the work you need to do.
Which ultimately means you don’t have time for the things you want time for.
So, this week, a very simple question and for that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Martha. Martha asks, Hi Carl, how would you make productivity simpler?
Hi Martha, thank you for your question.
The first place I would start is to clean up and organise my calendar. It’s your calendar you refer to when you need to know where to be and what you are committed to doing.
This involves removing conflicts. Conflicts occur when your calendar shows two meetings at the same time or your next meeting begins before a previous meeting ends.
You cannot be in two places at once, so pick one. If you have a meeting start before you are able to get there, inform the meeting organiser so they can either accept your late arrival or move the meeting to a more convenient time.
The sooner you do this, the better it is for everyone concerned.
I use a scheduling service for my coaching client appointments. That service will not allow any conflicts to occur and automatically puts in a ten-minute buffer between meetings.
That’s always a good practice to follow. Make sure you have buffer time between meetings. Meetings occasionally overrun, and you need to reset yourself before the next meeting.
The next step is hard for many people. Throughout our working lives we’ve become conditioned to be available at all times for our customers and bosses. And while you should not ignore these people, you are employed to do a specific job.
I know it’s become common for companies to create job titles and job descriptions in the vaguest possible ways but underneath that vagueness, there will be a set of core work activities we are expected to do—what was once called “our duties”.
What are your duties? What do you need to ensure is done on time each day or week? That’s your core work. What does doing your core work look like at a task level?
For example, if you were employed as a construction worker (a vague job title) and were given the responsibility to build the perimeter wall. At a task level, laying bricks would be your core work.
Now within that, they may be other tasks such as ensuring you have a sufficient supply of bricks and cement and that you laid the guide lines to ensure the bricks were laid straight. What do those activities look like at a task level. What do you need to do (and how frequently) to order bricks and cement?
By looking at things from a task level, you put yourself in a better position to estimate how much time you need to complete your work.
For instance, if you find you need to place an order for bricks and cement every Monday morning and it takes you thirty minutes to do that task, you can create a thirty-minute block of time for admin every Monday morning.
If you must place the order before 10:00 AM, then you may decide to create a time block every Monday morning called “ordering” and use that time to order any other supplies you may need that week at that time.
What you need to order can then be held in a note you add to throughout the week so you have everything fully complete the task on Monday morning.
That then leaves you free to focus on building the wall.
Taking the time to establish your core work gives you a way to automate prioritising. Core work always takes priority. It’s what you will be evaluated on if you are employed, and it’s how you earn your living if you are self-employed.
Where your calendar comes in to all this is once you have established your core work, make sure you have time protected for doing that work each week. Core work rarely changes, after all, it’s what you are employed to do. The details will change—I don’t write the same blog post or make the same YouTube video each week—but the work doesn’t change unless your job changes.
And I use the word “protected” deliberately here. If you give up that time for another meeting, or something that’s fleetingly urgent, you will still need to catch up somewhere.
To give you a benchmark, through my coaching programme and when I analyze my own core work, in total most people require between fifteen and twenty-hours a week for their core work.
If you are working an average thirty-five hour week, that still leaves you with fifteen to twenty hours for meetings and voluntary work.
There will be other “duties”. Managing your communications and daily admin, for example. If you were to protect ninety-minutes a day for these activities, that still leaves you with seven to fourteen hours a week for all the unknowns.
This is why your calendar is the most powerful tool in your productivity toolbox.
What about task lists? These are still helpful. Apple probably called their to-do list the best way—Reminders. Ultimately, if you have established what your core work is, and protected sufficient time on your calendar to get that work done, your task list is there to remind you of the things you want to complete that day.
You tasks will fall into three categories. The must dos. These must be done at some point in the day. If you promised to call a customer back today, then you must do it. You promised.
Then there are the should do tasks. These are the tasks that while don’t necessarily need to be done today, getting them done will ease the pressure on the rest of the week. Most tasks fall into this category.
If you were to give yourself twenty must do tasks today, and you are already committed to five hours of meetings, you won’t be going to bed tonight. You “must do” those tasks. So when you choose your must dos make sure you limit them to two or three tops.
And finally there are the could do tasks. These are context based tasks. For instance if you have to visit a customer in the east of the city and that’s where the pet supermarket is, you could call in after you meeting to buy dog food for your dog. Buying the dog food would be a category three task—it’s context based.
Now all this only works if you are consistently doing your daily and weekly planning sessions. Failure to do these will mean you miss opportunities to do your category three tasks and you will be unclear when deadlines are due.
The weekly planning session gives you an opportunity to stop and look at the bigger picture of what’s going on in your life. Perhaps you’re attending your cousin’s wedding next month and you need to buy an outfit. If you’re not doing a weekly planning session it would be easy to miss that commitment and that will leave you rushing to buy something a few days before.
The weekly planning session gives you an opportunity to reset and ensure you are doing the right things at the right time.
The daily planning session is simply checking your calendar for your appointments and comparing that with your scheduled tasks for tomorrow. Do you have a doable day? If you have five or six hours of meetings or are scheduled to attend a training session, having twenty to thirty tasks on your task list for the day would mean you have an impossible day.
It’s better to learn that when you can do something about it. You could reduce your task list or if you need to do something important, you may need to reschedule a meeting. The person you’re meeting will appreciate that and it demonstrates how organised you are. Win win in my view.
And that’s it. Focus on making sure your calendar is up to date and accurate—that’s the driver of your day.
Your core work and appointments Come first, then tasks. If you need time to complete a particularly important or urgent task, make sure you protect the time on your calendar.
And to make sure it all works, do your daily and weekly planning sessions consistently. And on the daily planning, I don’t know how anyone could start their day not know what they want to accomplish that day. Knowing gives you energy and a determination to get it done.
I hope that has helped, Martha. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Did you know that your calendar is the only productivity tool that can protect you from burning out and overcommitting yourself and, if used correctly, help you bring balance into your life? No? Well, let me explain in this week’s podcast.
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Script | 342
Hello, and welcome to episode 342 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Professor Barry Schwartz explains how too many choices can slow us down, create confusion and reduce sales.
You can see this in recent times with the explosion in new productivity apps. Thirty years ago, the only tools you had to manage your time and your work were diaries.
There was a lot of different styles to choose from, but the price point of these diaries helped to make choosing a diary reasonably simple.
Many companies gave away diaries as gifts to customers, some issued all their staff with one, while some people would go out an buy their own—I was one of those.
Yet because a diary can only show you the same thing—your twenty-four hours or seven days—people were much more focused on the doing part, and less on collecting and organising. And let’s be honest, if all you have is a diary, there not a lot of organising you can do.
While we now have digital calendars, task managers and notes apps, really only two things have changed. The speed at which we can collect information and the increase in the number of potential tools we can use to help our productivity.
Unfortunately, that increase in productivity tools has caused a lot of confusion. Many people confuse events—something that happens at a specific time on a given date—and tasks—something that can be done at any time.
When that happens, the only outcome is going to be overwhelm and a lot of rescheduling. Not a very productive way to go about your day.
This week’s question goes to the heart of this issue. So, without further a do, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weeks’ question.
This week’s question comes from Jeff. Jeff asks, hi Carl, I’m very interested in your ideas around how to use a calendar versus using a to-do list. Could you explain your thinking around this?
Hi Jeff, I certainly can.
In Your Time, Your Way, I mentioned when I visit companies I notice that those people who began their careers in the early to mid 1990s are generally more organised than their younger colleagues.
Of course that’s not a scientific observation, but I wonder if that’s down to how large corporations in the 1990s often sent their staff on time management training courses. You don’t hear of those courses much today.
It’s also likely that those who began in the 1990s developed solid time management practices and have not changed their approach much over the years. I’m sure they’ve switched over the a digital calendar, but a lot still carry round note books.
I remember seeing an interview with Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook, in around 2015. He was interviewed in his then office, and while there was an iMac on his desk and a MacBook Pro on a table behind him, there was also a notebook and pen. This was after the Apple Pencil had come out, which, in theory, meant he no longer needed to carry a notebook and pen.
Tim Cook will have begun his career in the mid to late 80s, and while at IBM, he will have been sent on a time management course—I do believe, IBM worked with the Franklin Quest organisation back then—which meant he will have gone through his career with a solid knowledge of time management principles.
So, that’s a little background. Now, how do we use our calendars today so we are operating at our most productive each day?
Well, first we need to know to difference between a task or to-do and an event.
A task or to-do is something you can do at anytime. For example, if you need to respond to a question from a client via email, you could do that at 9:15 am or 2:35 pm. There’s no fixed time. Similarly, if you want to finish off a report for your boss, you could do that at 10:00 am or 3:20 pm.
As long as you finish the report today—your plan, it doesn’t really matter when in the day you finish the report.
And event on the other hand is time specific. If you have a meeting with your boss at 10:00 am in your boss’s office. You’d better be there at 10:00 am.
If it takes you thirty-five minutes to get to your office, that means you will need to leave your home around 9:15 am to be sure you will be at your boss’s office by 10:00 am.
A wise person would block 9:15 am 10:00 am for travel time as well as the meeting time on their calendar.
That’s basics.
Now, given that your calendar is about specifics, and your task manager is about options, we can better manage all the stuff coming at us.
Your calendar can be used as a very powerful tool if you trust it. By trusting your calendar, I mean that you don’t ignore it. That you check it each morning to see what you are committed to and if you cannot do something, you will reschedule it.
One way to get the most out of your calendar is to use a method called time blocking. Time blocking does not mean you block every hour of your day, what it means is if you need two hours to work on that report, you would block the time out on your calendar.
You can become very tactical here too.
One way is to establish when you are at your most focused. Most people will either be early birds or night owls. According to author Daniel Pink, only around 3% of the population are at the most focused in the afternoons.
If say you are more focused in the morning, you can block two-hours out between 9:30 and 11:30 am for “focused work”.
This means, that each morning between 9:30 and 11:30, nobody can schedule appointments with you. Your calendar is blocked for doing your most important tasks.
Knowing that you have this time protected does a lot for your stress levels. You know you have two uninterrupted hours for getting on with your work.
And often, having two uninterrupted hours for doing critical work is all you need to stay on top of your projects.
Unless you are nomadic, it’s likely that being able to block the same time each day for focused work will be difficult. There will always be a need for flexibility. Yet, if you were only able to protect two-hours three times a week, you would still have six hours of uninterrupted time each week.
Imagine what you could do in those six hours.
I protect two hours each morning for writing on a Monday and Tuesday, and the four hours is enough for me to get all my writing done for the week. Occasionally, I will need to move things around, but for the most part, those times are fixed and that gives me the confidence that I have sufficient time each week to get my committed writing projects complete.
What all this means is your calendar is the hub for everything you do. It will tell you if you have enough time for doing your work, and where you need to be on any given day.
If you need to collect your daughter from School on Thursday at 4:00 pm, that will be on your calendar. If it takes you thirty minutes to get to your daughter’s school, you would block time from 3:30 pm to collect her.
This also means you would be unwise to schedule a meeting after 3:00 pm (meetings have a habit of overrunning). You would not be focused in the meeting, you’ll be clock watching and stressed.
Instead, you could use the thirty-minutes to respond to your communications, or even plan the next day.
You calendar should also be the first thing you look at when you plan your day. Whatever’s on your calendar is fixed. You’re committed to it.
If you see you have six or seven hours of meetings today, how much time will you have for your tasks? Not much.
If you begin the day, with six hours of meetings and a task list of thirty or more tasks, your day’s broken before it’s begun. You won’t be able to do everything on your task list and attend all those meetings.
Either you cancel meetings or your remove some of the tasks, leaving only the critical ones.
Today, for example, I have five hours of meetings and my to-do list has five tasks. It’s still going to be a busy day, but it’s doable… Just. I suspect already, that one or two of those tasks will be pushed off to another day.
I don’t care. The most important parts of my day are the confirmed appointments.
If I find myself with some critical tasks that must be done, then I will have to find time on my calendar to do them. I’m comfortable rescheduling meetings if necessary to complete an important piece of work. You should be too.
Your calendar is never going to lie to you. It only shows the 24 hours you get each day. How you use those hours is largely up to you. If you open up your calendar to everyone, there’s no point in complaining you don’t have time. You do have time. By allowing other people to schedule meetings with you without first consulting you, you are allowing g them to steal your time.
If you need time for exercise, to be at your son’s school concert or to finish any important piece of work, it’s on you to protect that time on your calendar.
Your task manager and notes app will not help you here. You can throw a hundred tasks into your task manager and date them for tomorrow And tomorrow you will have a hundred tasks to complete.
You task manager will never tell you that you don’t have time to do all those tasks. Only you calendar will do that.
So there you go, Jeff. That’s how to use a calendar. It’s your connection with the real world. It never lies to you and it’s a tool you need to be in control of.
Thank you for your question, Jeff, and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very very productive week.
Is there a gulf between what you want and where you are? That’s what we are looking at today.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
Subscribe to my Substack
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 341
Hello, and welcome to episode 341 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Many time management and pro ductivity problems result from a disconnect between one’s goals and what one is prepared to sacrifice to achieve them.
If you want to spend more time with your family yet are not prepared to say no to working beyond your regular working hours, there is a disconnect.
If you want to lose twenty pounds yet are not willing to cut back on sugary treats and exercise a little, there is a disconnect.
And, if you want to be more productive yet are unwilling to protect time on your calendar for doing the work you want to productively do, there is a disconnect.
It is sad to watch people desperately scramble for any excuse for not doing the things they say they want to do. It’s easy to find excuses, but much harder to be honest with yourself and accept that whatever you say is important to you is not important at all.
As the saying goes, “If it’s important enough, you’ll find the time. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse”.
Worthwhile goals take time. Often, you will need to learn new skills, gain experience and build endurance. There will be setbacks and sacrifices to be made. And, of course, time to be found.
That’s all part of what makes achieving goals exciting. If it were easy to achieve your goals, you would feel empty and unfulfilled and likely not bother trying to improve yourself.
It’s an interesting topic, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Suzie. Suzie asks, Hi Carl, I struggle to find the time to do everything I want to do. I’ve done your Perfect Week exercise but never seem to be able to fit everything into my week. My Perfect week looks great; my real week is a mess. Is there anything else I can do to fit more into my week?
Hi Suzie,
Thank you for your question.
This is something I come across a lot in my coaching programme. An ambitious person discovers there are not enough hours in the day to do everything they want to do.
Often, it’s someone who works a full-time job from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, who wants to exercise for an hour every day and start their own side business in the evening.
Now, all of that is possible, but it won’t be if you also want to spend time with your family, go out every weekend with your friends and watch episodes of your favourite TV show each evening.
As David Allen says, you can do anything you want, but you cannot do everything.
One of the first things you can do is to begin with the basics. How much time do you need to sleep and eat? Typically, people require between six and eight hours of sleep each day.
If you sacrifice sleeping time, what’s going to happen? You’ll first become tired and easily distracted; if you continue not getting enough sleep, you will become sick. How will that help you do the things you want to do?
So, get the basics right first. For any human to operate at their optimum level, they need the right amount of sleep, healthy food and some exercise each day.
Lack of sleep, poor-quality food, and sitting around all day will destroy your energy levels, mess with your emotions, and result in you not getting very much done. Get those three things right first.
The next step is to look at your calendar. Where can you protect time for doing what is most important to you? This will depend on what it is you want to do.
For instance, if you want to start building your own business, you may only be able to do this in the evenings after work. Perhaps, if you are more of a morning person, the only time available might be early in the morning.
Author John Grisham used to write his books before going to work in the morning. He’d wake up at 4:30 and write for two hours before getting ready for work.
However, it comes down to how much you are willing to sacrifice to pursue your goals. If waking up at 4:30 AM is not something you are willing to do to work on your business dream, that’s fine. Nobody will judge you. That’s simply a choice you have made.
There’s very little I would wake up at 4:30 AM for.
This isn’t just about our dreams and goals. Perhaps you want to be a great parent—who doesn’t? What does being a great parent look like?
Maybe you decide to have a family meal every evening at 7:00 pm, where you talk with your kids about their day and what they learned is important. Doing this is not impossible.
Yet, if you also value your career and rarely make it home before 7:00 PM, what are you elevating above being a great parent?
These are hard truths we are often afraid to address. Yet, if you want to live the life you want, you need to face them. What is more important, your relationship with your children or your career?
Again, there’s no judgment here, and the choices you make are entirely yours to make. But some choices need to be made to have that feeling of fulfilment.
The work vs family dilemma has always been fascinating to me.
Often, when you look deeply at it, it’s not really about the work itself; it’s the fear of being unpopular at work. Saying no to colleagues asking for help with their work so you can finish a project you’re working on risks being unpopular.
We worry about what our colleagues will think of us if we refuse to help them with their work. So we say yes to helping them, which means we need more time to finish our work.
And because time is fixed, that means the extra time we need to finish our work must come from the time we would ordinarily spend with our family. And after all, our family will understand, won’t they? Won’t they?
Another one is the importance of taking care of your health today to live an active and healthy retirement. When we’re in our thirties and forties, most people don’t worry about this at all. We prioritise our careers and social life above our long-term health.
Yet, if you were to visit a doctor and they told you that if you don’t change your diet and get some exercise, you will be dead in six months, the chances are you will make significant changes. Suddenly, your career and social life become less important than your health.
If you were to think about it for a few minutes, getting a little exercise and being more mindful about your diet is not difficult. It’s a choice you can make today.
All of this is why spending some time looking at your areas of focus and deciding what is important to you as a person is critical. Without knowing what is important to you, you will drift from one thing to the next.
This means defining what family and relationships mean to you. How does that fit with your career goals, finances, lifestyle, life experiences, and purpose?
These are important questions, and if you were to spend time defining what they mean to you, knowing where to spend your time will naturally follow.
What are you willing to sacrifice to live life on your terms?
Is the risk of upsetting your boss by not responding to her text message immediately worth it to spend undisturbed time with your family? Or is serving your customer professionally worth risking being late to a meeting with your colleagues and becoming unpopular?
When you know what your areas of focus mean to you, these choices are easy to make. You, in effect, make the decisions before they need to be made.
The upside to this is you gain respect. Not just respect for you and your values but also for your time.
The real danger is wanting more than you are willing to sacrifice for.
Building a business takes a lot of time and effort - are you willing to sacrifice time with your friends and family to build that business?
To stay organized and on top of your work, you have to say no to many people. Are you willing to say no to new things to keep up with the work you are paid to do?
To spend more time with your family, you need to reduce your work time. Is that a sacrifice you are willing to make?
Being more productive is never about doing more. It’s about knowing what is important to you and spending the appropriate time needed there. It means you must be comfortable saying no and not worrying about being unpopular or occasionally upsetting people.
After all, “you can’t please all of the people all of the time. You can only please some of the people some of the time.”
So, Suzie, before you go back to your “perfect week” calendar, spend some time with your areas of focus and prioritise what is important to you right now. Define what each of those areas means to you.
Once you have done that, return to your perfect week calendar and ensure you have enough time for the things you most value in your life.
I promise you that if you do that, you will feel more fulfilled, more focused, and much more productive.
I hope that has helped. Thank you so much for sending in your question and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
One of the biggest drains on your time (and productivity) is a disorganized workspace. This week, I’m sharing some ideas for getting organised so you can find what you need when you need it.
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Script | 340
Hello, and welcome to episode 340 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I remember watching videos by David Allen—author of Getting Things Done—where he explains the importance of having an organised workspace.
These videos were recorded before the digital takeover, yet the principles remain the same whether we deal with paper or digital documents.
If your stuff is all over the place, you will waste a lot of time trying to find what you need, and it’s surprising how much time you lose.
This week’s question caught my attention, as getting and keeping your workspace organised is an overlooked part of the modern productivity movement. It won’t matter how clever your digital tools are if you don’t know where everything is or how to organise your notes so you can find what you need when you need it in seconds. You’ll still waste much time doing stuff you shouldn’t need to do.
As I researched this, I could only find advice on keeping desks and physical files, notes, and documents organised. There is little advice on keeping a digital workspace clean and organised. Well, that is apart from some older articles about how an untidy computer desktop slows down your computer and makes finding anything slow and cumbersome.
Now before I go further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alice. Alice asks, Hi Carl, How do you keep all your files, notes and other digital things organised? I’m really struggling here and would love some advice.
Hi Alice, thank you for your question.
One of the first things you will need to do is allocate a single place for your digital documents. Today, most people are comfortable storing all their personal files in a cloud storage system, such as Google Docs, Microsoft OneDrive, or Apple’s iCloud.
If you are concerned about security, an external hard drive also works.
Now, just as before the 2000s, you will likely have two places: one for work and one for your personal stuff. Your company will probably dictate your work storage system.
The important thing about storing documents and files you may need is accessibility—i.e., how fast you can access the files.
In the past, if we wanted a file for a client named Rogers, we would go to the filing cabinet, locate the letter R, and find the file for Rogers there. If it wasn’t there, one of our colleagues probably had it. (And how frustrating was that)
Today, all you need to do is open iCloud, One Drive or Google Drive and type in the name of the client you are looking for. You will then be presented with a list of all the documents related to that client.
And perhaps you may already be seeing a problem.
In the past, everything was kept together in a single file folder; today, client notes can be found everywhere. We have CRM systems (Customer Relationship Management software) that track communications with customers and clients. However, these are only as good as those who enter the data.
We receive phone calls, emails, perhaps text messages, and all the documentation generated by orders, invoices, and quotes. If the people entering the data are not timely and perfect, time can be wasted just looking for all that stuff.
Those CRM systems may track documents related to that client, which makes things a little easier. But do you trust them?
So, how can you keep your workspace organised and in order?
First, choose your tools. Your calendar and email will likely already be selected for you in your professional environment. Fortunately, you should have freedom over your task manager and notes app.
Rule number one. Use only one.
By this, I mean one task manager, one notes app and one calendar.
Now, it is okay to use a separate calendar for your work events; after all, you may only be able to access your work calendar through selected devices. I would always advise you to try to connect your work calendar to your personal one where possible.
By this, I mean that if you use a Google or Apple calendar for your personal life, you can subscribe to your work calendar. Not all companies allow this, but I’ve found that most do.
This way, you have all your events viewable in one place. (Wasn’t life easier when we all carried our own diaries? No interference from outsiders)
Your to-do list and notes, however, are entirely within your realm. Avoid the temptation of using your work’s Microsoft To-Do or Trello. You want to have your complete life together, not scattered everywhere.
You may need to call a client early in the morning, and if all the details are separated on your work’s system, that call could easily be missed. Similarly, you may need to contact your bank. If that task is on a personal system, unless you look at that system in your lunch break, you’re going to miss it.
Now here’s a quick tip. Use a daily note.
A daily note is a note you create each day to capture meeting notes, ideas, things to look up, and other useful bits of information. Each note’s title is today’s date.
As you create a new note each day, you have a reference—the date. If you number each item you add to the daily note, you now have a transferable reference to link to tasks and calendar events.
For example, imagine I captured an idea for a YouTube video, added it to my daily note, and assigned it the number 1.
That means the reference number for that idea is today’s date plus 1. I can use that reference for any task or project from that idea. You can go one step further by adding a link to the note for your task, so all you need to do is click the link and boom, you are right where you need to be.
I would also advise you to keep your digital notes separate from work. I once had a client who was a university professor. She used her university’s OneNote to organise all her research notes.
She then left that university, and within two or three hours of leaving, the system’s organiser deleted all her notes. Seven years of research gone in seconds.
Of course, you should keep confidential information off your personal devices, but a large part of what we keep in notes is not confidential and is usually meeting notes, ideas, and possible solutions to difficult problems.
Once you have your tools and storage places sorted, it comes down to making sure what you need when you need it is quickly accessible.
To do that, learn how to search your computer. On Apple devices, this means learning to use Spotlight. It’s a powerful tool that means I can find coaching client feedback simply by typing their name into the search box. I can also find digital copies of my passport, car insurance, residency permits and my address in Korean (I find it’s faster to copy/paste than to type in Korean)
Everything I need frequently is instantly to hand.
And that’s another reference to the pre-2000s. An optimised workspace meant that you had the files you were working on and anything else you needed quick access to within arms reach of your desk.
Anything you didn’t need was stored in filing cabinets a few steps away from you.
There’s the famous picture of Rose-Mary Woods, President Nixon’s secretary, demonstrating how she accidentally erased 18 minutes of the tape recordings during the Watergate investigation. If you Google the picture, you can see that everything a secretary would need was on her desk or next to it (or rather coincidently, within arms reach)
For Windows computers, look up Universal Search. That will explain how you can search for everything on your computer from a single place.
The final part of the puzzle is file naming.
For years, I’ve used a file name system that includes the date, the file type, and the name. For example, if I had a client named Bill Tanner and wrote a proposal for him, the proposal title would be 2024-09-25-proposal-Bill Tanner.
If I need to amend the proposal, I would change the date. This way, when I search Bill Tanner, I will see all the proposals I have written grouped together.
I’ve found that adding version numbers to the title doesn’t work either, and it’s not as easy to get to the latest document. Searching by date puts the very latest version on top every time.
And I do still recommend keeping your desktop clean. A cluttered desktop causes distraction. A clean desktop helps maintain focus.
Now, before I finish, I should mention your phone. This can be a complete mess. I was in the bank the other day, and some twenty-somethings were opening an account. All they had with them was their phones, yet when the bank clerk asked them for different documents, they took ages to find the information on their phones.
Rather amusingly, an elderly gentleman, armed with a plastic wallet of essential documents, completed his business at the bank far faster than those twenty-somethings.
When the clerk asked him for a document, he pulled it out and handed it over instantly. It was a real eye-opener for me. Perhaps paper is faster than digital… Sometimes.
What I’ve learned is to keep all your frequently used apps on your Home Screen. Learn how to use widgets—they can be a real-time saver when you need them.
Oh, and one more: when flying, use your airline’s app. Place it on your Home Screen. It’s incredible how often you need that at the airport or in a taxi when they ask you which terminal you need to go to.
And there you go, Alice. I hope that has helped.
It comes down to doing a little cleaning up and getting your important files and apps where you need them. Remember, it’s all about accessibility.
Thank you, Alice, for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Podcast 339
How do you prioritise your tasks and estimate how long something will take to do? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
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Script | 339
Hello, and welcome to episode 339 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
This week, I have two common questions to answer: The first is how do I prioritise when everything’s urgent, and the second is how do you know how long a task will take?
Your areas of focus and core work determine one, and the other is impossible.
Before I answer the question, I’d like to let you know that I am now on Substack. There will be a link in the show notes for you to subscribe.
I have a crazy plan to write on Substack every week and, over a year, complete a book. The book will tackle the time management and productivity problems we face today and use subscriber comments and questions to enhance the book. If it’s any good at the end of the year, I will publish the book.
So, please help and become a subscriber. You can become part of something very special. Okay, on with the episode.
Let me deal with the impossible issue first. How do you determine how long a task will take?
The problem here is you are human and not a machine. This means you are affected by how much sleep you got last night, your mood, and whether you are excited by the task or not.
You will also be affected by things like jet lag, whether a close family member is sick or if you had a fight with your spouse or partner that morning.
This is why I don’t recommend task-based productivity systems. They are not sustainable. Sure, some days you can do all your tasks and have oodles of energy left in the evening. On most days, you’ll struggle to do two or three of them.
I usually write my blog posts on a Monday morning. I’ve been doing this for eight years. I write roughly the same length each time—around a thousand words. Yet, some days, I can write the first draft in forty-five minutes; others, it takes me ninety minutes to write 750 words.
I cannot predict what type of day I will have. Yet, what I do know is that if I sit down and start, I’m going to get something done. And that’s good enough.
This means I know I have two hours to write, and something will get done as long as I write in those two hours. I want to finish everything, but if I can’t, as long as I’ve got something written when I return to finish later, it will be much easier than if I had not started.
However, that said, sometimes time constraints can help. If you know you have a deadline on Friday, and you also know you still have a lot to do, putting yourself under a bit of pressure to get moving on the project can help tap into your energy reserves. The trouble is that this is not sustainable or productive in the long run.
Doing that means you will neglect other parts of your work. Emails will pile up, your admin will become backlogged, and you will neglect other things you should be doing, meaning you will need to tap into those reserves repeatedly.
And that becomes a vicious circle.
What works is to allocate time for your important work each day. Instead of focusing on how much you have to do, you focus on your available time.
Imagine you are in sales, and you have follow-ups to do each day. If, on average, you need an hour to do your follow-up, that would be the time you protect each day for doing your follow-ups. Some days, you will complete them in less than an hour; others, you won’t. But it doesn’t matter. As long as you do your follow-ups daily, you will always be on top or thereabouts each week.
And let’s be honest: When dealing with phone calls, nobody knows how long they will take. It’s just not something you can predict.
Now, on to the question of prioritising your day.
This comes back to knowing what is important to you and your core work—the work you are paid to do (not the work you volunteer to do).
All the classic books on time management start with you thinking about what you want before you dive headfirst into sorting out the mountain of work you think you must do.
You see if you do not know what is important to you, everything that seems remotely urgent will be important to you. And that is not true at all.
It could be argued that not knowing what is important is just plain laziness. You’re delegating an essential aspect of your life to everyone else because you cannot be bothered to decide. If you don’t determine what’s critical, then everything becomes critical. That’s the easy way out—although the consequences are never pleasant.
I remember when I was a trainee hotel manager. I did two years in night management. When I joined the night team, I inherited three night porters. One of them was aggressive and would speak his mind if he didn’t like something or felt it was a waste of time. One was a stickler for doing only what his job description said, and the third one was gentle and willing to do anything asked of him.
As their manager, guess who I got to do the little things that popped up randomly during the shift? The third one.
As a manager, I didn’t have time to argue with the two other night porters about whether something needed doing or was part of their job description. So, I dumped everything onto Martin. (Sorry, Martin)
If you don’t know what is important to you and what your core work is, you will be dumped on. And that is often the main cause of why you have far too much to do.
To overcome this at work, know what your core work is. Then, prioritise that work. For instance, if you are a photographer, you are paid to take photos. So, taking and processing those photos will be your most important work. Nothing should ever pull you away from doing that work.
Similarly, finding new clients will also be an essential part of your work if you are a freelance photographer. That may involve curating an Instagram account and perhaps some other social media.
Any activity or task involving those parts of your work should always take priority over everything else. Researching new lighting, redesigning your website or helping a family member find a good photographer (assuming you cannot do it yourself) are not your priorities.
What I find helps is to list your core work tasks—the tasks you need to do each day or week and then ensure you protect time in your calendar for doing that work.
Once it’s protected, nothing but an emergency will move it.
This work is your core work and, therefore, your priority. It’s where your income comes from and what you will be judged on for promotion. Screw this area up by doing low-value stuff for other people may make you liked and popular, but you will be swamped, stressed out and exhausted at the end of the day.
You need to set boundaries.
Setting boundaries does not mean you become unpleasant towards your colleagues. It means there’s a time and a place for work and a time and place for socialising. Don’t mix the two up.
Here’s an exercise you could do. List out your core work—the work you are paid to do. Then, calculate how long you need, on average, to do that work. As this is your core work you should have some data—it’s likely to be on your calendar.
If you don’t have the data, monitor it for a week or two. That will give you sufficient information to make the calculation.
Remember, you won’t necessarily be perfectly accurate. You’re human, after all. But all you need is an average.
Let me give you an example. I know if I protect twelve hours each week for doing my core work, I will be able to get it all done. This means if I were working a regular forty-hour week, I would still have twenty-eight hours available for meetings, dealing with emergencies and anything else unexpected. Surely, that’s enough time?
You, too, will likely find you don’t need much time for your core work. However, until you know what that work is and have calculated how much time, on average, you need to complete the work, you are flying blind. And your brain will tell you you don’t have enough time.
Externalise it, write it down, get it into your task manager and calendar and protect the time.
Over the last 100 years or so, many books have been written on time management and productivity. Professors, senior executives, and business titans have studied the subject relentlessly, and in almost all cases, they have come to the same conclusions.
To be on top of your work and live a balanced life, you must know what you want time for. If you don’t know that, you will quickly find yourself wasting that precious resource. (And, of course, building huge backlogs of stuff you’ve neglected)
So, there you go. First, you will never be able to accurately calculate how long a task will take. You are not a machine; you’re a living, breathing human being susceptible to emotions, low energy, and sickness. Stop trying. Instead, allocate time for your work, get as much done as possible within that time, then take a break and move on.
Getting started is the most critical thing. It’s better to do 25% of the task and only have 75% left. At least you’ve started and will know how to finish.
And secondly, be very clear about the work you are paid to do. That’s your prioritised work. The work you volunteer to do should never be prioritised over your core work.
I hope that helps.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
What is the Eisenhower Matrix and how can you use it to help you focus on the important things in life.
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Script | 338
Hello, and welcome to episode 338 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
You may have heard of the Eisenhower Matrix, or as Stephen Covey called it in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the Productivity Matrix. It’s a matrix of four squares divided up between Important and urgent (called quadrant 1), Important and not urgent (quadrant 2), urgent and not important (quadrant 3) and not urgent and not important (quadrant 4).
It’s one of those methods that gets a lot of attention after a book has been launched. Yet, this matrix was first introduced to us by President Eisenhower in the 1950s after President Eisenhower mentioned in an interview that "I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.
This “quote” was first spoken by Dr J Roscoe Miller, president of the North Western University at that time.
So, it’s questionable if Eisenhower ever applied this method to his work, but whether he did or he didn’t, it is an excellent framework to help you prioritise your work and help you to get focused on your important work and aspects of your life.
This week’s question is all about this matrix and how you can apply it to your life so you are not neglecting the important, but not urgent things that so many of us neglect because they are not screaming at us and because they need an element of discipline which so many people find difficult today.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Michele. Michele asks, hi Carl, I recently read your book and saw that you wrote about the Eisenhower Matrix. I’ve always been fascinated by this matrix but have never been able to use it in my daily life. How do you use it to get things done?
Hi Michele, thank you for your question.
This matrix is one of those things that once you’ve learned and begin to apply it to your daily life, you soon forget you are using it.
Let me explain. Much of what comes our way is “urgent”, or it is to the person asking us to do something. That could be your boss, a client, your spouse or partner or your kids. Whatever they want, they want it now, and only you can give it to them.
Then, there are quite a few things that are important but not urgent. These include taking care of your health, planning your week and day, sitting down for a family meal at least once a day, and self-development—whether that is through reading books, going to night school, or taking courses.
These are often neglected because the urgent and important drown them out.
Ironically, if you consistently take care of the important and not urgent things, you will spend less time dealing with the urgent and important. Yet, most people cannot get to these quadrant 2 tasks because the quadrant 1 tasks are swamping them.
It becomes a vicious circle.
The bottom part of the matrix—the not important things—is what you want to avoid. these are the urgent and not important and the not important and not urgent things. (What’s called quadrants 3 and 4).
The urgent and not important things (quadrant 3) are the deceptive things. These are unimportant emails dressed up to look important. Most emails and messages will come under this quadrant.
One of the things I’ve noticed when I begin working with a new client is the kind of tasks they have in their digital task manager. 80% of the tasks there are not important tasks. It’s these tasks that are drowning out the quadrant 1 and 2 tasks (the important ones).
I am starting an experiment to see if using a paper Franklin Planner for three months can still be done in 2024. One thing I’ve already noticed is because I have to write out the tasks I need to or want to do today, I am much more aware of the kind of tasks I am writing. My daily task list is much shorter than when I do this digitally.
As a consequence, tasks that are not important (urgent or otherwise) rarely get onto my list.
This paper-based task list has reversed the type of tasks on my list—now, 80% are important.
So, what kind of tasks fall into these different categories?
Let’s begin with the easiest one: Quadrant 4. These are the tasks that are not important and not urgent.
These tasks include watching TV, scrolling social media, reading political news, and anything else that triggers you in some way.
While checking social media or watching TV may be beneficial sometimes, these activities should be undertaken only after you have completed your important work for the day.
What about quadrant 3–the urgent and not important. What kind of tasks are these? Well, quite a few emails are. These could be something you want to buy, but you are not ready to do so yet. However, a last-minute offer might expire at midnight (urgency), so you feel you have to act.
No, you don’t.
I don’t need to buy my winter sweaters in September—the temperature is 28 degrees outside (around 85 degrees Fahrenheit), and it’s still quite humid; I can wait until the end of October. Yet the email is urging me to act now. It’s not important.
You’ll also find many requests from colleagues that fall into this category. “I need it now!” “I have to have it immediately!” only for you to find a few minutes later that it’s unimportant and they don’t need it now.
Busy work also falls into this quadrant. When I was teaching at a university, the admin department was always sending reminders to teachers to send the attendance record for that day’s class. It was framed as urgent, yet in the grand scheme of things, attendance records were not important to me as a teacher.
As a teacher, ensuring my students learned was important. Not some box ticking exercise to keep the administration team happy.
I was never late in sending my attendance sheets, but I did find it annoying that almost immediately after the class finished, there was a message asking me to send the attendance sheet.
I soon got to ignoring those messages—they were sent out to all professors.
This is the bottom part of the matrix—the place you want to stay away from as much as possible. Likely, you will never be able to remain entirely out of it. After all, there’s a new season of Taskmaster starting this week, and your favourite sports team could be heading towards the finals, and every game is on TV.
(Although watching a favourite TV show or sports team could arguably be placed in the quadrant 2 area—after all, it’s a form of relaxation—well, perhaps not if you support the Leeds Rhinos rugby team)
Now, the top part of the matrix, the important area, is where you want to spend as much time as possible. You can think of this area as the proactive area.
The urgent and important quadrant—quadrant 1—includes your core work tasks, customer requests, and some requests from your boss and colleagues (the important project/process-driven requests).
These tasks are often deadline-driven—hence their importance.
Then there is quadrant 2—the important but not urgent quadrant. This is possibly the most important quadrant because, as I mentioned, the more time you spend here, the less time you will spend in the urgent areas.
Your areas of focus drive quadrant 2. It also includes planning, thinking and self-development.
For example, exercise, reading, weekly and daily planning are all quadrant 2 tasks. As is spending time with your family, learning and reading.
All healthy pursuits will come here.
The problem is that there’s no sense of urgency. These important tasks are often sacrificed for the important and urgent tasks of Quadrant 1. Spend too much time in Quadrant 1, and it will grow and grow.
If you pull yourself away and try to move towards your quadrant 2 area, your quadrant 1 area will shrink—a good thing.
So, how can you implement this matrix into your own life?
Identify what each quadrant looks like in your life. Where do the urgent and not important (Quadrant 3) tasks come from, and why? Ask the same question about Quadrant 1—urgent and important, why are they urgent?
What is the underlying reason these tasks become urgent?
You will likely find that you are not doing something from Quadrant 2. For example, not doing a weekly planning session will always cause things to become urgent because you never get a chance to see the overview of what you have going on.
That’s how deadlines creep up on you.
Not giving yourself ten minutes at the end of the day (or first thing in the morning if you are an early bird) to plan the day will leave you at the mercy of events (quadrants 1 and 3).
Creating an Eisenhower Matrix on paper and writing out the different activities you do in each category can help you prioritise. And that’s not just related to work. It’s a life-changing prioritisation exercise for your whole life.
You can see what you should be doing and what needs to change so you have more time for what you want to do in your life.
It will also show you what needs to be eliminated to find that time. Anything in the bottom half of the matrix should eliminated (although that may not be possible 100% of the time)
I hope that has helped Michele. Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
What are the time-tested principles of better time management and productivity? That’s what I’m exploring in this week’s episode.
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Script | 337
Hello, and welcome to episode 337 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
If you have read books on time management and productivity, you may have picked up that there are a few basic principles that never seem to change.
Things like writing everything down, not relying on your head to remember things, planning your day and week, and writing out what is important to you.
These are solid principles that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. The tools we use may have changed, but these principles have not and never will.
What is surprising are the attempts to reinvent time management. New apps and systems seem to come out every month claiming to be “game-changing”—I hate that phrase—or more ways to defy the laws of time and physics and somehow create more time in the day than is possible.
Hyrum Smith, the creator of the Franklin Planner, an icon of time management and productivity, always said that time management principles have not changed in over 6,000 years. What has changed is the speed at which we try to do things.
Technology hasn’t changed these time management principles; all technology has done is make doing things faster.
Today, I can send an email to the other side of the world, and it will arrive instantly. Two hundred years ago, I would have had to write a letter, go to the post office to purchase a stamp, and send it. It would arrive two or three months later.
Funnily enough, I read a book called The Man With The Golden Typewriter. It’s a book of letters Ian Fleming sent to his readers and publisher. He often began his letters with the words “Thank you for your letter of the 14th of February,” yet the date of his reply was in April.
Not only were things slower fifty years ago, people were more patient.
So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Lisa. Lisa asks, Hi Carl, I’ve noticed you’ve been talking about basic principles of productivity recently. Are there any principles you follow that have not changed?
Hi Lisa, thank you for your question.
The answer is yes, there are. Yet, it took me a long time to realise the importance of these principles.
The first one, which many people try to avoid, is establishing what is important to you. This is what I call doing the backend work.
You see, if you don’t know what is important to you, your days will be driven by the latest urgent thing. That’s likely to come from other people and not from you.
Stephen Covey wrote about this in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, with his Time Management Matrix, also called the Eisenhower Matrix. This matrix is divided into Important and urgent, important and not urgent, urgent and not important, and not urgent and not important.
The goal of this matrix is to spend as much time as possible in the second quadrant—the important but not urgent. This area includes things like getting enough sleep, planning, exercising, and taking preventative action.
The more time you spend here, the less time you will spend in the urgent and important and urgent and not important areas.
Yet, unless you know what is important to you, the only thing driving your day will be the things that are important to others. That includes your company, your friends and family. They will be making demands on you, and as you have no barriers, their crises will become yours. You, in effect, become part of the problem instead of being part of the solution.
When you have your life together, you can offer calm, considered solutions to those you care about. You also know when to get involved and when to stay well away.
Yet, you can only do that when you know what is important to you.
Many authors and time management specialists refer to establishing what is important to you in different ways; Hyrum Smith calls this establishing your governing values, Stephen Covey calls it knowing your roles, and I call them your areas of focus.
These are just names for essentially the same thing. Get to know what is important to you as an individual. Then, write them down in a place where you can refer back to them regularly so you know that your days, weeks, and months are living according to the principles that are important to you.
It’s these that give you the power to say no to things that conflict with your values.
Without knowing what they are, you will say yes to many things you don’t enjoy or want to do.
The next principle is to plan your week and day. Again, this is another area so many people avoid. I remember hearing a statistic that less than 5% of Getting Things Done practitioners do any weekly review.
If you’ve read Getting Things Done by David Allen, you’ll know that he stresses the importance of the weekly review in almost every chapter.
People who don’t plan are often driven by the fear of what they might learn, such as a forgotten project deadline, an important meeting that needs a lot of preparation, or a lost opportunity.
Yet, these are the results of not planning. If you were to give yourself thirty minutes at the end of the week to plan the next week and five to ten minutes each evening to plan the next day, many of the things you fear will never happen. You will be alerted to the issues well before you need to act.
For me, consistently planning my week and day has been life-changing. This simple activity has ensured I am working on the right things, dealing with the most important things, and ending the week knowing that the right things were completed.
Prior to becoming consistent with my planning, I was all over the place. I spent far too much time on the unimportant and saying yes to many things I didn’t want to do. I was also procrastinating A LOT.
A huge benefit of planning is that you get to see data. In other words, you learn very quickly what is possible and what is not. When you begin planning the week, you will be overambitious and try to do too much. The more you plan, the more you learn what can be done.
No, you won’t be able to attend six hours of meetings, write a report, reply to 150 emails, go to the gym and spend quality time with your family.
When you know what is important, you will ensure you have time for it because you plan for it (can you see the connection?). You will start to say no to some meetings (and yes, you can say no by offering an alternative day and time for the meeting) and renegotiate report deadlines.
A third principle is to manage your time ruthlessly. By that, I mean being very strict about what goes on your calendar. Never, ever let anyone else schedule meetings or appointments for you.
Your calendar is the one tool you have that gives you control over your day. Allowing other people to control it essentially turns you into a puppet. No, never ever let that happen.
Now, before Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple Calendar, we carried our own diaries around with us. No one else could have control of it. If you were fortunate enough to have a secretary (now called an “executive assistant”), you would meet with her (secretaries were largely female in the 60s, 70s and 80s) each week and explain when you were and were not available.
Your secretary would then gate keep your calendar. The best secretaries were pretty much impossible to get past. They protected their boss’s time.
People knew that time was important and for anyone to do their work, they needed undisturbed time. Your calendar was respected.
A person’s diary was so important that the courts would accept it as evidence they were in a particular location. I doubt very much they would do that today.
A mistake is to say yes to a time commitment too quickly. This is how we get conflicts in our calendars. You cannot be in two places at the same time—that’s another law of physics—so you either say no and offer an alternative date, or you have to waste time renegotiating with someone later.
I am shocked at how often I see conflicts on people’s calendars. Clearing these up should be the first thing you do during your weekly planning.
Information you need to know about the day should go in the all-day section of your calendar, not in the timed area. Only committed timed events go in the time area of your calendar.
When your calendar truly reflects your commitments, you can then set about planning a realistic day. If you have six hours of meetings and thirty tasks to complete, you will know instantly that you have an impossible day, and you can either move some of your appointments or reduce your task list.
Ignoring it only diminishes the power of your calendar, leaving you again at the mercy of other people’s crises and issues.
This is about being strict about your time. Wake up and go to bed at the same time each day so you have solid bookends to your day. Ensure you protect time for your important work and your family and friends. And never let other people steal your time.
The final principle is the tool you use won’t make you more productive or better at time management. Tools come and go. In the 1980s, it was the Filofax. In the 90s, it was the Franklin Planner. Today is the latest fashionable app. It doesn’t matter. None of them will ever make you more productive.
What will make you more productive is knowing what is important to you. Having a plan for the day and week so you know what must be accomplished that day, and week. And being in complete control of your calendar.
Get those three things right, and you will feel less stressed, more in control of your life and have a sense of purpose each day. Isn’t that what we all want?
I hope that has helped, Lisa. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week, how to process your task manager’s inbox quickly and effectively so you can get focused on what needs to be done.
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Script | 336
Hello, and welcome to episode 336 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One issue that pops up regularly in my coaching programme is an overwhelming inbox. There are too many unclear items left to fester and fill up space, with no clear pathway to dealing with whatever needs to be done.
Now, it’s true that you need to collect things. If you’re not collecting your commitments and ideas, you soon find yourself forgetting to do the important things you have committed to. However, collecting is just the first part of a three-part process. You also need to organise what you collect and then do the work.
There are no shortcuts around this. These are the three principles of task management. Collect whatever needs to be collected, organise what you collect and then do the work.
This is something I have learned the hard way. I’ve collected thousands of items over the years, and in my early days, before I had learned the basic principles, that meant my inbox filled up and just became an overwhelming mess. It was a place I never wanted to visit because it just reminded me of how unproductive and disorganised I was.
I know those basic principles now: I collect stuff, regularly organise what I collect, and then do the work.
Today’s podcast is about organising what you collected. I will tell you how to quickly clear your inbox, sort out the important from the unimportant, and, more importantly, get comfortable deleting stuff that is low in importance.
Oh, and before I forget, Friday this week—that’s the 6th of September— sees the opening session of my Ultimate Productivity Workshop.
This is your chance to learn the fundamental principles and put them into practice so you can become a master of time management and productivity.
There are just a few places left, so if you want to become better organised, more productive, and in control of your time, join the workshop today. Details for the event are in the show notes and on my website, Carl Pullein.com.
Okay, on with the show, which means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jeff. Jeff asks, “Hi Carl, I am really struggling with my inbox. I put a lot of stuff in there, from ideas to things my wife asks me to do and emails that need a response.
Each day, I feel I am collecting thirty or more things, and then it takes forever to clear the inbox. I hate doing it, so I don’t. And, of course, that just makes things worse. What can I do to make keeping my inbox manageable.
Hi Jeff,
Thank you for your question.
The good news is there are a few changes you can make that will help to reduce the overwhelm caused by an overloaded inbox.
Let’s first deal with the three questions to ask when you process your inbox. These three questions will clarify what you have and help you to determine if you really need to do them or not.
The first question is, “Do I need to do it?”
This is designed to clear tasks that have already been done or are no longer relevant because events have moved on.
You will often add a task like “Find out if Margo has all the documents she needs.” Later that day, Margo may ask you a question about the documents. You now know she has them. The task can be deleted or modified if the question requires you to do something.
Or you may have been asked by someone to do something only for them to tell you later that the task no longer needs to be done.
These can all be deleted.
Similarly, you may have added tasks to look up something or find out more about something, only to look at the task later and wonder what you were thinking. You are no longer interested in the idea. Again, delete these.
If the task still needs to be done, then move on to the next question, which is:
What do I need to do?
This question concerns properly defining the task. It’s not good to have a task that simply says, “Tony script.”
That might have meant something to you when you added it to your inbox, but if you do not need to do the task for a week or two, when the task comes back you’ll be unsure what needs to be done. Make it clear.
Rewrite the task as something like, “Send Tony the amended voice-over script.” This makes sense. If you are sending Tony many different scripts, you would add the name of the amended script to send so there is no confusion.
Another type of task to watch out for is the “follow-up” or “chase” task. These are often not tasks. They may be vehicles for completing a task. For example, if you asked Roger for a copy of the script to send to Tony, the task is not really to chase Roger.
The task is to get a copy of the script to send to Tony. Until you have that script in your procession the task is not complete. Adding another task to chase Roger duplicates the original task.
Instead, after asking Roger for the task, make a note that you asked Roger for it, add a date you asked, and then reschedule the task.
Every task in your task manager needs an action verb attached to it, such as call, write, read, review, design, sketch, reply, etc. If a task does not have an action verb, it has not been properly defined.
You will find that adding a verb helps you to estimate how long something will take.
For those tasks that are difficult to estimate the time it will take, you can use the “start, continue, finish” method.
I use this method for a lot of project tasks. For example, when I was writing Your Time Your Way, every Monday to Friday, I had a repeating task that said, “Continue writing book”. This meant I could decide how much time I had available to write the book and not worry about the task itself.
I knew I was never going to finish writing the book in one day, it was the kind of task that jut needed to done little by little. So, I allocated ninety-minutes a day, five days a week and repeated that for six months. That got the book done.
The third question is: When am I going to do it?
This is where most other time management and productivity systems go wrong. Establishing whether you need to do the task and defining what needs to be done is pretty universal in the productivity world. Yet, it doesn’t matter how well you define a task if you don’t have time to do it.
Once you commit yourself to a task, you need to know you have time to do it. That means asking, when are you going to do it?
How do you do that? Open up your calendar and your task manager and have them side by side. Some task managers can show you your calendar at the same time. Todoist, Tick Tick, and in a couple of weeks, Apple Reminders will do that for you.
What you are doing is looking to see where you have gaps in your schedule for doing the work.
Now, the task could be grouped with other similar tasks. Doing your expenses, for instance would be an admin task. Responding to an email would come under your communications.
But, some tasks may be too big and require a few hours to do. The question then becomes will you do in one go or split it up?
Your calendar will guide you. You will be able to see where you have time; if not, you can decide whether something else needs to be rescheduled for you to do the task by the date it’s due.
Now, when you start going through your inbox and asking these questions, you will be slow. Remember when you learned to ride a bicycle? You didn’t jump on the bike and go. There was a slow process of learning and building muscle memory.
The same will happen when processing your inbox. It will be slow at first as you’re building your mental muscle memory.
I’ve been asking these three questions for years. It takes me very little time now, yet it was a slow process when I first began. The only option you have is to stick with it. As time goes on, you will get faster and faster.
You will also pick up the patterns. The different requests you get will fall into similar groups, which helps you quickly decide what something is and how long it will take.
Be patient and follow the process.
And… Do not be afraid to delete stuff. If it’s important, it will come back.
If you are using the Time Sector System, you have a bit of an advantage. With the Time Sector System, the only tasks that matter are the ones you need to do this week. Anything else can be moved to your Next Week, This Month, Next Month or Long-term and on Hold folders. You can decide when you will do those tasks when you next do a weekly planning session.
So there you go, Jeff.
This is a process game. The more you follow the process, the faster you become. You also get comfortable deleting and delegating tasks. The goal is not to accumulate tasks; it’s the reverse. The goal is always to eliminate. The less you have to do this week, the more focused you will be and the more flexibility you have for dealing with the unknowns that will inevitably come in.
I hope that has helped answer your question. Thank you so much for sending it.
Don’t forget Friday is the start of September’s ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP. You can register by going to my website. If you are already registered, I will be sending you the workbook in the next day or two.
Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
One of the most productive things you could do is to start writing a daily journal. In this week’s episode, I answer a question about how to get started journaling.
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Script | 335
Hello, and welcome to episode 335 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Possibly the most productive thing I have done over the last ten years is to write a journal. This habit has taught me many things. For one, it has taught me the value of consistency. The act of spending ten to fifteen minutes every morning before I start the day has given me something deliberate—I sit down and write—which has led to me building out a solid set of morning routines that start my day in a way that’s healthy (mentally) and productive.
It is productive because it gives me a few minutes to think about the day ahead and review my objective tasks—the things I want to or must complete that day. This is far better than rolling out of bed at the last minute, rushing around to get dressed and out the door only to realise I left something important at home.
Writing a journal every day has also given me a space to analyse where I am doing well and where there is room for improvement. It allows me to write how I am feeling and what I am worrying about and consider future directions.
It’s almost as if I have a close friend I can confess all to.
Now, if you search YouTube for journaling, you will find thousands of videos advising how to start. Yet, it can be difficult. What do you write about? Do you use a digital tool like Day One or Apple’s Journaling app, or an old-fashioned paper notebook?
There’s a lot of questions.
This week, I received a question about starting and what I suggest you use. So, I decided to share all the tips I’ve learned over the years so you, too, can begin this fantastic habit.
Before I get to the question, there are just under two weeks until the start of September’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop.
This workshop will teach you how to build your own productivity and time management system from the ground up.
We begin with your calendar and task manager, and I show you how to connect the two so that they work in harmony. This removes the overwhelm we face when tasks swamp our days.
In the second week, I show you how to do an effective weekly planning session and how to get, and more importantly, stay on top of your communications—those hundreds of emails and messages that must be dealt with daily.
By the end of this workshop, you will have a perfectly balanced system that works for you and your work style. What you will learn will eliminate backlogs, help you identify what is important (and what is not), and establish your core work and areas of focus.
You will learn a lot in this workshop. Plus, your package includes four courses, which gives you lifetime access to the four key elements of maintaining your system.
There are only a limited number of places, so if you haven’t registered yet, you can do so with the link in the show notes.
I hope to see you there on the 6th of September.
Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Naomi. Naomi asks, Hi Carl, I saw your recent video on how to get started with journaling. Could you talk a little more about what to write and your recommendations about the best way to write it?
Hi Naomi, thank you for your question.
Let me first deal with digital Vs paper journals.
There are many advantages to writing your journal digitally. For one, you can add a photo each day and set the journal to collect data such as your exercise, the weather, and, if you wish, what you posted on social media automatically.
I spent three years writing my journal in Day One. It was easy. I could write on my phone, my computer or my iPad. I preferred my iPad, but occasionally I would write on my phone.
What stopped me was the realisation that technology was gradually taking over my life. I was no longer doing anything manually and was always on the lookout for more convenience.
Sure, convenience is nice. In theory, anyway, it frees up time for other pursuits. Yet, I found those other pursuits were not productive or healthy. It invariably meant more time on social media and TV watching.
So, back in January, I switched back to handwriting my journals.
I’ve discovered that handwriting my journal has slowed me down. It’s helped me to be more thoughtful and to express myself better in my journal.
It’s also rekindled my love of fountain pens and good-quality paper, which can be a very dangerous hobby—fountain pens and notebooks can get very expensive.
Yet the key here was slowing me down.
Why would you want to rush to get the day started? There will likely be plenty of drama—you don’t want to rush into all that.
The other reason I stopped journaling digitally was that I realised I was spending far too much time in front of a screen. Giving myself ten to twenty minutes every morning with a good old-fashioned pen and paper felt far better than sitting in front of another screen.
If you decide to go down the pen-and-paper route, my advice is to get yourself a good-quality notebook, preferably hardbound.
A hardbound notebook can travel with you, and if you don’t have a table to write on, its binding will give you enough support.
I’d also recommend investing in a nice pen. A fountain pen may not suit you, but that nice pen investment will give you extra pleasure when writing in your journal.
Okay, those are the tools dealt with. Now, what do you write about?
If you’ve never written a journal before, when you start, you may be afraid to share your deeper thoughts and feelings.
I always think of this like when you meet a stranger for the first time. You don’t open up and tell them what you feel or what your opinions are about other people. You are reserved and generally stick to topics such as the weather or the traffic conditions.
So start there. Write down what the weather was like and what you did that day (or the day before).
When I started, I wrote down all the important, meaningful tasks I had completed the day before. And, of course, the weather.
You can even write what you ate and how much activity/exercise you did.
You will soon begin opening up and writing about how you feel. Again, this is very much like when you meet a stranger. As you get to know them, you open up.
Now as you progress and develop the habit of writing your journal every day, you may want to create a few recurring areas.
For example, I have five items in my morning routine. After writing the date at the top of the page, I list these five items (make coffee, drink my lemon water, do my stretches, write my journal and clean my email inbox) in the margin and check them off. This tells me how consistent I am with my morning routines.
I also write in the margin what exercise I did that day.
This year, I have a 366-day challenge to do at least ten push-ups each day, so I write down the number of push-ups I’ve done that day. (So far the year, I’ve done just over 8,000 push-ups)
That gives me a start and some structure to my journal.
After that, I write whatever’s on my mind. This morning, for example, I wrote how much better I feel. This week, I’ve been suffering from a heavy cold, and I felt a lot better this morning. So, that was my opening paragraph.
I also wrote about the weather. It’s been hot and sticky over the last two weeks. Last night, we had quite a lot of rain, and that cleared the humidity a little.
So you don’t have to write anything too deep.
When starting, your goal should be to get into the habit and let nature take its course. After a few weeks, you will naturally open up and write about more deeply meaningful things.
You’ll likely begin writing negatively about your colleagues—we all do that occasionally—don’t worry. No one else is going to read your journal. And writing about your feelings about anything is how journaling can be very therapeutic.
And that’s the whole point of writing a journal. It’s therapy and it helps you to focus on what’s important.
I find the act of writing what’s on my mind helps me to organise my thoughts, put things into perspective and then focus on the essential things. That could be my relationships, finances, spirituality or how my business is growing.
It also helps me see where I can improve my life. I track my weight each week, and it becomes very clear when my weight is rising, which tells me what needs to be done to get back to where I should be.
And finally, journaling gives you a record of your life. After all, you are documenting your life. And that’s a beautiful thing to do. If nothing else, you leave something for your kids and grandchildren.
One of my family’s most prized possessions is my great-grandmother’s recipe book. It was started in the 1890s and has been handed down from daughter to daughter. It’s incredible to look at. It is tatty and torn, and the pages are stained. Yet, the handwriting is still legible; there are pen and pencil marks.
Your journal could potentially become the same thing. A treasured family possession. Who knows how technology will progress in the future? Perhaps the text files you create today won’t be accessible in ten or twenty years. But a handwritten journal will always be accessible.
We still have 7,000 pages of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks—written 500 years ago. Wouldn’t it be nice for your own life to be celebrated in 500 years?
So there you go, Naomi. I hope that has helped and motivated you to start writing your life. You’ll never regret it.
Thank you for your question and for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very productive week.
You have an overflowing inbox, you’re behind on projects and your calendar for the next ten days is full of meetings and other commitments. What can you do to get things under control and meeting your commitments? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Ultimate Productivity Workshop
Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 334
Hello, and welcome to episode 334 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
I know it can be easy for productive people to say all you need to do is this or that, and you, too, will be productive. The reality is it’s not that simple.
It’s not just about getting organised, reestablishing control of your calendar, and learning to use a to-do list properly; there’s also a mindset shift involved.
Many people I work with individually have been told and come to believe that they are disorganised and sloppy with their time management. If you’re told this too often and your actions support it, you begin to believe it. Being poor at time management and productivity becomes an identity.
Once you believe you are bad at these things, it becomes a self-fulfilling habit. Every attempt to become better organised and more productive will fail because you will sabotage your successes.
Your brain has an incredible capacity to reorganise and adapt. Just look at how people adapted to the lockdowns in 2020. There was resistance at first, then the adoption of new ways of doing things. Those who enjoyed exercise found ways to adapt their exercise programmes and work from home—something many people believed was impossible for them- but they soon discovered it was possible.
Your brain can adapt and remodel itself using “neuroplasticity”. All you need is a stimulus—such as a determination to get organised and be better at managing your time—like muscles in response to exercise.
Sadly, most people don’t try. They accept these negative patterns as just who they are. Yet it’s not true. Your mindset and habits are not set at birth. You learn them. And that means you can unlearn them and develop better beliefs and habits.
So, with all that said, it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Wim. Wim asks, hi Carl, for years, I have tried to get myself organised and failed every time. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’ve read all the books, watched thousands of YouTube videos, and learned all the tricks. But for some reason, I can never do anything I learn. How would you help someone like me?
Hi Wim, Thank you for your question.
Part of the problem for people who struggle to get themselves organised is trying to do too much at once.
While we are good at changing things, we are not very good at changing everything. This is why it’s often said that moving house is one of the most stressful things a person can do. Moving house is exciting, yet it also involves a lot of change.
That makes it uncomfortable. There’s a new home, a new way to get to the supermarket, a different drive to work and new people to get to know in the neighbourhood.
Yet, after a few weeks, our new home becomes normal. We feel comfortable and safe, and the stress of the move disappears.
All change requires an initial period of discomfort. We make mistakes and forget to do something we should have done, and going through the actions feels like a huge effort for a small gain.
But we discovered during the pandemic that we can do it. We can adapt to change and do it quite quickly.
So, where do you begin?
As always, the best place to begin is with the basics. To get organised means learning and implementing the principles of COD—Collect, Organise and do.
When it comes to collecting, how will you gather together all the stuff you either have to do, would like to do or have a passing interest in?
For some, that may mean setting up their phones as their universal collection tool (UCT) or perhaps a pocket notebook.
If you choose to use your phone—possibly the best UCT as we carry these things with us everywhere we go (including the bathroom!) what application will you use?
The application you use for collecting is important because it needs to fulfil two requirements. First, it must be quick and easy to use. Too many buttons to press, and you won’t collect everything. Second, you need to trust that what you collect will be saved and not lost.
A lack of either of those functions and it will fail.
Once you have your collection tool set up, the next area to work on is the habit of processing and organising what you collect. Done frequently, and this won’t take a lot of time. Done infrequently, and it will take too long, which then means you won’t do it.
I generally advise people to clear their inboxes every twenty-four to forty-eight hours. This depends on how much you are collecting. I find people just starting out with a system collect a lot more than seasoned people do.
That’s actually a good thing because for the first few weeks, it’s about building the habit. The old habit of trying to remember things in your head doesn’t work, but it’s an ingrained habit—“oh, I won’t forget that”.
You will. Write it down.
If you are collecting a lot of stuff, clear your inbox daily. If you’re collecting less than ten things a day, you can clear your inbox less frequently. (Although I do advise you to scan your inbox daily to ensure you haven’t missed anything important).
Now, when it comes to organising what you collected is a little more difficult. This requires some thought.
The goal is to find what you need as quickly as possible when you need it.
One thing that will hinder you here is if you have stuff all over the place. I have a policy of using tools for the purpose they were designed. This means I use one task manager, Todoist, for all my tasks.
This stops me from having to find stuff in multiple different places. When I start the day, I know all my tasks will be in one place.
This also helps with trust. I can trust that what needs to be done today will be on my Todoist Today list.
Yet, this didn’t happen overnight. It took many months of learning Todoist and building trust.
When I see people announcing on YouTube or social media that they have switched to another app, my eyes roll. I’ve seen it time and time again. If you constantly switch apps, you never build trust in your system. You’re always learning a new tool, and things slip through the cracks.
Let me say this: you will never become better at managing time or more productive if you cannot settle on a set of tools and stick with them.
You are not missing out if a new app appears and promises to fix your productivity woes. That’s just marketing. Stop falling for it.
The question is, how will you organise your stuff?
I use the Time Sector System to organise my tasks, and my notes are organised using a methodology called GAPRA (Goals, Areas, Projects, Resources and Archive).
I have a lot of resources on these organisation methods on my website, so if you want to learn more about them, head over to Carl Pullein.com.
The final part is to do the work.
This involves getting control of your calendar.
Now, here’s the thing. If you do not control your calendar or are ignoring it, you will always have difficulty managing your time. While your calendar is the simplest tool in your productivity toolbox, it’s also the most powerful.
We all begin each day with the same amount of time. Yet we have different priorities and things we want time for. However, time is fixed. And that’s a good thing. It means you have one constant you can work with.
The number of tasks coming at you is not something you can control. You have no idea what will happen today. You don’t know how many emails and messages you will get; you don’t know what your customers or boss will ask you to do. That side of the equation is not within your control.
Yet, I see so many people trying to control the uncontrollable. That’s often where problems begin.
Instead, take some time and look at the different categories of things you need time for. Communications and admin will be two things. It’s also likely you will need time for chores and planning. On top of that will be the work you are employed to do.
A lawyer will need time to read and write contracts, prepare cases for court and talk to clients. All this requires time. The question becomes how much time do you want to allocate to these activities each day?
For example, I know that if I dedicate two hours a day to content creation, an hour to communications, and thirty minutes to admin, I will never have any backlogs or be very far behind on my commitments. That’s just three and a half hours a day to get important work done.
That means I have just over twenty hours for everything else each day. Take Louis, my dog, for his walk, eat, do chores, sleep and exercise, and, of course, spend time with my family and friends.
We are all different, and we will all have different priorities. Yet, if you control your calendar and are strict with how you allocate your time, you will find you do have time to get everything done. Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but you will have time over the next few weeks.
Doing what I call the backend work matters. That’s deciding your priorities and using those to guide your days. If spending time with your family is important, you need to protect time to spend with your family. Hoping you will find time in the future is not a good strategy.
If you’re sick and tired of seeing hundreds if not thousands of unread emails in your inbox, they won’t disappear because you hope they will. You have to deliberately set aside time to deal with them and then protect time each day to ensure the backlogs don’t reappear.
Similarly, if you have projects that are behind schedule, they will not miraculously get back on schedule if all you are applying is hope. You have to set aside time to do the work intentionally.
It’s worth pointing out that no new, brilliant AI-inspired calendar or productivity tool will ever do the work for you either. You do the work. It’s your time, and only you know what is critical and what is not.
This all comes back to the basic principles. Know what is important to you—develop your areas of focus. You can download my free Areas of Focus workbook from my website.
Make sure you collect and organise your stuff, set aside time to do the work, and then do the work.
It will take time to develop these habits. But it’s not impossible if you really want to do it. Allow yourself that time, and within a few weeks you will begin to see notable improvements in your time management and productivity.
Thank you, Win, for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
What’s the difference between a project and a goal? That’s what we’re exploring this week.
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Script | 333
Hello, and welcome to episode 333 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the benefits of becoming more organised is that you begin to analyse what you do and why you do it in a little more detail. You start seeing what is important and what is not, what you need to do, what you can pass off to others, and what you can ignore.
And, most importantly, you understand what your areas of focus mean to you.
However, one area I’ve seen people struggle with is how to define a project and a goal and what the differences are. This week. I hope to clarify that so you know how to use each one.
Before we get to the question, I just wanted to give you a heads-up that September’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming up. Registration is open now, and places, as usual, are going fast.
I know there are no quick fixes or that the road from disorganised to organised is easy and problem-free. But if you follow a few core principles, you can build a system that works for the way you work. That is what you will learn in this workshop.
I’d love to see you there. The dates are September 6th and 13th. Both days start at 8:30 pm Eastern Standard Time (that’s 5:30 pm if you are on the West Coast of the US).
Full details can be found on my website or in the show notes below.
Okay, on with the show. Which means handing you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Janine. Janine asks, Hi Carl, would you explain the difference between a goal and a project? I find the distinction very confusing.
Hi Janine, thank you for your question. You are not alone in this question. I get asked it a lot.
Let’s start with the basics. A project is a desired outcome that requires time and a series of connected tasks to be completed by a given deadline. A simple example of this would be clearing out your garage. This would be a project in that there will be a number of things that need organising, such as a skip (a British word for a large container that you throw large items away in).
You may need to go to the hardware store to buy cleaning materials and storage containers etc.
For this project, you’d set a date for when you would like to do it—say a weekend—and block your calendar so that’s what gets all your attention on the given day.
The project is complete once you have achieved the desired result.
Now, a goal also has a desired outcome, and it may also have a timeline in that you want to achieve the desired result by a given date.
However, a goal differs in that once the goal is achieved, you will want to maintain it.
A simple example would be if you set a goal to lose twenty pounds by the end of the year. As I am recording this in August, that would give you four months to lose twenty pounds or five pounds a month.
Once you have achieved your goal, though, you are unlikely to want to put those twenty pounds back on. So, a goal’s objective is to take you from where you are today to where you want to be in the future.
I like to think of a goal like acting as a course correction engine burn. If you’ve seen the film Apollo 13 (a brilliant film if you’re interested in project management and dealing with crises).
When a spacecraft goes to the moon, it is dealing with a moving object. The moon travels around the earth. Therefore, you need to anticipate where the moon will be when you arrive at its atmosphere. Get that wrong, and you are in trouble. Too shallow, and you would bounce off into outer space. Too steep, and you would burn up in the moon’s atmosphere.
This means, from time to time, you need to adjust your course, and that’s where the engine burn comes in. You turn on the engines for a few seconds to push you back on course.
That’s how goals work in your life.
If you have established what your areas of focus are—these are the eight areas of life we all share that are important to us. For example, family and relationships, your career, health and fitness and finances. If any of these falls out of balance, you can set a goal to push you back on track.
A simple example would be if, as part of your financial area of focus, you save a minimum of $5,000 per year, and currently, you have only saved $1,000 for the year, you would set a goal to get that back in balance. You could increase the amount you save per month by reducing your spending, or you may decide that this year is proving difficult financially, so you choose to increase the amount you save next year—that would become the goal.
In many ways, goals are a series of repetitive tasks you perform in order to achieve a specific outcome that improves your life.
A project is rarely repetitive. For instance, I have a project at the moment to record the audiobook version of Your Time Your Way. Sitting down to record the chapters is repetitive, but the content I record is different each time, and I need to share the recorded files with my publisher each week.
The deadline for the project is the end of September. Once done, that’s it. My publisher will fine-tune things and add the audiobook to the list of formats available. I no longer have anything to do. The project is complete.
If we return to the weight loss goal, imagine I achieve my goal of losing those twenty pounds; it’s not finished. Now, the goal becomes to maintain my weight and avoid anything that would risk putting those twenty pounds back on. That means changing eating and exercise habits.
Similarly, with the financial goal, once everything is back to where it should be, I need to change or add habits to ensure I don’t fall behind again.
That’s the real purpose of setting goals. To initiate a change that endures.
A project doesn’t do that. Once done, it’s finished. Often forgotten about.
A project could be your next vacation. Before you arrive at your vacation destination, you have a series of tasks to complete. Research hotels, flights, and car hire, for example. Then, book your hotel, flights and car rental. Pack your clothes and get to the airport on time.
When you return home. The project is complete. Yes, you will hopefully have some nice memories and pictures, but for all intents and purposes, the project is complete.
Now here’s the interesting part of goals and projects. Sometimes, a goal can become a project.
Let me explain.
One of my goals is to spend a week at the Goldeneye Resort in Jamaica. It’’s not just a goal for me, it’s been a dream since I was a teenager. Goldeneye is where Ian Fleming wrote all the James Bond books. And, if you don’t know, Ian Fleming is my writing hero.
Today, though, it’s just a goal.
To achieve this goal, I will need to save a lot of money. Goldeneye is not a cheap place to stay, and I’m sure the flights will not be cheap either.
So, if I decide I want to go to Goldeneye in twelve months’ time—let’s say September 2025, I have twelve months to save the money. I would set a goal to save X amount of dollars per month. That goal may involve reducing my expenditure—no more expensive pens, inks and paper (oh no!) and instead putting that money away.
However, the habit I form here is to become more of a saver than a spender, getting into the habit of saving money each month.
Now, once we get to April next year, I would need to book a villa at the resort—that would require a little research. This goal has now become a project. There are a series of tasks involved to ensure my wife and I are on the plane flying to Jamaica in September next year.
In other words, the goal is to save money so I can achieve a dream. Once the money is saved, it becomes a project so we arrive at Goldeneye on the right date.
I can see why understanding the difference between a goal and a project is difficult. Although they have many similarities, their functions are quite different.
Think of a goal as something you use to change a habit. A way to move you towards living to the standards you set for yourself in your Areas of Focus. A project is a tool you use to organise a group of tasks that achieve a specific outcome by a given deadline.
As Tony Robbins says: “The reason we set goals is to give our lives focus and to move us in the direction we would like to go.”
And that is the essence of a goal.
One more distinction here is the number of projects and goals you may have. Often, you won’t have any control over the number of projects you have. They could be given to you by your work or family.
Goals are personal. You get to decide what they are. It’s also important not to try and accomplish too many goals at once. That dilutes your focus and attention.
By their very nature, goals are hard. You are changing habits and moving outside of your comfort zone. If you have too many goals at once, making that change becomes almost impossible. Be patient. Change one thing at a time.
We are all works In progress.
In 2009, I was an overweight, smoking binge drinker. I chose to change that lifestyle and become a healthy, non-smoking runner by the end of the decade.
That involved numerous changes, but the goal was to end the decade healthier, fitter, and stronger than I began it.
I achieved it. Yet, I didn’t quit everything on January 1 2010. I took my time. I began by reducing drinking to almost zero. I also started running again.
By 2014, I had completed two marathons and numerous half-marathons and chose to tackle smoking. By 2016, I had quit smoking, and the final part of the goal was to quit sugar—I managed to do that in 2019.
It took ten years to turn my health and lifestyle around. But it was fun. There were challenges—quitting smoking was the hardest, but as I went through the decade, I developed resilience, a stronger mindset and as I saw the results, I maintained my enthusiasm throughout.
So, there you go, Janine. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week is a very special episode.
Earlier, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr Kourosh Dini, a clinical psychiatrist who is also very prominent in the productivity world with his Waves of Focus programme and his fantastic weekly Wind Down newsletter (which I highly recommend you subscribe to)
I first encountered Kourosh in 2012 when he spoke at the OmniFocus event at MacWorld. I then began following his work.
In this chat, we discuss focus, ADHD, and much more. There’s so much in this episode, so get your pens and paper ready—you’re going to need them.
Links
Learn more about Kourosh’s work:
Kourosh’s website →
Waves of Focus →
Kourosh’s newsletter →
Get a $20.00 trial of Waves of Focus membership →
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Do you feel you never have enough time to do everything on your to-do list? Well, you’re not alone.
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Script | 331
Hello, and welcome to episode 331 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
How often do you begin the day with a to-do list that you know will be impossible to complete? What does that do to your motivation? If you are like most people, your motivation will sink, and the day becomes another stressful horror show.
Why is that? Why do we find ourselves with a to-do list longer than any reasonable person could complete in a single day? Is it because we are over-ambitious and over-optimistic about our abilities or because we have too much to do?
Well, this week, we will examine some of the causes of this problem and discuss potential solutions. While not necessarily easy to implement, these solutions will give you the necessary breathing room to create realistic, doable days and leave you with enough energy to enjoy your evenings doing what you want.
Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, may I ask a favour? If you have been kind enough to buy a copy of my book Your Time, Your Way, could you leave a review? Reviews help other people discover the book, learn better ways to manage their time and their lives and reduce stress, which will ultimately help all of us.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Heather. Heather asks, Hi Carl, I have tried for years to use a to-do list, yet after a few days, the list becomes enormous, and I stop looking at it (which makes the list even longer). I’ve tried all sorts of digital to-do lists and even pen and paper, but nothing works.
How does anyone keep their to-do list manageable so it doesn’t become useless?
Hi Heather, thank you for sending in your question.
To get to the bottom of this, we need to go back to some basics. That is to understand the relationship between time and activity.
To start, can we all agree that doing anything requires time? Whether taking your dog for a walk, cooking dinner, or meeting up with friends, all activities require some time.
Can we also agree that each day has twenty-four hours?
As long as we accept these two facts—that anything we do requires time and that there are twenty-four hours in a day—we have a solid anchor on which to build a reliable time management system.
When I accepted these two facts, everything changed for the better. It didn’t matter how much was on my to-do list if I didn’t have the time to complete the tasks.
I remember the days before I accepted this. I used to commute to the university I was teaching at—ninety minutes each way—and then teach for six hours. I had a to-do list with over thirty tasks on it, and I needed to stay two or three hours after my classes to talk with my students.
In effect, my day was doomed the moment I woke up. There was no way I could drive for three hours, teach for six, do two hours of tutorials, and complete thirty tasks. Yet that was what my day looked like each day.
That had nothing to do with time management or productivity. It had everything to do with me being unrealistic about what could be done in a single twenty-four-hour period.
And that is where most of our problems start—being unrealistic about what can be done in a single day.
If you are familiar with my Time Sector System—a way to manage your work and time more realistically—you will know about something I call your “core work”.
Your core work is the work you are employed to do. It does not include work you have “volunteered” to do—those little favours you do for a colleague or looking something up for your boss. It’s just the work you were employed to do.
As a university lecturer, I was employed to teach. My core work involved preparing for and delivering my lectures. There was some additional work, such as setting and grading exam papers, but for the most part, my core work was teaching my students.
Sending attendance records and dealing with class time conflicts for my students was not a part of my core work. I did do those tasks, but they were never at the expense of doing my core work.
Establishing what your core work is gives you some advantages. The first is you know what to prioritise each day. As your core work is what you are employed to do, it naturally follows that it will be your top priority for the day.
The second is you learn how long it takes to do your core work. This helps you see what is possible and not possible regarding the work you set for yourself each day.
Let me give you an example. Today, I run a coaching programme. After each coaching call with a client, I write feedback summarising what we discussed and include a little homework for them to do before our next call.
Writing one piece of feedback takes me, on average, twenty minutes. This means I can write around three pieces of feedback per hour. I didn’t know this when I first started writing feedback; I only learned this by repeating the same task over and over.
This is an average. Sometimes, it may take me thirty minutes to write one; other times, it may take ten minutes. I am human, and so are you—I hope—which means the time it takes you to do something will vary depending on how much sleep you’ve had, whether you are stressed or anxious about something. You could be distracted by a colleague, family member, or anything else from a long list of potential factors.
If you try to strictly limit yourself to a precise timeline, you will become stressed out. It’s not possible. With your activities, you can only work with averages. Time and the number of tasks you have may be fixed and easily identifiable; however, how long it takes you to do the tasks is not. There are too many variables involved to be able to do that.
But averages are fine. Over a week, those things do average out, and you will find that your critical core work is consistently getting done.
However, this goes a step further. Because I know I need one hour a day to write feedback, I can only allow up to three coaching calls a day. If I were to allow four or five calls a day, I would require more time to write the feedback.
Requiring more time to write my feedback would mean I would need to reduce something else. Perhaps I could stop writing my blog posts or newsletters or reduce the number of episodes of this podcast.
Remember, time is fixed—that part of the equation cannot be changed. The only thing that can be changed is the number of tasks you do—i.e. your activity.
Another factor here is that repeating the same task over and over leads to better efficiency, which reduces the time it takes to complete the tasks. If I were to take three of you listeners to a Formula 1 pit lane and we attempted to change the tires on an F1 car as they came in it would take us a long time.
While the tools would be given would be state of the art, and each tyre only has one bolt to undo, our unfamiliarity with the task would slow us down. The pit crews tasked with changing the tyres can do so in less than two seconds. That comes about because they practice. They’ve done it over a thousand times before.
What you can do is look at your core work and calculate how long it takes you to do that work each week. You may need to monitor this for a week or two, but the exercise will give you some valuable data. Data you can use to plan out your week.
For instance, I discovered that if I dedicated an hour a day to dealing with my actionable emails and messages, I would never have a situation where anyone was waiting longer than 24 hours for a response. There are some days where I cannot reply to all of them, but on the whole, I can stay on top of it all (and that’s based on 150 emails on average per day, although not all of them will be actionable).
Responding to my actionable email for an hour daily means I have developed the most efficient method possible. I group all my actionable emails in a single folder. When I process my inbox, I can quickly identify anything that needs action and move it to my actionable folder in seconds. I’ve been following this process for over ten years, and now I can clear around 350 emails from my inbox in less than thirty minutes.
Ten years ago, that would have taken me more than two hours. Repetition is not just the mother of mastery; it’s also the secret to getting faster at doing anything.
Last week, in one of my newsletters, I wrote that hope is a terrible time management strategy. Hoping you will find time to do your work is never going to work. The only thing that works is to get realistic about what you have to do and how much time you have available.
I’ve seen so many people tie themselves in knots, trying to perform impossible mental gymnastics to circumvent this fact.
It’s only when you stop trying to do the impossible and get real about what you can and cannot do in a day that you start to get control over your time.
So far, I’ve talked about the constants—your core work—which is known to you. But what about all the unknowns? The agitated client who needs your help urgently or your boss who forgot an important presentation she is due to deliver this afternoon and needs your help to prepare.
One thing you likely will have discovered is that these unknowns are going to happen. Perhaps not every day, but more often than you would like. How do you manage these?
This comes back to controlling your calendar. Filling your calendar with appointments and time to do your tasks leaves you vulnerable to all these inevitable unknowns. You will need to create space for these.
Again, this is about being realistic. How many meetings do you have scheduled today? When are they? How much time do you have between them?
Perhaps an additional question is: Do you really have to attend all these meetings? Are there some you could excuse yourself from? Maybe not, but it’s worth asking.
I love to ask people if they could guarantee two hours a day where they are undisturbed so they can get on and do their most important work for the day. Would they become more productive? Of course, the answer would be yes.
Why not try that? When you plan the week, find two hours a day for undisturbed, focused work. If you were to look at your calendar next month, could you pre-block those two hours out now? I suspect most of you listening to this could do that. Why not do it now? At least try and see what happens.
There will be days when you cannot do that, and that’s fine. If you could do three days out of five where you could, though, you’ll soon find yourself becoming more productive.
And that’s what it’s all about, Heather. Understanding your relationship with time. Time is fixed; you cannot change that. You only have control over what you say yes to and the number of tasks you complete each day. Focus your attention on that part of the equation. Learn what you can realistically complete each day and then get more efficient at doing that work.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Heather. Thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week, is it possible to stay disciplined, or is there a better way to ensure you are consistently doing the things you want to do?
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Script | 330
Hello, and welcome to episode 330 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
When I hear people discussing discipline, I am always interested in hearing about their struggles.
Life is always a struggle. We are often torn between what we want to do and what we must do. I would love to watch my rugby team play live, yet the kick-off time is usually around 2 AM in my time zone, and I know I must be asleep at that time.
I’ve discussed the importance of daily and weekly planning many times. If you’re listening to this podcast, you probably know how valuable a solid weekly planning session is to your overall productivity. The question is, how consistent are you?
It’s easy to skip the weekly planning because there’s no immediate penalty. You could go through the whole week without any plan and get stuff done. Unfortunately, this approach leads to doing the work of others and never being able to do what you should be doing.
Whether you do or you don’t do the right things will always come down to discipline. But is that true? Perhaps not. There is another way, and I will show you that by answering this week’s question.
This means it’s time now for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Clyde. Clyde asks, hi Carl, I’ve loved following you and other people who teach time management and productivity skills. I know the concepts and what to do but never do it. I think I am too lazy or lack discipline. Do you have any strategies to help someone like me who lacks discipline?
Great question, Clyde.
Very few people are able to be determinedly disciplined every day. I can think of only one person—David Goggins—who has mastered this. Yet David Goggins was not always like that. If you know his story, it took him many years to develop the resolve and mental strength, and even after all those years, he admits that each day is a struggle.
This means that being consistently disciplined will be an uphill battle for us everyday folk—one we will likely lose.
So, what can we do instead?
I’ve found that we can develop a set of standards by which to live our lives. This can begin with simple things like going to bed and waking up at a consistent time.
You are likely already doing this; if you are, it will be much easier to set that standard.
The great thing about standards is your mindset changes. Instead of thinking, “I have to wake up at 7:30 every morning”, it becomes something you do. It goes from “I have to wake up at 7:30 to “I wake up at 7:30” because that is who you are.
It took me years to become consistent in writing my journal. During those years, I used to think, “I should write a journal.” The problem with that statement is the word “should.” That single word makes it optional. Remove that word, and now it becomes a standard.
I cannot imagine a day not spending ten minutes writing in my journal after making my coffee. I look forward to sitting down with my favourite pen and journal and writing my thoughts, ideas, and fears on a page. I am a journal writer. It’s part of my identity.
Yet I also remember the years of thinking, “I should write a journal”, and never writing one. I began to believe there was a problem with my discipline. The truth was it had nothing to do with my discipline. It was because writing a journal every morning was not a standard I followed.
When I was in my final year of high school, my first part-time job was working in a hotel. I was very fortunate because, in the late 1980s, hotels were still focused on quality and personalised service instead of the standardised, automated service most hotels offer today. This meant that everything had to be pristine and in perfect order from the moment a guest walked into reception.
I remember my induction training focused on little things like placing the pencils and notepads on the conference room tables in the exact same way and how the handles of the tea cups should always be placed, with the handle pointing to the right and the teaspoon placed on the left.
Even how the decoration of the plates must always be pointing in the same direction.
I learned those things thirty-five years ago and still follow the same standards today when laying the table for a family meal.
It doesn’t feel hard to do that. I have set these standards for myself, and I follow them daily without thought or difficulty. There certainly is no discipline involved.
You may have heard the phrase, “We are creatures of habits”. Well, that’s true. We are creatures of habit. If you are not doing a weekly plan, it is because it is your habit not to plan the week. If you are not exercising regularly, it’s because you are in the habit of not exercising. It has nothing to do with discipline. But it does have everything to do with the choices we make.
You can choose not to plan the week, or you can choose to plan the week. The question then is, what is your standard? Are you the kind of person who plans the week consistently or not?
Another way I have seen this manifest is through exercise. When I was a teenager, I was a competitive middle-distance runner. I was a sub-four minute 1,500-metre runner at the age of 16.
When I was training, doing a 10-mile run every Sunday was the standard. It didn’t matter if it was pouring with rain, snowing, or a gale was howling. It was 10 am Sunday morning, and I’d put my running shoes on and head out the door to begin my ten miler.
I rarely enjoyed it, but it was just something I did. I did it because I saw the benefit every summer when racing on the track.
Today, I am no longer a competitive runner, yet I still do my longer runs on a Sunday. Doing them on any other day seems weird. It breaks my standard.
So, Clyde, it has nothing to do with being lazy. We are all lazy. We inherited that from our ancestors when food was scarce in the winter months, and we needed to conserve energy to survive. The least active people survived the winters. All animals are designed to be lazy.
Yet, because we are naturally lazy, our brains will fight us when we try to change something about the way we live our lives. Change requires a lot of energy and focus; our brain’s natural instinct is to stop us from doing that. Routines and habits are safe, and so if you are not currently planning your week or blocking time out for doing your important work, your brain will fight you. And it will continue to fight you until your new habits are embedded.
This is why you will fail if you try and change too much at once. That involves far too much mental energy to remember your new standards. Instead, you pick one thing at a time.
I find changing one thing each quarter works best. This gives you three months to focus your efforts on one thing. That allows you enough time to adjust to your new habit or routine.
At the start of this year, I began a challenge to do at least ten daily push-ups. I knew ten would be easy to do when I was squeezed for time or travelling. I have tracked the number of push-ups I have been doing and noticed that the first week was a struggle. I was doing the minimum.
By the second week, I was doing between twelve and fifteen daily. Six months later, I am consistently doing between fifty and sixty a day, and it doesn’t feel any more difficult than when I was doing ten in early January.
Today, doing push-ups before I take my evening shower is something I just do. I don’t think about it. I get down on the floor and do them.
So, where would you begin if everything is not working? I suggest weekly planning. It’s giving yourself a plan for the week that lays the groundwork for better time management and productivity.
Planning the week gives you time each week to step back and examine your life as a whole, refocusing you on what is important to you.
Weekly planning highlights things you may be missing. For instance, you may realise you have not spoken with your brother or sister for a few weeks or have not thought about what you will do for the holidays later in the year.
And it also allows you to look ahead and make sure nothing significant has been missed and, more importantly, to plan out your week so it is balanced between your work and personal lives.
You will find that dedicating the same time each week to your weekly planning helps you become consistent. I’ve found Saturday mornings are usually the best time to do it. The week is still fresh in your mind, and once done, you can enjoy the weekend without worrying about the week ahead.
It’s much harder to be consistent and set a standard if you try to do the weekly planning at different times each week. You set the standard that you sit down and plan the week ahead at 8:00 a.m. every Saturday morning. That’s your standard.
This helps your family, too, because they know you do your weekly plan each Saturday morning. They will leave you alone and let you get on with it. (Hopefully)
This goes with anything you want to be more consistent with. Learning new things, for example, can be done in the evenings before bed. That hour before I go to bed has become one of my favourite times of the day. I get to sit down with my commonplace book and learn something new. Last week, I learned how to make the “perfect” cup of coffee and how to do a proper double-edged safety razor wet shave.
Learning something new each day has become a standard for me. Going to bed now without learning something feels strange. It doesn’t have to be something deep. It can be anything you might be interested in at that moment. The standard you set is about learning something new, not learning something specific.
So there you go, Clyde. Stop trying to be disciplined. That is very hard to do. Instead, set yourself standards. These are things that you just do because that is the person you are. You are the kind of person who clears their actionable email each day. The kind who plans their week and allocates one or two hours a day for doing the important things.
Thank you for your question, Clyde.
And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
What can you do to be productive when you have a chronic illness or a very unpredictable schedule? That’s what we’re looking at today.
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Script | 329
Hello, and welcome to episode 329 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
It’s a daily challenge to protect our time and stay focused enough to get our work done. It becomes even harder when we don’t get enough sleep or are worried about something in our personal life.
Yet, if you are suffering from a chronic illness or recovering from one, this challenge becomes exponentially more difficult. Not only are you trying to get work done, but you will also face unpredictable tiredness, low energy, difficulty consistently doing your work, or even knowing if you can do any work today.
This means planning the week is almost impossible, and you’ll find yourself frequently changing events and meetings on your calendar.
The good news is there are things you can do that don’t make you even more tired.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Mia. Mia asks, do you have any productivity tips or advice for those with chronic illness? Or just those who have incredibly unpredictable schedules? I'd love to find a way to be more productive that doesn't feel stressful, but obviously, time management is difficult for me.
Hi Mia, thank you for your question.
With illness, the priority is always to avoid making things worse. This means prioritising rest above everything else. Naturally, this can be difficult as an employee because of your company’s demands. Hopefully, you have an understanding boss.
It’s also tricky if you are self-employed, as your work may be your only source of income.
So, given that you must prioritise rest and recovery, the place to start is with your calendar. Don’t start with your task manager—that will never help you. All that will do is remind you that you have a lot of things to do. It will never tell you if you have the time to do it. Only your calendar can do that.
Before opening your calendar, though, ask yourself when you will most likely be focused and have some energy. That could be in the morning if you are a morning person or perhaps in the evening if you are a night owl. It’s this time you want to be protecting.
However, there’s an important factor to consider. According to recent research, and as Andrew Huberman points out, we focus in ninety-minute cycles.
In other words, we can focus for about ninety minutes before needing a rest. However, that time will reduce if you are ill or recovering from an illness. Depending on the severity of your illness, the amount of time you can focus on before needing a rest could be very short.
A couple of years ago, I worked with a client who was suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and her focus time was around twenty minutes before requiring a four-hour rest. Fortunately, she was on long-term sick leave, but being an ambitious person, she wanted to readjust her lifestyle so she could better cope when her condition improved.
When you know your focus time ability, you can better plan a schedule that allows you to get at least some things done.
For instance, if you know you focus better early in the morning, plan your focus block of time then. You want to work with your natural rhythms rather than fighting against them. It’s tough when you’re not sick to fight your natural rhythms; when you are sick or recovering from an illness, it will work against you and leave you more tired.
When planning the week, try to book meetings and appointments when you are not at your most focused. There’s something about human interaction that produces its own natural energy.
This means that if you are a morning person, you would schedule a block of time in the morning for doing your most important work for the day, then give yourself a sufficient break before allowing one or two meetings in the afternoon.
The good thing about this approach is if you feel strong and can go a little longer with your focus time, you have the flexibility to do so. Although, be careful here.
I usually need to wake up early Monday and Tuesday morning for calls. I only get three or four hours of sleep on Sunday and Monday nights. I find that on Tuesday afternoons and evenings, I am exhausted. Knowing this, I don’t schedule much work but keep things as free as possible, so I am not trying to push myself too hard.
If I push through on a Tuesday, I am also tired on Wednesday. If I back off a little on a Tuesday afternoon, it will give me time to recover, and I can be back on point on Wednesday.
If you schedule this during a weekly planning session, you can protect time for focused work before anyone tries to schedule more meetings with you.
Okay, so that’s the weekly planning taken care of. Now, how do you deal with the unpredictability of suffering from a chronic illness?
This is where having a weekly objective comes in.
Whether you are suffering from a chronic illness or not, one thing you will likely have discovered is that, being human, your energy and motivation ebbs and flows. Some days, you’re on fire and in the zone; others, everything is a struggle. The trouble is, it’s impossible to predict when this will happen.
The mistake we all make is thinking tomorrow will be the same as today or better, yet that’s not guaranteed. When you set objectives for the week rather than the day, if you do have a bad day or two, you can still recover and get what needs to be done, done.
Another thing to work on is establishing your daily non-negotiables. In my case, they are walking Louis, my little Yorkshire Terrier, getting a minimum of twenty minutes of exercise and spending at least thirty minutes responding to my actionable emails and other messages.
What are your daily non-negotiables beyond getting enough sleep and the right nutrition?
Whatever they are, they need scheduling, so you protect time for them.
I would also recommend scheduling your rest times too. Rest and recovery are a big part of your rehabilitation when you are ill. This becomes a hard must-do each day—whether you want to or not. Not getting sufficient rest will delay your recovery, which is never good.
Scheduling your rest time also brings some predictability to your days and week. If you know you will rest between 10:30 am and 2:30 pm, you can better schedule your tasks and appointments in the day. You have a hard block for four hours in the middle of your day, and whether you need the rest or not, at least you know you have it in reserve.
Now, what about the people with unpredictable schedules? I was thinking about what types of work this would be and thought of firefighters and emergency room medical professionals. No day will be the same; some days could be very quiet, others extremely busy and stressful.
In these situations, you will find that this type of work involves shifts. You’re either on shift or not. When I was working in hotels, we worked shifts, and there was no way I could expect to do any focused work while I was on shift. It was impossible to predict when things would be chaotic or quiet.
To do focused work, you need protected time. If you are not confident you will get the peace and quiet needed, you will be on edge, waiting for the next interruption. This is not a great place to be mentally when trying to do your most important work.
The only real option is to structure your days so that when you are on shift, you allow yourself the freedom to do light, easy tasks such as admin and communications. These rarely need a lot of focus and can usually be done little by little.
You can save the tasks you need to concentrate on for an hour or two when you are not on shift. Once you structure your weeks in this way, if you are asked to produce a piece of work by a given date, you can check your calendar to ensure you have enough non-shift days to do the work you are asked to do.
It’s worth remembering that we are all limited by the hours we get each day. We can leverage this by hiring assistants and other people to do some of our work, but that option is not available for all of us. And you cannot delegate important things such as rest, family time, and working on your health to other people.
When you work shifts, much of the decision-making is taken away from you. You’re on shift, and your job is to help people. For those hours you are working your shift, that’s what you do. If there is downtime, take advantage by doing the little things that have a bad habit of accumulating, but never schedule something important when you are working. Leave those tasks for when you are off shift.
The key, Mia, is to get very strict with your calendar and trust that it will do its job for you. This does involve you not ignoring your calendar. You can reschedule or delete things but not ignore them. You need to trust something, and your calendar serves you. You can trust it.
I hope that has helped, and thank you for your question, Mia.
Before I go, my book, Your Time Your Way, is now available in Kindle, soft back, and hardback versions. The links are in the description below.
Thank you for listening. It is now my turn to wish you all a very productive week.
This week, what are the basics of time management?
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Script | 327
Hello, and welcome to episode 327 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
A lot has been spoken and written about time management over the years. This has made the whole space of time management confusing when, in reality, time management is simple—or it should be.
Today’s question concerns all this and, more importantly, how to return to the basics of time management so you can regain control and not feel guilty about not doing things when more important things need doing.
Now, before we get to the question, just a quick reminder that Your Time, Your Way is now out in Kindle, Soft and hardback formats. You can get it right now and start building the foundations to live the life you want to live.
Your Time, Your Way is a book, yet to me, it’s much more than that. It’a also a manual to build a resilient time management system that will work in the background for you.
If you have already bought the book, thank you so much. Could you do me a little favour and leave a review? That really helps to get the book in more people’s hands, which can only benefit all of us. The more people who operate using these principles, the easier it will be to manage meetings and requests.
Anyway, back to this episode, and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Robert. Robert asks, hi Carl, what do you suggest I do when, no matter how hard I try, I just cannot get control of my calendar? I try to block time out for my core work, but then I get so many meeting requests I have to either delete them or reschedule. It’s driving me crazy!
Thank you, Robert, for your question.
A good place to start is to look back at your calendar for the last two or three weeks and see where your time is going. How many internal meetings did you attend?
There’s a difference between internal and external meetings. Hopefully, your external meetings—with customers, for instance—are important. However, you should look more closely at your internal meetings. Were they valuable? Did you really need to attend them?
One important metric to consider is how many hours each week you spend in internal meetings.
Internal meetings are, by their very nature, places where you talk about the work. Work rarely gets done. The biggest waste of time for people is those team update meetings. These benefit no one and just drag people away from doing their work. A good manager sets up systems and processes so that their team maximise their work time and minimises their meeting time.
One thing you can do is set a limit on the number of hours you attend each week. For instance, you may choose to limit your internal meeting time to ten hours per week. Once that time is taken, you accept no more meeting requests that week.
This approach has two benefits. The first is you can confidently create time blocks for your core work around these ten hours. The second benefit is if anyone in authority challenges you about declined meetings, you have evidence to show you are being asked to attend too many meetings.
If your manager objects to this limit, you can increase the limit, but you do so in a way that they are fully aware of the time involved and how that will reduce your available work time.
There is always a conflict within a corporation between the managers, whose job is to fill their calendars with meetings, training sessions, and one-on-ones, and the producers—the people who produce the work—whose goal is to minimise events on their calendars so they can get on and do their work.
However, some compromise is needed here. Managers can only do their jobs if they know what’s going on and can give guidance and instruction when necessary. To do that, they need meetings. Equally, producers need to communicate what is being done, where there may be areas of difficulty and to ensure what they are working on is the right work.
One thing that will always destroy any attempts to become better at managing time is to treat everything that comes your way as urgent. That’s never likely to be the case. Most things are not urgent and are tasks that are being passed off to buy the sender some time.
Here’s something you can try when you are asked to do something. Default to doing it next week. This means if you receive a message asking you to do something, you respond with a reply, saying you will do it and get it to them next week. Avoid giving a specific date. Just say I will get it to you next week.
This tests how urgent something really is. The worst that can happen is the receiver replies, telling you it is needed sooner than next week. Okay, now you know it is urgent.
I do this all the time, and I can say that 90% of the time, I get the response thanking me, and that will be fine. The remaining 10% or so usually reply with something along the lines of “Could you do it sooner?”—which still gives me a choice.
Of all the things in the productivity world, the only thing you have that is constant is time. You are not really managing time. Instead, you are managing your activities within that time. This is great because you have at least one constant and that means you can do something with it.
Sadly, the second part of this equation is never fixed and will never stop. That is stuff to do. There will always be something to do. The trouble is because time is fixed; you have to solve a puzzle each day. How to fit in the right pieces of activity into your limited time.
If you do not know what your areas of focus are—the things that are important to you as an individual—and your core work—the work that is important in your job, you never have a reference to decide what should go on your calendar each day. Your areas of focus and core work give you your priorities, which means you can better choose what needs to be done each day. Without knowing them, everything will be important and urgent; in other words, nothing is important and urgent.
This means it’s important to step back and think about what is important—a way to pre-decide what will get your attention and what will not. This avoids having to make too many decisions each day—something that will inevitably leave you feeling exhausted and worn out.
That’s one of the reasons why I stress the importance of establishing your areas of focus and core work. It might take you a few weeks or months even to work these out, but the time it will save you in the long term makes this essential.
If you really want to get control of your calendar, Robert, then begin with what you want time for and fix it in your calendar when you do your weekly planning. If you would like forty-five minutes a day for exercise, then get it on your calendar and treat it as a non-negotiable part of your day.
Taking Louis out for a walk each day is non-negotiable for me. Not only is it important for Louis to get outside, but it’s also important for me as it gets me away from a screen. It also means I am moving—something we humans are designed to do. It’s one hour out of 24. It’s not much to ask.
Also, be aware of how much time you are spending on the hidden task admin. That’s the emails, messages and additional check-ins required when you accept tasks from other people. It’s never as simple as preparing a presentation. There are likely to be additional time commitments such as more emails, requests to add things from other people and, of course, the inevitable meetings.
If you’ve ever been asked to join a committee, you will have discovered that the one or two hours a week you were promised is never one or two hours. You’ll be expected to read reports, agendas, and meeting minutes and submit ideas. Those one or two hours very quickly become six or eight hours a week.
A couple of years ago, I agreed to do a series of interviews for an organisation. I thought a one-hour interview every month would be easy. All I would need would be an hour of research and preparation for each interview and the interview itself—two hours a month at most.
Hahaha, that’s not what happened. The research often took three or four hours; then there was submitting the proposed questions to the organisation, the back-and-forth trying to set up the interview time, and the requests for changes in the questions I proposed. In total, I found that those expected two hours a month turned into ten hours.
This goes back to one of the most basic laws of time management. Things will always take longer to do than you initially anticipate.
If you really want to master your time, getting control of your calendar is the most important part. This means you have to be strict and ruthless. That said, what you will find if you do is people will start respecting your time much more. If you are tow available, you lose that respect. It’ll always be, “Oh, ask Robert; he’ll do it for you”, and boom, you have more work to do.
Saying no every so often is one of the best ways to get your time back. Sadly, so few people have the courage to do it. Instead of finding solutions, they find excuses as to why they are different and must remain available to everyone. Good luck with that strategy. I’ve never found anyone who could make that work.
I hope that has helped, Robert. Thank you for your question.
And if you have not got your copy of Your Time, Your Way yet, you can get it now. The link is in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Three years ago, I began a journey that came to an end last Saturday. Today, I want to share that journey with you, what I learned and how my journey can help you become better at managing your time and ultimately be more productive.
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Script | 327
Hello, and welcome to episode 327 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
My book, Your Time, Your Way, Time Well Managed! Life Well Lived!, was published last Saturday. It is the end result of a three-year journey that began with the idea of putting everything I have learned about better managing time together so you have enough time to spend with your loved ones, enjoy the hobbies you have always wanted to participate in, and so much more without feeling drained, overwhelmed, and rushed.
The book is a manual for taking control of your time and making the things you want to do happen without stress or overwhelm. It gives you a complete roadmap for making time work for you instead of working against you. But more on the contents later.
From a productivity perspective, when you begin a project like writing a book, there is one critical starting point: getting started. What often happens, and is the reason so few people do any of their personal projects or achieve goals, is that too much time is wasted in the thinking and planning stage.
There’s a comfort in dreaming and thinking about landscaping your garden (backyard). That dreaming can be very seductive. It allows you to believe you are doing something about your project—‘I’m doing the planning’—yet nothing is happening. Your garden is not getting landscaped.
This book was two years in the planning stage (I am not immune to being seduced by the dream). I was even telling people, “I’m currently writing a book.” That was a lie. I wasn’t “writing” anything. I was dreaming of writing a book. I was stuck in the planning stage.
To get yourself out of that delusion—as that is what too much planning is, a delusion—you need to start doing something. Every project has a beginning. That could be visiting the local hardware store to purchase the tools you will need or, in my case, when writing a book, to write the introduction (this gives me a mini-outline of what I want to write about). Do that first step.
The next critical part of any project, whether professional or personal, is to decide how much time you are willing to give it each week. You are unlikely to be able to estimate how long a big project will take accurately. There are too many unknowns, and if you involve other people, there will inevitably be delays.
The only thing you have control over is your time. You don’t control other people’s time—even if you are a boss. So, how much time are you willing to or are able to give to the project each week?
Once you know how much time you are giving the project each week, schedule it.
Personal projects can be worked on in the evening and at weekends, while professional ones can be done during work hours.
One thing you will eventually learn about time management is hoping you will find the time to do something is not a good strategy. It never works. If you want time to work on something, anything, you need to protect the time. Whether that is going out for a family walk in the evenings, washing your car or writing a letter to your aunt in New Zealand.
Time management works when you are intentional about it. In other words, you must protect time for the things you want to do.
When the early version of Your Time, Your Way went out to a select group of readers, many commented that it took over fifty pages to get to talking about time. That was intentional.
Too often, books on productivity and time management are about showing you how to squeeze in more and more. That is not the purpose of this book. Not only is that approach unsustainable, it’s also unhealthy. Instead, my approach is to encourage you to start by thinking about your life as a whole. What do you want out of your life? What is important to you?
While we share eight areas—family and relationships, career/business, finances, health and fitness, self-development, lifestyle and life experiences, spirituality, and life’s purpose—how we define these are different for each of us. That means what we want out of these areas will also be different.
The order of priority is also different. As we go through life, the priority of these will change. When you are young, career/business and perhaps lifestyle and life experiences will be high on your list. As you age, health and finances may creep up towards the top. Again, we will all be different here.
Knowing what is important to you is the foundation of a well-lived life. It also shows you how to best use your limited resource of time so you spend more of it doing the things you want to do.
It was very tempting to begin the book with lists of tips and tricks for managing time, but I knew that would not help you in the long term. It’s a quick-fix approach that quickly leads to slipping back into old habits.
When you begin by identifying what is important to you, you give yourself a self-generating motive for getting out of bed with enthusiasm, and it naturally gives you a purpose each day. You are spending a large portion of your day on the things you know are important to you.
But more than that, knowing your areas of focus and what they mean to you gives you clarity that helps you make decisions. If you have identified your family and friends as being important to you and you work in a company that expects you to work late and at weekends, you may wish to consider looking for an alternative job. That could mean you need to change companies or perhaps your career.
Not identifying what is important to you will likely leave you stuck in a job or career that leaves you feeling deflated, unhappy and trapped. Showing you how to do more in less time is not going to help you in that situation. All it will do is leave you feeling more unhappy, trapped and lost.
Your Time, Your Way takes you through the key time management techniques of COD (Collect, Organise and Do) and the Time Sector System. It explains how to choose the right UCT (Universal Collection Tool) for you and how to plan your week and day using the Planning Matrix.
Yet, more than that, it also shows you how to develop a morning routine that will set you up for the day and give you some time for yourself—something often lost when we begin a career and a family and are trying to juggle getting kids ready for school, with ensuring you have saved the presentation file you need today to your OneDrive account.
I’ve also included a chapter on managing your email. I know so many people struggle to stay on top of emails and other messages. It can be a never-ending struggle. Yet, the process I teach you in the book will give you a framework you can adopt that will ensure you are never behind with your communications, and you will begin to enjoy communicating through email and other messaging services (no, really you will, I promise)
One of the chapters many of the pre-readers say they enjoyed most was the chapter on common pitfalls. This chapter lists the most common issues you will face as you develop your own system and shows you how you can avoid them or, if they are already embedded, how to get out of them so you unblock any problems quickly and effectively.
This chapter draws on my experience working with people from all walks of life and multiple different jobs, from senior executives to stay-at-home parents, all of whom face different challenges as well as some common ones.
Ultimately, though, no matter how much you have to do, you still only have twenty-four hours each day. Understanding that and knowing what you want time for will give you a huge advantage over your peers—well, the ones who don’t read this book.
It gives you a framework on which to create a structure that safeguards time for the things you want time for—not just in your personal life—which often gets sacrificed by our work life—but also for the critical things in your professional life, such as career development, having enough time each day to deal with communications, and your all-important core work—the work you were employed to do.
While writing this book, I quickly learned that many productivity best practices are not just best practices but laws. To write a book, you need to write. Wasting time trying out different writing tools does write a book. The only way to write a book is to write. That’s the same for anything you want to do. To landscape your garden, you need to get outside and dig, build and plant.
To do that, you will need to protect time. That means blocking out time on your calendar that is dedicated to doing the work.
And, the best law of all—it will always take you longer to do than you imagine. I expected this book to take around twelve to eighteen months. It took nearly forty. I laugh at myself now for being so optimistic. But now the book is available, I can honestly say that the journey has been incredible. Frustrating at times, yes, but that was always going to be part of the journey.
Whatever you want to do, please enjoy the journey. Find the time, protect it and just start. You will discover things about yourself you never knew. You’ll learn patience, how to deal with setbacks and frustration and, more importantly, how to overcome those setbacks. Each project, whether it is writing a book, landscaping your backyard or building a career, will teach you things that you can take with you into your next endeavour and give you skills and know-how for the next time you embark on a journey.
All that remains for me to do now is to ask you to buy Your Time Your Way: Time Well Managed! Life Well Lived! Get control of your time so you can live the life you want to live. The link to purchase the book is in the show notes.
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is all about unpredictability and the struggle to find some kind of structure in your day.
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Script | 326
Hello, and welcome to episode 326 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
In an ideal world, we would be able to set our calendar for the week and allow it to flow from one event to another while getting all our work done in a timely and relaxed way.
Sadly, that ideal world does not exist and never will. Life is unpredictable, and for the most part, we are dealing with other people who likely do not share our priorities or long-term vision and, in some cases, expect you to drop everything to deal with their crisis or problem.
This week’s question goes to the heart of these issues: how do you cope when your carefully laid plans are destroyed by events and the urgencies of the people around you?
So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Max. Hi Carl, I work in a job with competing demands. I can plan most things ahead but occasionally get asked, often at the last minute, to complete tasks that require an immediate or 24-hour turnaround. How do I fit these into my planning schedule so my other work plans are not thrown into chaos?
Hi Max, thank you for your question.
When asked what was most likely to blow governments off course, former British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan replied, "Events, dear boy, events."
Well, the truth is, it’s not just governments that can be blown off course; we as individuals can also be blown off course by events, too.
Around three years ago, I carefully planned a day to record the update to my Apple Productivity course. I had set up the studio the night before, checked my notes, and went to bed comfortably with the knowledge that nothing could stop me from getting the recording done the next day.
Around 7:00 am, I woke up and noticed our beloved Yorkshire Terrier was looking very sick. He had thrown up his food and was unable to get up off the floor.
He was old and suffered from a heart condition, and I knew something was terribly wrong. My wife was 50 miles up the coast staying with a friend, so I called her immediately, put Barney into the car and set off to pick my wife up before going to the vet.
Barney passed away that day, and for the next two days, I was certainly not in the mood to record anything. The whole day was a nightmare.
Later that day, I looked at my appointments for the next day and cancelled them all. No one objected; everyone understood, and I was able to mourn the passing of my best friend (anyone who has a dog will understand that one) for a couple of days without the worry of work.
Whenever you are thrown off course by events, and your plans for the week get destroyed, it’s easy to think everything’s destroyed. Yet, is it? You see, we always have the power to renegotiate deadlines, put off a few things for a day or two, stop and review what has happened and reschedule a few of the lower-value things.
However, probably the most powerful thing you can do is to build some structure into your day. I learnt this from possibly the most productive and relaxed person I have ever worked with.
Andrew was one of the first bosses I ever had, and he would arrive at work at 8:30 am each day, walk into his office and close the door for 15 minutes. That was his sacred time, and everything could wait until he was finished.
What Andrew was doing was going through his mail (it was paper back then—no email in those days), reviewing his calendar (a beautiful A4 leather folio with a week to view) and writing down the five most important things that needed to be done that day.
He would then open his door, and he was available again.
Andrew would block time out on his calendar each day for doing those five or six tasks. Some would be lengthy, requiring an hour or two; others may be a simple follow-up call with one of his leadership team members.
On the occasions I saw Andrew’s diary, I saw that he always had at least thirty minutes between meetings and blocked time. The time blocks were written in pencil, and the meetings were in blue ink. As he completed his tasks, he would cross them out.
Those gaps in his diary were to deal with the unknowns that inevitably came up each day. The chairman may have called and demanded a change to the marketing plan for that week, or there may have been an accident in the workshop that needed dealing with. None of these were predictable and my guess is you also have a few unpredictable tasks and events occurring each day.
The best thing you can do is plan for them.
While you may not know the precise nature of these unknowns, what you do know is that there will always be a few each day. You will likely not know what the crisis will be, but if you work on the principle that there will be a crisis each day, you can at least leave sufficient time to deal with it.
What about the constants in your day? We all have communications to deal with—email, Teams or Slack messages—and admin.
These are what I call my constants, and as such, I know I will need some time each day to deal with them.
As I’m sure you’ve discovered already, skip responding to your messages for one day, and you have double the amount to do the next day—which means you need double the amount of time as well. If you are already squeezed, how will you find double the amount of time tomorrow? You won’t. And that leads to backlogs building up.
If, in an ideal world, you would like an hour a day for managing your communications, but owing to interruptions and emergencies, you only have thirty minutes one day, take it. Thirty minutes is better than nothing. Doing a little each day will keep the mountain from becoming impossible.
The key is consistency. Be consistent with your constants.
In my world, there’s always content to create. Blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, and newsletters don’t create themselves. Content creation is a daily constant, so I set aside two hours each day for it. For the most part, my content creation time is 9:30 to 11:30 am each weekday morning. However, owing to some unknown, there will always be one or two days when that will not be possible. Okay, so All I need do is look for another suitable time that day, and if that’s not possible, I will have to look for another day.
Every productive person I have met or learned about does this, and every unproductive, disorganised person I have met or learned about doesn’t.
The artist Picasso was available for anyone and everyone until after lunch. Once lunch was over, he’d disappear into his studio and paint for four or more hours without allowing anyone to disturb him. Maya Angelou hid herself away in a local motel bedroom from 7 am until 2 pm. It was only after she emerged from that room that she was available to other people.
You do not have to be that extreme, but the point is if you have work to do, Max, you need to protect time to do it. No one can escape that. Hoping time will miraculously appear is not a great strategy.
The only strategy that works is protecting time and respecting that time.
What I have discovered is that when someone asks you to do something by a certain time, the deadline they give you is based on their estimation of how long the task would take them to complete, given their current workload. It is not based on your current workload or ability to complete the task.
Recently, I was asked to record a two-minute video for a partner. The person asking me had never recorded and edited a video like this before and asked if I could send it over by the end of the week. Given that I was asked to do the task on Thursday evening, I instantly knew it would be a tall order to complete the task. Recording the video would take fifteen to twenty minutes, and the editing would likely take three or four hours.
I accepted the task but asked if I could send the edited video over the next week. The response was, “Great! Thank you so much for doing this for us.”
That was an easy negotiation. Yet, unless you try, you will never know.
I could have panicked, removed some of my planned work, and completed the video by the end of the week, but, as so often is the case, the deadline was not really a deadline; it was a guess and an attempt to make me treat the task as urgent.
You owe it to yourself to explore the potential for negotiation on deadlines.
Every one of us will be different. We do different jobs, and we have multiple responsibilities related to family, friends and our work. Just because I think you can do something by tomorrow doesn’t mean you can. Only you know if something is possible.
And always remember, if you are given 24 to 48 hours’ notice of a deadline, the problem is not yours. It’s the person who left it so late to ask you for help. You are always in a stronger negotiating position in these circumstances.
Now this is entirely different to being reminded of an impending deadline that you have known about for several weeks. That’s on you and is your mistake.
In these circumstances, that would be an indication that your weekly planning is failing and needs looking at.
Ultimately, Max, if the work you do involves frequent last-minute deadlines when you plan the week, these need to be taken into account. I have a flexible day on a Thursday to catch up. I don’t plan any content work on Thursdays. I try to schedule meetings and leave enough free space to catch up on anything that may be behind schedule for the week.
This week, I used that time to send my accountant the VAT receipts she’d asked for and finish this script. Next week? Who knows what I will need the time for?
I hope that has helped, Max. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week, it’s time to slow down.
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Script | 325
Hello, and welcome to episode 325 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
How often have you rushed to complete a task only to find you did it wrong or misunderstood what was required and wasted several hours doing something that wasn’t required? It happens to all of us, yet it can be one of the biggest drags on your overall productivity. But here’s the reassuring part: it has an easy fix. A simple change in approach can make a significant difference in your productivity and time management.
One of the advantages of the Time Sector System is it helps you to slow down by asking when you will do something rather than saying “yes” to everything and finding you have no time to do it. This then causes you to rush to complete urgent tasks (which may not be important tasks), leaving behind the important tasks.
Speed kills productivity, which may sound ironic, given that we think of productivity as doing things quickly and efficiently. And that is true, but speed ignores the “efficiency” part. Targeted speed is what you want, but to get fast at something takes practice and following a process. Without that practice and a process to follow, you leave yourself wide open to time-destroying mistakes that will need more time to rectify.
And this is what this week’s question is all about.
So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from John. John asks, Hi Carl, I have so many tasks, and whenever I try to get them done, I end up having to redo them because I rushed and misunderstood the task or the request was unclear. How do you overcome these kinds of problems?
Hi John, thank you for your question.
This is a speed issue. Now, this might be part of your work culture, or it could be the expectations of your customers and bosses. The demands of others can create a sense that everything is urgent, and this leads to trying to do something that requires a little thought too fast. The result being mistakes are made or the wrong thing getting done.
One of the most important parts of becoming more productive and better at managing time is slowing down. I know that might sound contrary to what you think improving productivity is all about, but you will only improve your productivity if what you do each day is the right thing and at the highest quality you are capable of.
If Toyota wanted to increase the speed at which they produced a car, they could easily do it. Instead of screwing on the front bumper with twenty turns of the screw, they could reduce that to ten. On one car, that might save one or two seconds, yet over hundreds of thousands of cars, that adds up to hours saved.
Yet, it would be a false economy. Within a few weeks, many of those cars would be returning to their dealerships with hanging-off front bumpers. The impact on their dealership’s time and costs would be huge. Plus, it would destroy their reputation for quality. It would be disastrous for them in terms of costs, productivity and reputation.
Yet, so many people fall into this trap every day. They think if they rush and take shortcuts to get more things done, their productivity will improve. It won’t. What it will do is create a lot of unnecessary work fixing the mistakes that were made in haste.
So what can you do?
The first step is to look at the work you regularly do. Where are the processes? We all get email, Slack and Teams messages. What’s your process for handling these?
There are two approaches to your communications. You can react instantly each time a message comes in. We often think this looks good. It shows we are on the ball, quick and efficient. Yet are you? Sure, some messages may require a quick yes or no, but what about those messages asking for your thoughts on something? Do you ever stop and think about your response?
And then what happens to your other work? The work that is likely to be much more important? All this stopping to respond to a message and then starting again is slowing you down considerably. Of course, at the moment, you don’t notice that slow down. After all, you’re rushing from one thing to the next. You’re busy, and you’re moving fast.
But what’s happening to the important work in front of you? It’s not moving forward. You stop, respond to a message, then you come back to the work, and you have to refresh yourself—where were you, what were you writing, where are the reference materials? It’s so easy to lose an hour or two just getting back to where you were before you allowed yourself to be interrupted.
That is not being productive. It’s the reverse.
The biggest gain in productivity in car manufacturing plants was the introduction of robots. Robots don’t get interrupted. They do their job without the need to respond to emails, messages and questions from colleagues. They don’t need to attend meetings. As soon as you turn on the robot, it does its assigned job at the correct speed and in the correct order.
If you were to disrupt the assembly line by misaligning a chassis or not placing a wheel in the right place, that mistake would be catastrophic. Everything would come to a halt until the mistake was corrected.
For some reason, we rarely see that in ourselves. Stopping in the middle of doing focused work to respond to an email or message is disrupting your flow in the same way. It takes a disproportionate amount of time to recover and get back online.
The alternative approach is to develop a process for managing your communications. One way, for example, is to start your day by clearing your inboxes. Filter out the messages and emails you don’t need to respond to, delete the junk, and move your actionable messages to an Action This Day folder.
Then, assign thirty minutes to an hour later in the day to respond to those actionable messages. Fixing that time each day helps your reputation, as your colleagues and clients quickly learn your patterns. That may not always be possible, but each day, having an amount of time for managing your communications takes the pressure off having to respond instantly, and it improves your productivity because you can focus on doing your work to the level of quality expected of you.
This also has the advantage of giving you time to think. Because when you are responding to your actionable emails and messages, you’ve had time to think and respond in a clear, considered way. That improved communication means you receive fewer messages asking for clarification.
For the most part, our work does not need speed. Whether you reply to an email now or in a couple of hours is not going to create an issue (seriously, it’s not!) or responding to your boss’s Teams message this second or in twenty minutes.
We may have conditioned ourselves to believe these things need a speedy response, but they don’t. You will not lose a client because it took you two hours to respond to their email, and your boss will not fire you because it took you twenty minutes to reply to their message.
One thing that will happen if you slow down, though, is you won’t make as many mistakes, and the quality of your work will improve. On top of that, when you remove the sense of urgency, you instantly calm down and feel a lot less stressed.
One thing I urge all my coaching clients to do is set aside an hour or two each day for undisturbed focus work. If you work a typical eight—or nine-hour day, protecting two of those hours still leaves you with six to seven hours when you are available for everyone else. Surely that is more than enough time?
Knowing that you have two hours each day without being disturbed relieves a lot of pressure. However, this only works if you take control of your calendar. It means you plan your week—finding two hours a day and protecting them—and then decide what you will do with that time on a daily basis.
And that is a process: weekly planning to ensure you have sufficient time to complete your important work and daily planning to assign work based on the changing priorities that happen to all of us. If you can fix that to the same time each week and day, you will go a long way towards radically improving your productivity.
It doesn’t matter if you are an accountant in a busy accountancy firm, a lawyer or a salesperson. Everything you do on a regular basis can be turned into a process. I have CEOs in my coaching programme who begin preparing for their board meetings fourteen days before the meeting. The preparation time is blocked out in their calendar, and it’s given an appropriate priority. The steps they take to collect all the information and the document they set it out in are the same each time. They follow a process.
Processes reduce the thinking time required to do a task. This naturally speeds up your work performance without compromising quality. Because you follow the same steps each time, you know where you are with the work. It also helps you to identify areas where improvements can be made.
Whenever I watch Formula 1 racing, I’m amazed at the speed at which the pit crews can change four tyres. Two years ago, the McLaren team broke the record with a time of 1.82 seconds. In the last race in Monaco, almost every team was changing the tyres in under two seconds. That wasn’t an accident. That was a process.
The pit crews will have analysed in the minutest of detail how McLaren was able to do 1.82 seconds and changed their processes ever so minutely. That analysis has saved them, on average, three-tenths of a second. A tiny amount, yes, but in Formula 1, every tenth of a second counts.
If you watch the pit crews at work in a race, they are not panicking. Each person knows exactly what to do and in what order. It’s fast because it’s so smooth, and it’s repeated over and over again.
You are not going to be able to turn everything into a process. Many projects you work on are unique. However, if you look at your work as a whole, there will be multiple individual pieces of work you repeat each day. It’s that work you should be looking at for the potential to create a process.
In my work, I’ve turned writing books, blog posts, newsletters and client feedback into processes. I’ve eliminated unnecessary actions and slimmed everything down so that when I sit down to work on something, I can begin instantly without the need to waste time looking for tools and ideas.
That’s the approach you want to be taking, too, John. Begin with your communications—that’s something we all have to do. Where can you build a process?
I hope that helps. Thank you, John, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
So, you’ve decided to get yourself better organised. What would be the best way to start? That’s the question I am answering this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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Script | 324
Hello, and welcome to episode 324 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Whenever I begin working with a new coaching client, one of the first places we often need to start is unpicking the old system that is not working and transitioning into a system that does work.
Everyone is different. We have different times when we can focus, and we do different kinds of jobs. I recently watched an interview with J P Morgan Chase bank’s CEO Jamie Dimon, who wakes up at 4:30 to 5:00 am each morning so he can read the financial news, exercise and have breakfast before the day begins, which inevitably involves back-to-back meetings.
Waking up at 5:00 am may not work for you. You may prefer working late and waking up around 8:00 am.
But wherever you are in your productivity journey, if you want to develop a system that works for you, it will inevitably mean tweaking your old system at least somewhat. That being the case, where would you start?
And that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Frank. Frank asks, Hi Carl, I’ve decided to get myself organised. I’ve tried everything over the years, and I have bits of all sorts of systems everywhere. If you were to start all over, what would you do first?
Hi Frank, thank you for your question.
I approach this by looking at the hierarchy of productivity tools first. There are three tools we can use to help us become more productive: your calendar, task manager, and notes. Of those three, your calendar is the top one. That’s the one tool that is never going to deceive you.
It shows you the twenty-four hours you have each day and tells you what you can realistically do given that time.
Your task manager is the most deceptive tool you have. You can load it up with hundreds of tasks, yet it never tells you if you have the time available to do those tasks. It doesn’t even tell you which tasks would be the right ones to do at any given time. Perhaps AI will help us in the future there, but I doubt it.
I doubt it because while AI could see everything and may know what deadlines you have and where your appointments are, it will not know how you feel. You may be coming down with a cold, might not have slept well, or had a fight with your significant other. Any one of those could derail your effectiveness, and they are things you cannot plan for.
So, when starting out, get your calendar fixed first.
What does that mean?
It means first letting go of all your double-booked times. You cannot be in two places at once, and if you do see a scheduling conflict on your calendar, these need fixing first. This may mean you need to renegotiate a meeting or move something to the all-day section.
I’ve seen people putting their daughter’s driving lesson on their calendars. This often leads to seeing an appointment with a client at the same time as the daughter’s lesson. If you need to know your daughter has a driving lesson at 3:00 pm, put it in your all-day section of your calendar with the time in brackets—preferably in a different colour. You will find this cleans up your calendar significantly.
The next thing I suggest you do, Frank, is to look at all the tasks you have to do and categorise them. It’s likely you will have tasks related to communications—emails, messages and follow-ups, admin, and chores. Beyond that, it will depend on the kind of work you do. A journalist will spend a lot of time writing, a designer will spend time designing, and a lawyer will likely spend a lot of time writing contracts or court documents.
Whether you’re writing, designing, or doing something else, you want to group similar tasks together.
In a task manager such as Todoist and Things 3, you can assign labels or tags to a task. You would use these labels or tags to assign a category to your tasks. This way, you can easily group all similar tasks together.
The next step is to look at your calendar and assign blocks of time for these categories. Some may not need specific time blocks, but I encourage people to allocate blocks of time for communications and admin. These will always need doing. The problem is that if you do not have time assigned for them, the next day, instead of requiring forty minutes or so, you will need double that time just to catch up. This is not a good time management strategy.
One question I often get is about dating tasks. I do recommend that you date tasks, but only for tasks you know need to be done this week.
There’s a lot that can change between this week and next, and what you may think needs to be done the following Thursday could quite easily change to either need to be on Monday or not at all. If a task does not need to be done this week, place it in your next-week folder and forget about it. You can come back to it when you do your weekly plan.
While we are on the subject of dating tasks, beware of the things that are not tasks that can end up in your task manager. Your bill payment dates, your son’s graduation and your next dental appointment are not tasks. These are events and should be on your calendar.
You may need to know day-specific information on a given day. This information should always be on your calendar. I have my wife’s exam week dates, when my parents-in-law are staying, and public holidays on my calendar. None of these would qualify as a task unless I needed to do something on them.
Most of these are simple tweaks anyone can make to their system without the need for a complete overhaul.
The biggest challenge I find people struggle with is stepping away from firefighting addiction. This is where a person is hooked on running around panicking about everything they have to do. This just does not work. It leads to only doing easy, so-called urgent tasks and never getting anything meaningful done.
The next thing to look out for is the dilemma of being able to do anything, just not all at the same time. There’s something inherently faulty with our brains. We believe we can do a lot more than we actually can. No, you cannot complete fifty tasks and attend seven hours of meetings in a day. Not only is it unrealistic, but it’s also a guaranteed way to burn out.
Part of the problem is we like to see twenty, thirty or more tasks on our daily to-do list. It makes us feel important and useful. Yet it’s a delusion. You cannot do that number of tasks with a high level of competency.
I find it interesting that people feel ashamed when all they have on their to-do list are three or four tasks. Yet, that is what you want to be trying to get to.
You can accomplish this by moving towards a time-based system and away from a task-based one. This means instead of counting the number of tasks you have to do, you instead allocate blocks of time to specific categories of tasks.
This then allows you to dedicate an hour to responding to your messages, for instance. Then, instead of having a lot of email tasks in your task manager, you have a single task telling you to clear your actionable email folder. Similarly, you can do this with projects. Rather than having fifteen or more tasks related to multiple different projects each day, you have a single task telling you which projects to work on that day.
You will finish more projects faster if you focus on one or two projects each day instead of diluting your effectiveness by trying to work five or six projects each day.
You can then use the third tool in your toolbox, your notes. This is by far the best place to manage your projects. You can keep project and meeting notes, links to documents and emails and checklists of things that may need doing. You then only need to link the project note to the relevant task in your task manager for a single click and in experience.
The advantage here is you avoid the possibility of being distracted by something else. You see a task telling you to work on the next board meeting presentation, and click the link that will take you straight to your project notes, where you will find links to the presentation file, your research and other relevant information.
The alternative is to be clicking around, looking at a long list of tasks which will only demotivate you and waste a considerable amount of time looking for something to do instead of being directed towards the exact task that needs doing next.
Now, what about all your old stuff?
The first thing to know is that the way everything is right now may not be as bad as it first looks. I strongly suggest you consolidate your tools into three—a calendar, task manager, and notes app. If you have multiple different apps, choose one for each and combine everything into one. You do not want to be wasting time trying to remember where everything is.
Then, go through your tasks in your task manager, deleting old tasks that are no longer relevant and cleaning up your calendar.
Your notes are less important. These can be kept as you don’t know which ones may be a source of inspiration in the future. You can move old notes to an archive. There, they will be out of the way but still searchable if you ever need them.
I hope that has helped, Frank. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
How do you create and maintain your motivation once you have your new productivity system in place? That’s what I’m answering this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course.
Take The NEW COD Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 323
Hello, and welcome to episode 323 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the positive things about creating your productivity system is the excitement you get once you have your new tools and systems set up. We often cannot wait to get started using these tools and systems.
Then, after a few weeks or months, the “newness” wears off, and we are back where we were before—looking for new tools and systems and convincing ourselves that the tools and systems we currently use no longer work.
And if your tools and systems do work, it can be hard to stay motivated once the monotony of doing the same things at the same time each day beds in.
This week’s question goes to the heart of that—staying motivated to do the work we know we should do but just don’t want to do.
So, with that little introduction complete, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Keith. Keith asks, HI Carl, I feel like I’m doing something wrong. When it comes to the time of actually doing work allocated on my calendar, I often feel not bothered and I just simply reschedule it for the next time, I find myself doing that a lot, with both routine and areas of focus tasks and I find it strange that I am able to reschedule it all so easily… do you have any tips on what to do here?
Hi Keith, thank you for your question.
There are two distinct parts here. Your areas of focus should be self-motivating. These are tasks you have identified as important to you and for the life you want to live.
The second, routines, are less important—these are the tasks that just need to be done to maintain life. Things like taking the garbage out, washing the car, doing the laundry or, mowing the lawn, etc.
The more concerning part here is a lack of motivation in your areas of focus. Doing these tasks should be the things you look forward to doing the most. Well, mostly. I know it can be hard to head out for a 10-mile run when it’s pouring down outside and blowing a gale. (Although the way you feel when you get back is fantastic!)
Let’s step back a little first.
When you find yourself rescheduling calendar blocks, that’s not necessarily a bad sign. That’s just life. Emergencies happen, plans are changed, and occasionally, we get sick.
That said, having structure does help you to be consistent. For instance, I recommend you protect time each day for dealing with your actionable emails and messages. Rather than going in and out of your email every few minutes—which is disastrous for your cognitive ability to focus—having time set aside for dealing with these gives you the time and space to get on with your important work.
Similarly, you will likely find that if you can set aside an hour for admin and chores each day, the only thing you then need to decide is what admin tasks and chores you do in that time. Becoming consistent with this results in you rarely needing the full hour.
You may find that if you move these blocks around every day, consistency will be difficult to achieve. The goal of setting aside a little time each day for focused work, communications, and admin is to get them fixed in your calendar.
This is a using a little neuroscience to get your brain working for you. You are using neuroscience when you go to bed at the same time each day. It’s why you begin to feel sleepy at the same time each day. This is the same for meal times. Consistent meal times informs your brain when to tell you that you are hungry.
As an aside, if you take up intermittent fasting, you will find skipping breakfast early in the morning difficult at first. Yet if your eating window is between 11:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m., after a few weeks, your brain learns when to tell you to eat. You will no longer be hungry in the morning.
Let’s examine the motivational aspect of this, beginning with your areas of focus.
These activities should be self-motivating. Your areas of focus are the things that are important to you. If you lack motivation here, it’s likely that the way you have defined what each one means to you is not quite right and needs a little refining.
Health and fitness can often be difficult if you find any form of exercise unpleasant. What may be happening if you skip exercise is you are trying to do too much. I have found if you set a minimum—a level you can do very easily will keep you motivated here. For example, you could set a minimum of 5,000 steps per day or 10 push-ups and 10 air squats. Doing that set would count as an exercise session.
Once you’ve completed your 5000 steps, you are likely to do a few more to exceed your minimum. Likewise, with pushups and squats, you are likely to do more than ten just to exceed your minimum.
You will probably have found that starting is the hardest part. Once you have started, you end up doing more, which is where another trick can be deployed.
I mentioned setting aside time each day for communications is a good habit to have. If you know at 4:00pm, you will spend an hour dealing with your actionable messages but are really not in the mood to do it, you can tell yourself I will just respond to the five oldest messages today.
In most cases, once you’ve done those five, you are going to continue for the full hour. And if you don’t continue, you’ve done five. Five is better than none. After all, one is always greater than zero.
Going back to the principle of blocking time out. Try not to be too specific here. Your time blocks should be for specific types of work. For instance, if you are a lawyer who is required to write contracts frequently, you could block two or three hours each week for “Writing”. This then gives you greater freedom on what you will write in that time. Perhaps one day, you need to write a will or an affidavit. By keeping the time block general, you have greater freedom about what you will work on.
This helps with motivation, as you have a greater choice of what to work on. If there is time pressure on a particular part of your work, you can choose to do the most time-sensitive part—which is usually the best motivator. Or, if there is no time pressure, you can choose something you feel like doing.
Another area to look at is timing. For most people, the late afternoon is not a great time to do focused work. You’re likely to get tired and possibly feel frazzled by all the stuff being thrown at you all day. That’s not a motivation issue; that’s just being tired—tired of looking at a screen all day, tired of dealing with other people’s problems, and tired of making decisions. It all adds up.
What I’ve discovered is that doing deeper, focused work in the morning is much easier than trying to do it in the afternoon. You’re fresher and will find it easier to focus. This does not work for everyone. Some people focus better in the afternoons. But as Daniel Pink found when writing his bestselling book When, the number of people who can focus better in the afternoons is less than 2%. The majority of us are either morning or night people.
If it’s possible, try to do your more meaningful work in your natural biorhythm rather than fighting it. Nobody wins the fight against nature.
Finally, look at your processes. Processes are a human form of automation. This is why when you begin your day with a consistent “you” focused morning routine, no matter what is thrown at you, on the whole, you get through the day without too much trouble.
If you wake up late, skip your morning routines, and run out the door to get to work on time, everything seems to go wrong.
Processes ensure that once you begin a piece of work, it’s almost automatic. My favourite routine is email management. You clear your inbox in the morning. This part of the process is all about speed—clearing it as fast as you can. You can add a little incentive here and time yourself to see how fast you can clear fifty or a hundred emails. The second part of the process is about slowing down and clearing your action this day folder.
Because the second part of the process is about slowing down and thinking about your responses, you can begin the process by making yourself a nice cup of tea, putting on some relaxing music and begin.
Rather than focusing on numbers, set yourself a time limit. For instance, if you give yourself forty-five minutes, start with the oldest email in your action this day folder and start. Because you are not focused on how many emails you respond to, you can see the “end of the tunnel” it’s forty-five minutes later.
Again, if you are consistent with this, you won’t lack motivation, particularly with email management. If you skip just one day, you’ve doubled the amount of time you will need tomorrow. Now, that would be demotivating.
I hope that helps, Keith. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
What is “Time-Based Productivity”, and how can you apply it to your daily work? That’s the question I am answering this week.
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Script | 322
Hello, and welcome to episode 322 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the huge benefits of the Time Sector System is that it removes the tyranny of task-based productivity and replaces it with something more concrete: time.
You see, tasks will never stop coming at you. Your kids’ toys need to be picked up, the laundry needs to be done, your bed needs to be made, and you’d better check the refrigerator to see what you need to pick up from the supermarket. And that’s before you start your work day.
If you base your productivity system on the tasks you need to do, you will wear yourself out. It’s impossible because it’s never-ending. There are no barriers, and you will see this rather quickly if you use a task manager. Task managers fill up, and everything is screaming at you to be done.
But then you’re faced with the question: where am I going to find the time to do all these tasks?
It always comes back to time.
This week’s question asks how you can transition away from this tyranny of task-based productivity and bring a sense of control and calm into your world.
So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jens. Jens asks, hi Carl, I am always overwhelmed with tasks and never able to get all my work done. I am also constantly interrupted by messages and emails and never seem to be able to get a quiet moment. How would you handle this situation?
Hi Jens, thank you for your question.
You describe a real problem today. Over the last fifteen years or so, technology has broken down the barrier between our work and personal lives. Long gone are the days where when we finished work for the day we really did finish work. If we needed to respond to a work email, it had to be done from our office computer. Once we had gone home, that was it. No more work email.
Sure, there were other issues—people staying late in the office for one, but at least when you left your place of work for the day, that was it. You left work at work. (Or it certainly felt like it.)
So, what can you do today to establish some barriers so you do not always feel pressure to do more?
A few years ago, I discovered that if you base your system on task management, you will lose. Tasks are never-ending, and there will always be more to do than time available to do them.
It was that phrase—“always more to do than time available” that gave me a clue towards the solution. If tasks were unlimited, then perhaps I could work on the one area that was limited—time.
Working with time gave me natural limits or constraints. There are only twenty-four hours in a day, and during that time, I need to eat and sleep at the very least. That then gave me a new number to work with. Given that I personally need around seven hours of sleep and, let’s say, ninety minutes for eating, then all I had left was fifteen and a half hours for everything else.
Once you work out how much time you need for sleep and eating, plus time for personal hygiene, you likely will have around fourteen hours a day to work with.
So the temptation is often how much work can you fit into fourteen hours, yet that’s probably not the best place to work from.
Work is just one part of your life. It’s an important part, but so is time spent with your family, getting a little exercise and perhaps some relaxation activities such as watching TV, reading a book or watching your favourite sports team.
When you add up all the time you need for these activities, your work day will likely be around eight to ten hours.
So, what can you do in, say, nine hours?
Well, let’s break things down a little further.
Email and Slack or Teams messages will probably be a big part of your work—particularly if you are a knowledge worker—i.e. you are employed for your brain rather than your physical strength. That being the case, how much time do you need to be able to stay on top of all these messages and emails?
In my case, I need about an hour a day to respond to my actionable emails. You will likely be around the same figure. Think of it this way: if you had one uninterrupted hour each day for responding to your actionable emails, would you be able to stay on top of it?
If that’s the case, then you need to protect an hour a day for managing your communications. If you accept you need an hour yet do not protect that hour, what’s likely to happen?
At the very least, you’ll need two hours the next day, three the day after that and so on. Where will you ever find two or three hours in a day for nothing but email and messages?
Not protecting time for these activities is not sustainable. That’s how backlogs build up, and that just drains you.
One of the first things I advise my coaching clients to do is protect some time each day for communications. This one positive action can bring huge benefits.
The first is that you stop worrying about what’s lurking in your inbox. You know you have time protected to deal with it. This means you are going to be much more focused on the work you want to get done. The second is that it starts to reduce the “addiction” of going in and out of your inbox “checking” to see if anything important has come in.
All that checking is creating havoc in your cognitive abilities to focus on what needs to be done. It’s hugely inefficient and drains your mental energies.
Try to think of it in terms of the gears in your car. If you are constantly changing gears, you are going to run out of fuel much faster than if you get into top gear and stay there. You may not be accelerating as fast, but you are running at a much more efficient rate, which conserves energy.
Constantly switching your attention to check email or messages does the same thing to your brain as if you were going up and down the gears. It’s highly inefficient and drains you of energy.
But we keep checking because we don’t feel confident that we have sufficient time at the end of the day to clear any actionable email.
The key to time-based productivity is to identify the types of work you are expected to do. For example, if you are a designer, how much time do you want to spend on design work each day?
Imagine you protected four hours each day for doing focused design work; this means you could focus all your efforts on doing the work you were employed to do. From 8:30 am to 12:30 pm, you would block that time on your calendar as focused design work.
Now, all you need is a list in your task manager called “design work”, and you can pick which you will work on that day.
Now, I know many of you will immediately tell me that’s impossible. Okay, it might be in your situation. But rather than dismiss this idea, perhaps you could play with it.
Perhaps instead of blocking the first four hours of your day for focused work, you could break it down into two-hour segments. You could do two hours of focused work and one hour of miscellaneous work, such as communicating with your clients and colleagues. Then do another two hours in the afternoon.
That would still leave you with four hours for meetings, returning calls and messages, and handling emails.
I promise you that one change will radically improve your productivity and leave you a lot less exhausted at the end of the day.
If this is so effective, why do so few people do it? Fear.
It’s the fear of saying no to someone who wants to interrupt your protected time. And that’s hard. There’s an element of FOMO—the fear of missing out, but also a deeper human instinct to be alert for danger. That danger today, is not some predatorial mammal but angry bosses, upset clients and people thinking you’re being lazy because you’ve disappeared.
However, when it comes to your evaluation as an employee, no one remembers whether you answered an email in thirty minutes or less. You will always be assessed on your results.
People will always remember when you failed to meet a deadline or didn’t deliver an order on time. Saying, “But I replied to your emails and messages within a few minutes,” isn’t going to wash.
The only way to get results is to do your work. If you’re wasting precious time allowing yourself to be interrupted and distracted, something is going to have to change.
So, yes, if you base your productivity on the number of tasks you have to do, you will feel overwhelmed and stressed out. There’s only one end result—burnout, and that’s not very pleasant.
Instead, make a list of your core work activities—the work you are employed to do and a list of the things you want to spend time doing—your non-work related activities.
Then, open up your calendar and find time for those activities.
With your core work, I recommend you fix it as repeating blocks on your calendar where possible. Find a time in the day when you are least likely to have meetings and block it out now.
You may find that a fixed time is not possible because of the dynamic nature of your work; in that case, block sufficient time out on a week-to-week basis for you to get your work done. It’s an extra planning task, but it’s worth it.
For the tasks you want to complete, place them in your task manager in folders designated by when you will do them: this week, next week, etc. Then, label or tag the task by the category of work it relates to.
Is the task related to communication or administration? Does it relate to your core work as a designer, salesperson, or manager? On your calendar, create blocks of time for each of these categories. When the time comes, the only list you need to look at is the list of tasks for that particular category. Then, do as many of them as you have time.
If you remain consistent with this process and don’t cherry-pick the easy tasks, your output will soon shift upwards. I know; I’ve seen it time and time again. It works, and very few people ever complain you are no longer as available. And the few that do, once you explain you need quiet time to get on and do your work effectively, they soon stop complaining.
Switching away from unsustainable task-based productivity is easier than you may think. It does take a positive effort, though. To start, decide how much time you need each day to fulfil your work commitments and go from there. Once you see it working, you will be encouraged to add more focused time blocks.
Thank you Jens, for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me know to wish you all a very very productive week.
If your notes are a disorganised mess, this episode is the one for you.
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Script | 321
Hello, and welcome to episode 321 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
This week, I have a special episode for you. No question; instead, I want to share a way to think about your productivity tools, particularly how your notes app fits into the whole scheme of things.
There is a trinity of productivity tools—your calendar, task manager, and notes app—that when connected, will enhance your overall effectiveness by reducing the friction between organising and doing work.
Today, I want to focus on the notes app because this is the tool that is most often neglected.
Within this Trinity of tools, your calendar is number 1. Everything flows from your calendar because that is the tool that will prevent you from being overly ambitious and give you the reality of the day. There are twenty-four boxes in your calendar, each representing an hour, and that’s all you get each day.
You cannot change that, for time is the fixed part of your productivity system.
Your task manager tells you what tasks you have committed to and when you will do those tasks. Its relationship with your calendar is critical because if you have seven hours of meetings, you’re committed to picking your kids up from school, and you have a hundred tasks to do; you will know instantly you have an impossible day. You can then either reschedule some meetings or reduce your task number.
So, where do your notes come into this trinity?
Your notes support your tasks. It’s here where you will manage your projects, interests, goals and areas of focus. It’s also where you can keep your archive, which, if used well, will become a rich resource of inspiration, ideas and creativity. But more on that later.
Of all the productivity tools you use, your notes app is the one where you can be a little relaxed. Your notes do not need to be perfectly curated and organised. Most notes apps today have powerful search built in, and I would argue that the ability to search within your notes is a critical part of your choice when choosing a notes app.
I suspect Evernote’s popularity over the years (despite its recent changes) is due to two factors: its search, which is arguably still the best in the field, and its brilliant web clipper.
The ability to search your notes means that as long as you give any note a sufficiently descriptive title, you will be able to find it quickly and effortlessly.
As a side note, I highly recommend that you learn all the different ways your notes app can search for your notes. Just Google your notes app of choice’s search functions. For instance, you can search “OneNote search” or “Notion search”. Learning this will save you a lot of time in the future.
Evernote has a keyboard shortcut on the Mac operating system that I’ve been using for years. However, for a brief period in 2019, this feature stopped working while Evernote was transitioning from the old “legacy” version to the new Evernote 10, which was very frustrating.
During that six-month period, I realised how important it was to be able to search your notes quickly in terms of overall productivity.
Your notes do not just support your projects. They can also support multiple parts of your life, from tracking your goals to keeping your eight areas of focus front and centre of your life.
Moreover, you can keep track of your hobbies, wish lists, book notes (if you read Kindle books), self-development topics, and interests. And all this information can be taken with you wherever you are through your mobile phone.
All this is great, but what if you have a notes app up and running, but it has become neglected and lacking in a little TLC (tender loving care)? Well, fear not. As you do not need to be as strict about how tidy your notes are, getting things back on track can be a little project you do over a few weeks or months.
Here’s how to get things started.
First, create five folders. What these are called in your own notes app will depend on the app you are using. If your preference is OneNote, this would be your notebooks, Evernote would be stacks and Apple Notes would be folders. To help you, this is the highest level you have in your notes app.
These five folders should be named as follows:
Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources, and finally, your Archive. Again, depending on what app you are using, you will also need an Inbox for collecting your notes.
To give you a quick summary of what goes in each folder, for your goals, this is where you put the goals you are currently working on. Really, this is a place where you keep track of your goals. For example, if you are saving money, you can track how much you are saving each month. Similarly, if you are losing weight, you can track your weight each week and add the numbers here.
Your areas of focus is where your eight areas go. If you are unaware of these, you can download my free areas of focus workbook from carlpullein.com. What you do with this folder is create a subfolder for each area and have a note in each defining what each area means to you and what you need to do to keep it in balance.
Next up, your projects folder. For each project you are currently working on, you would have a subfolder. There, you can keep notes on any meetings you attend, checklists, links to any files you need, copies of relevant emails and contact details for collaborators.
You can also keep a master projects list here, which will give you quick access to any of the projects you are working on.
Then, there is your resources folder. This is for your interests, hobbies, further education, and anything else you want to keep. Think of this as your commonplace notebook area. If you are not sure what a commonplace book is, here’s the Wikipedia definition:
“Commonplace books are a way to compile knowledge, usually in notebooks. They have been kept from antiquity and were kept particularly during the Renaissance and in the nineteenth century. Such books are similar to scrapbooks filled with items of many kinds: notes, proverbs, aphorisms, maxims, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, prayers, legal formulas, and recipes.”
Your resources folder is unique to you, and you don’t want to overthink it. I love all things related to James Bond, and I have a subfolder of articles, links, and videos related to all things James Bond. There’s stuff in there about the films and locations, clothing and props, and products the James Bond from the books used.
It’s a gold mine of information related to something I have a deep interest in and it’s unique to me.
And your archive. Contrary to popular belief, this is not one step away from the trash. Your archive is a rich resource of discarded ideas, old projects, and stuff you were once interested in. It’s here where you can potentially make connections only you could make. Your life experiences, knowledge, and way of thinking make you who you are, and many of the ideas and things you were once interested in may be the spark to something very special.
When Steve Jobs was at university, he took a calligraphy class. At that time, it was a passing interest, yet several years later, when they were designing the Mac User interface, many of the things he learned in that class came back to him. Today, whether you use a Mac or Windows machine, you can thank Steve Jobs that you have hundreds of fonts to choose from.
Nobody had made the connection that multiple fonts to choose from would allow people to use their computers to be creative. Perhaps nobody would have done had Steve Jobs not taken that calligraphy class.
That’s the power of your archive. Yes, I know Steve Jobs didn’t have the benefit of Apple Notes in the early 1980s, but that passing interest sparked an idea we all benefit from today.
It’s the randomness of your archive, built up over many years, that will become a place for you to, at the very least, reminisce. This is where you have the freedom to dump stuff. You never know when or if any of what you put in there will become useful again.
Once you have your folder structure set up, you can go through all your old notes and move them into your new structure. Now, I want to stress that you do not need to do this in one go. Take your time, enjoy the process and reminisce as you go through your old notes. This should never be a chore; it should be treated as a fun project.
Remember, because of the powerful search your notes app has, all your notes, new and old, are searchable. So there is no rush to do this. You could decide to do this while watching TV in the evening or perhaps while commuting to work if you use a bus or train. Maybe you have a long flight coming up; you could use some of that time to go through your notes.
One tip I can give you here is that as you go through your old notes, you should ensure that the titles of your notes mean something to you. If you come across notes with an image, for example, you may find that the title is something IMG6654. You want to change that title as it won’t be searchable in that format.
You can also add tags if you wish to. Be careful not to tag something with the same name as the name of your folder or subfolder. To give you an example from my James Bond subfolder, I use tags to denote whether something is related to a book, film prop or location. I use a coded tagging system. So, anything related to a location would be tagged JB Location. Anything related to a film would be tagged JB Films.
Likewise, I have a subfolder in my resources called Places to Visit. The tags I use here are the place names. So, I have tags for Paris, London, Seoul, Tokyo etc.
Your tags are there to aid search, so if you decide to use tags, make sure you use names that mean something to you. You do not want to be too clever here. A good adage to go by is, “When tagging, tag as if you were being your dumb self.”
Now, if you want to learn more and go into more detail, I have just published a brand new course called Mastering Digital Notes Organisation. In this course, I go into detail on setting up your notes, how to process new notes, and the importance of the three underlying foundations of provenance, categories, and series.
This course will also show you how to build a rich resource of information that you will want to revisit repeatedly. Details on how to join the course are in the show notes, or you can go directly to my website, and the links and everything you need to know will be right there.
Thank you for listening, and I wish you all a very, very productive week.
Setting up a structured day makes sense. It reduces decision-making and helps you prioritise your work. But how strict should you be with this structure? That’s the question I answer this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Take The NEW COD Course
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Script | 320
Hello, and welcome to episode 320 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
The change that has given me the biggest productivity benefit over the years was giving my calendar priority over every other productivity tool. This means that if my calendar tells me it’s time to buckle down and do some focused work, I will do that. If a customer or boss asks for a meeting when I have scheduled time to work on a project, I will always suggest an alternative time.
This single change has meant I get all my work done (with time to spare), I can plan my days and weeks with a reasonable amount of confidence, and I rarely, if ever, get backlogs.
However, when you adopt this method, the temptation is to adhere to it rigidly. And that is where things begin to go wrong.
This week’s question is on this very question. How strict should you be with the plan you have for the week? So, with that said, literally, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Lucas. Lucas asks, hi Carl, I love your idea of blocking time out for your core work each week. The problem I have is I feel guilty now whenever I ignore a message or refuse to meet someone when I have a time block. What do you do to overcome this feeling of guilt?
Hi Lucas, thank you for your question.
Having structure in your day (and week) lets you know with a strong degree of confidence that you have sufficient time each day to do your work.
Let me give you an example. Pretty much all of us get email each day. It’s just one of those inevitable parts of life. Now, if you are a typical knowledge worker, you will be getting upwards of 80 emails each day. Let’s say, of those 80 emails, half of them are non-actionable, 10 of them are for reference, and the remaining emails (thirty) require a response of some sort from you.
How long will it take for you to respond to thirty emails? An hour? An hour-and-a-half? However, how long it will take you is rather less important. What matters is that at some point in the day, you will need to deal with those emails. If you don’t allocate some time, you will require double the amount of time tomorrow because you will have to deal with all the emails you didn’t deal with today.
That’s how backlogs build: by being unrealistic about the amount of time you need to protect to stay on top of things like email and your admin.
It would be easy for me to sit here and tell you to find an hour a day and dedicate it to responding to your emails. In theory, this sounds great. In practice, life will get in the way. It always does.
And even if life doesn’t get in the way, you may be exhausted, or something could be worrying you. All of which will conspire to slow you down and make you less efficient.
Instead of strictly sticking to a plan, you will find it better to work on the principle that one is greater than zero. In other words, while you may like to have an hour to manage your emails, on those days that you don’t, give yourself twenty or thirty minutes instead.
The goal is not necessarily to clear your actionable email each day. The goal is to stay on top of it. This means that if you are unable to clear all your actionable emails today when you come to deal with your email tomorrow, you begin with the oldest and work from there.
This way, no one will ever wait longer than twenty-four hours for a reply.
This approach gives you the flexibility to deal with requests as and when they come in—and they will come in. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of waking up with a clear plan of action for the day, only to begin your work day and be told some catastrophic mistake has happened and all hands are required to get things back under control.
That’s life for you. As the saying goes. “No plan survives the first shot being fired.”
Getting comfortable with this reality means you retain some degree of flexibility to deal with colleagues’ and friends’ requests in a way that doesn’t make you feel guilty.
But let’s look at this a little deeper.
Attending meetings and answering messages and emails is what Call Newport describes as the administrative tax you pay for agreeing to do a project. Unless you are working on your own project, there will always be some form of communication that, while important, will stop you from doing actual work on the project.
Your colleagues may be very happy to see you in the meeting or to receive your message responses in a timely manner, but how will they feel if you are unable to meet your deadlines?
Nobody will remember you skipped a meeting or two or were a little late responding to a message. But I can assure you they will remember if you cannot meet your deadlines. That will leave them feeling disappointed and tarnish your reputation as a productive and effective employee.
Time blocking does not mean you block out every day for specific types of work. Allocating two hours for focused work and an hour each for communications and admin would only take four hours out of a typical eight-hour working day.
That would ensure you are consistently on top of your work and still allow you four hours for meetings, responding to quick requests and answering your phone.
The only area where someone may feel put out is if they want to hold a meeting at 10:00 am and you tell them you cannot do so but will be happy to meet at 11:30 am instead. Yet, with that said, I’ve never come across anyone who got offended because I suggested an alternative time.
And remember, if they pull rank on you, so to speak—i.e. your boss tells you that you must attend the meeting at 10:00 am, okay, you have no choice so attend the meeting and readjust your focus time. Either you can reduce the time that day, or you reschedule it for another time in the day.
When you plan your core work for the week, you do so knowing that your plan will likely need to change. That does not mean you don’t plan the week.
Planning out when you will do your core work for the week means you know you begin the week with enough time to get that important work done. If, or rather, when something comes up that requires you to adjust your schedule, that’s fine. Look at your calendar and see where you can move a focused time block. If you cannot, look at reducing the time block.
If none of that is possible, delete the time block altogether. It’s one day, and you may create a small backlog for a day or two. But if you are consistent and you stay with your plan where possible, you will soon find yourself clearing any backlog.
It’s interesting that you assume there’s a feeling of “guilt”. I must admit I did feel uncomfortable when I began implementing these practices. I went from being always available for anyone to being selectively available. But I don’t remember ever feeling guilty.
The people demanding my time wanted me to do some work for them. The thing is, talking about work is not doing work. Sitting in a meeting delayed the work. It was easy to overcome any risk of guilt by telling myself that by making it difficult for me to be in a meeting with them, I was able to do what they wanted me to do better and faster.
Life is always going to be full of difficult choices. Do I take my dog for a walk now or later? When do I go to the supermarket? Do I work on this project or that one? It’s never-ending.
Yet, a plan for the week reassures you you have the time set aside. And once that plan is in place, you do whatever you can to protect it.
That does not mean you stubbornly stick to it. There will always be a need for flexibility. But, if you give yourself ten minutes or so before the end of the day, you can look at what you didn’t do and reschedule what you can.
The best special forces teams always begin a mission with a clear plan of action. Yet they know that once the mission begins, that plan will change. Part of their training is to learn how to adapt to the changing nature of the battlefield quickly. Intelligence may have been incorrect, a weapon may malfunction, or a team member may take a hit and be rendered out of action. The skill is in quickly evaluating the changing nature of the plan and adapting your actions to adapt to the new set of circumstances you face.
You will not be able to do that in a week or a month. It’s something you will always be working on. But with practice and focus, you will soon find yourself becoming more adaptable. Better at making decisions about where to apply your time and feeling less guilty about being less available than you used to be.
Good luck, Lucas and thank you for your question.
Thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
So, your calendar and task manager are organised, and you have enough time to complete your important work. But how do you define what your individual tasks are? That’s what I’m answering this week.
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Script | 319
Hello, and welcome to episode 319 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
One of the most powerful ways to improve your effectiveness is to ensure you have sufficient time each day protected for your important work. Some of these tasks will be obvious. If you’re a salesperson and one of your customers asks you to send them a quote for a new product you are selling, that will come under the general category of “customers”. As this is an important part of your work as a salesperson, your “customer” category will have time protected each day. Well, I hope it does.
Then there will be your general communications and admin to deal with. We all have these categories of tasks to do each day. There’s no point in sticking your head in the sand, as it were, and hoping they will go away. Emails demanding a reply do not disappear. Ignore these for one day, and you’ll have double the amount to do tomorrow. This means you will need double the amount of time, too—time you likely do not have.
What this all means is that if your task manager supports tags or labels (and most do), you can use these for your categories.
This week’s question is about how you choose which category for your tasks.
So, with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from José. José asks, Hi Carl, I am struggling to define which tasks are admin, consulting, or sales-related. How do you go about choosing categories for your tasks?
Hi José, thank you for your question.
Let me first explain the different categories of work you may have.
The concept here is that every task you have will come under a particular category. Those categories could be communications or admin, but they could also be sales activity, writing, designing, or marketing. Your categories will depend on the kind of work you do.
Once you have established your categories, you protect time each day (or week) to work on those categories.
For example, I have a category for “projects.” I block Wednesday mornings for project work. This means that when I plan for the week, the majority of my project tasks will be scheduled for Wednesday.
The important thing is you do not add too many categories. The less, the better. To give you a benchmark, I have eight categories. Mine are:
Writing
Audio/visual
Clients
Projects
Communications
Admin
Planning
Chores
It can be difficult to establish your categories at first, and the temptation will be to add more categories than you need. This is a mistake because very soon, you will have too many categories, which slows down your processing.
If you’re familiar with COD (and if you are not, you can take the free course—the link is in the show notes), the purpose of Organising is to get everything in the right place as quickly as possible. If you have too many categories, it will slow you down and involve far too many choices. You may experience the paradox of choice, where too much choice paralyses your thinking.
So, what are your categories? Well, you will likely have communications and admin. We all have to communicate, and email and Teams/Slack are pernicious and never-ending. Having some time protected each day to deal with your communications will keep you on top of these and prevent you from being overwhelmed.
And there will always be bits of admin to deal with. Requests from HR, banking, filing, and expenses to process etc. You may not need a great deal of time for admin each day, but it’s worth protecting thirty minutes or so to stay on top of this.
However, aside from your communications and admin, what other categories do you need? This depends on your core work.
For instance, if you are a journalist, two categories spring to mind: research and writing. This is the core of your employed work and is what you are paid for. If you spend six hours out of an eight-hour working day in Teams or Zoom meetings, that leaves you with just two hours to manage your communications and admin AND do some writing.
No chance. It’s not going to happen. Something will have to change if you want to spend more time doing what you are employed to do.
One way to do that is to ensure before the week begins, you have enough time to meet your core work objectives. That comes first. After that, you will see how much time you have left for meetings.
Simple, yes. To put into practice, perhaps a lot more difficult. But it’s one of those important adjustments worth working on.
This means, if you were a journalist, you would have your writing and research categories blocked in your calendar before the week begins.
Now, in your case, José, you mentioned how to determine what type a task is. I would see any task that comes from a customer or client as something more than admin unless it was updating a customer relationship manager or a spreadsheet—which would be admin.
If a client requests a copy of an invoice or receipt, I would categorise that as client work. It’s important because it’s a request from a client. It might be small to you, but your client may need that invoice or receipt urgently. (Remember, not everyone is as efficient as you are.)
It’s also a quick win for you, as a task like this would be a quick task.
Consulting is an interesting category. That perhaps is something you do as part of your client work. For example, I don’t consider my coaching work a separate category. Coaching is relatively straightforward as I am with the client. It’s an appointment on my calendar. The resulting feedback I write for the client comes under the category “Writing” - As I have four or five coaching appointments per day, this means I have four or five feedback reports to write each day. Hence, I have a writing block on my calendar most days.
Similarly, with sales, is that a category of task, or is it an appointment with clients? Sales activity may be prospecting, writing proposals or following up with clients (although that could be under the category of communications)
Now, this leads me to an important aspect of this. You do not need to be absolute here. What matters is that the work gets done. Whether something is categorised as communications or sales activity doesn’t really matter. What matters is that the task gets done when you intend it to happen.
There inevitably will be some grey areas. You could say that writing feedback for my coaching clients is a communication task—after all, it involves writing to the client. However, I chose to categorise the task as a writing task.
And that’s important. I chose to categorise it that way, and I am consistent with it.
Perhaps in your consultancy work, José, you prepare reports for your clients. How would you categorise writing those reports? Is it writing, or is it client work? How you categorise it doesn’t really matter as long as you are consistent with your categorising.
Why go to the trouble of categorising your work in the first place?
Well, doing so helps you to prioritise your work more effectively. For instance, as a consultant, your top priority each day could be your client’s work. When you begin the day, and you see three tasks related to client work, you know, without any further planning, that those three tasks will be your priority for the day.
Likewise, chores could be low-priority tasks for you, in which case you can decide whether you will call the bank at lunchtime or leave it until later in the week.
Categorising your work is another way to automate the decision-making process. Having to decide what to do based on a long list of potential things to do overwhelms you and leaves you exhausted at the end of the day. By pre-determining what your core work is—the work that is important as opposed to work that feels important but, in reality, is disguised low-value busy work.
At the heart of this method is pre-determining what is important and what is not. Only experience will tell you this to any accurate degree, and there will always be some grey areas. Fortunately, with experience, these instances of grey areas will reduce.
If you are moving away from trying to decide what to do from a long list of tasks each day, moving to a categorised list will be uncomfortable at first. You will make mistakes and miscategorise tasks. That’s fine. It’s certainly nothing to worry about. It’s by making mistakes you will learn for the next time.
And, I should mention, you will never be perfect. There are too many different types of tasks coming at us each day that may defy a category. The important thing is not to worry too much about these. They will be rare, but will happen.
So, if you are new to the idea of categorising your tasks, the way to set this up is to create tags or labels in your task manager for the types of tasks you generally get. Try to avoid being too specific. Your tasks are specific—for instance, “call Jenny about next week’s board meeting” would come under your category communications. Likewise, your follow-ups would be communications too.
It’s also a good idea to keep these labels or tags to a minimum. The more you have, the slower you will be.
Once you have your tags set up, you then create time blocks in your calendar for working on those types of tasks. So, in my case, I have an hour each day set aside for communications. This means when my communication time comes up, I only need to see my list of communications for that day. Nothing else matters for the next hour. I know if I stick with this each day, I will never have a backlog or be overwhelmed, even if, on some days, I am unable to clear them all.
All this ultimately comes back to defining your role at work. Most of us are pretty clear about our roles in our personal lives (e.g., mother/father, son/daughter, community member, etc.). It’s our work roles that we struggle with.
Giving yourself some time to think about your roles will help you to develop the right categories for your work, and that, in turn, will help you to organise your task list so it works for you rather than be a source of stress and overwhelm.
I hope that has helped, José. Thank you for sending in your question.
And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, it’s COD week. In a special episode, I’ll walk you through the fundamentals of what all solid productivity and time management systems have.
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Script | 318
Hello, and welcome to episode 318 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Now, some of you may be wondering what COD means. Well, it’s not a type of fish. COD stands for Collect, Organise, and Do, and these three parts of a productivity system are the critical foundations you need to develop if you want your system to work effortlessly.
COD came about several years ago following a research project I did. In it, I went back to 1960 (not literally) and looked at all the time management and productivity systems I could find to see if there were any common denominators.
There were multiple systems and approaches, from Hyrum Smith’s Franklin Planner system to Stephen Covey’s First Things First and Jim Rohn’s notebook and planning method. And, of course, I didn’t neglect to look at GTD (Getting Things Done) and the multiple variations that came from that.
There were four standout features of all these systems. The first was to collect everything into a trusted place. The second was to organise or process what you collected. The third was to plan the day, and finally, there was doing the work.
When I developed COD, I wanted to give you a simple framework on which to build your own system. A system based on how you prefer to do your work. Many of you will like routine, others perhaps like flexibility. What COD does is give you a three-step process you can customise to work in the way you want to work.
Let me begin with collecting.
Nothing will work if you don’t collect whatever comes your way in a trusted place. Here, there are two key parts. Collect everything and put it somewhere you trust you will see later in the day.
Scribbling tasks and ideas onto PostIt notes can work, but I have observed that they often get stuck on computer monitors, whiteboards, and many other places, which means you don’t trust that you will see them later in the day.
What works best is having a central place for all these tasks, appointments, and ideas. That could be a task manager on your phone and computer or a pocket notebook you carry with you everywhere you go.
What matters is you use it consistently, and you trust it. This may mean you need to practice to develop the right habits. But this practice is well worth it.
The second thing about your collecting tool (or UCT, as I call it, Universal Collecting Tool) is that it should be fast. If there are too many buttons to press or you keep a notebook in your bag and you have to retrieve your bag to get your notebook, you will resist and start to believe you will remember whatever you were going to collect in your head. And that will never serve you. It will forget to remind you to add it to your inbox.
The second part of the process is organising what you collected. Here, you want to choose something that works for you. I recommend using the Time Sector System, but you may find organising things by project works better for you.
What matters when it comes to organising is that you can quickly organise what you collected that day into their appropriate places. For instance, a task would go into your task manager, an event would go to your calendar, and an idea would go into your notes app. Where you put them will depend on how you have each of these tools set up.
With your task manager, what matters is the things you need to do show up on the days they need to be done. Nothing else really matters.
A side issue is that if you are going in and out of your task manager looking for things to do in individual projects or lists, you will be less effective. When you are tired, you will just scroll through your lists of tasks, causing you to feel depressed about how much you have to do and how little time you have to do them.
This is why being clear about when something needs to be done prevents that scroll. You trust that what you have on your list of things to do today is the right thing to do today.
That’s why I recommend the Time Sector System as your organisational system. It focuses on when you will do something, not how much you have to do.
There are only twenty-four in a day, and you’re not going to be able to get everything done in a day. Be realistic about what you can and cannot do in a day.
And then there’s the doing.
And this is what it’s all about. You’ve collected all this stuff, and it’s organised, so you know where everything is, what appointments you have, and what tasks need to be done today. If you have ensured the first two parts—the collecting and organising—have been done, the doing part will largely take care of itself.
But what is important about doing? That’s doing the things that matter, and remaining focused on what you have decided is important.
When you don’t have any kind of system for collecting and organising, you will find you get pulled into doing things for other people at the expense of what you are meant to be doing. It can be easy to spend four or five hours helping someone else to get their work done, only to find yourself with precious little time left to do the work you are expected to do.
This is where you will find yourself building mountains of backlogs and with no time to get them under control.
It doesn’t mean that you cut yourself off from other people. What it means is you begin the day with a clear idea of what needs to be done.
If you do have everything organised and you are spending five or ten minutes each day planning the next, you will find that out of a typical eight-hour day, you will likely need three or four hours for your own work. That still leaves you with four or five hours where you are available for other people. If you are structured and disciplined, you will find managing your own work and the requests of others easily manageable.
Yet all this begins with the collecting and organising.
That is the most powerful part of COD. It’s essentially a process you follow that ensures the right work is getting done at the right time.
And that is the way to think about it—a process. Throughout the day, you collect. Then, at the end of the day, you spend ten minutes or so organising what you collected, and for the rest of the time, you do the work.
There are other parts to building a productivity system. Ensuring you have enough time protected each day for doing your important work, which means blocking time on your calendar.
I find it interesting that with the advancement of technology, we have focused on doing more rather than using technology to protect our time for the important things in life.
I remember years ago envying bosses who had secretaries. Secretaries protected their bosses’ calendars by making it difficult for people to make demands on their time. Technology can do this for you today. Services like Calendarly allow you to specify when you are available for meetings with other people, and they can choose a suitable time from a list of available times.
There are Do Not Disturb features on your phone and in internal messaging services that tell people you are busy. Technology can do all the things the best secretaries did twenty to thirty years ago. Use them. They will make your life a lot less stressful.
The final part of doing is the art of prioritisation. In the COD course, I have a section on the 2+8 Prioritisation Method. This is a simple method for choosing what to work on each day. The principle is that each day, you dedicate ten tasks to be done. These tasks do not include your routine tasks—the low-value maintenance tasks. These are bigger projects or goal-moving tasks.
Two of those tasks will be nominated as your must-do tasks for the day. These are the tasks you absolutely must do that day, and you will not stop until they are done. For instance, today, my two must-do tasks are recording this podcast and continuing my research into the profession of archiving.
When I did my planning last night, I highlighted these two tasks in my task manager and blocked time out on my calendar for getting them done.
There are other things I need to do today, but those two tasks are the must-dos.
This is how COD helps you. It gives you a framework and a process for doing your work and living your life.
If you adopt COD, you will find you have a system for managing your workload. However, beyond COD, there are a few other things you need to develop.
The first is how you will manage your tasks. As I mentioned before, I recommend the Time Sector System, which emphasises what needs to be done this week and pushes everything else off your list until it becomes relevant. This act alone significantly reduces that sense of overwhelm and encourages you to be realistic about what can be completed in a week.
Then there are the higher-level objectives in your life—your long-term vision and goals for getting to where you want to be.
However, without the basics in place, you do not have steps to get there. After all, a goal without a set of steps to achieve it is a delusion.
If you are struggling to get things working for you, I encourage you to take the COD course. Even if you already have a system, the course will give you ideas and methods that will help you make your system even better.
It’s a free course and will take less than an hour to complete. Plus, you get free downloadable guidance sheets and so much more.
The link to the course is in the show notes, and you can get further information from my website, carlpullein.com
Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Do you feel your digital notes are not giving you what you want? And, is there a right and wrong way to manage all these notes? That’s what we are looking at today.
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Script | 317
Hello, and welcome to episode 317 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Over the last few years, there’s been a lot of discussion around how we manage our digital notes. There have been hundreds, if not thousands of new notes apps promising to do wonderful things for us and there have been numerous ways to organise all these notes from Tiago Forte’s PARA and the Second Brain to the Zettelkasten system.
The question is do any of these apps and systems work?
I feel qualified to answer this question as I have been down every rabbit hole possible when it comes to digital notes. I’ve tried Michael Hyatt’s Evernote tagging system, Tiago’s PARA and I even developed my own system, GAPRA. But, ultimately do any of these work ?
And asking that question; do any of these systems give you what you need? Perhaps is the right place to start. What do you want from a notes app? What do you want to see and how?
Before we get to the answers here, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Susan. Susan asks, Hi Carl, I’m having difficulties trying to understand how best to use Evernote. I just do not know how to organise my notes. I have thousands of notes in there going back at least five years and it’s a mess. Do you have any suggestions on how best to clean all these notes up?
Hi Susan, thank you for your question.
I don’t think you are alone. The popularity of books like Building A Second Brain and the number of YouTube videos on this subject suggests many people are struggling to know how best to organise their digital notes.
But, I wonder if what we are doing is over-complicating something that should be very simple.
I’ve recently been reading Walter Isaacson’s brilliant biography of Leonardo Da Vinci and on the chapter about his notebooks Isaacson points out that Leonardo Da Vinci instilled the habit of carrying around a notebook into all is students and apprentices. It was something Leonardo did himself and everything he collected, wrote and sketched was random in order.
We are very fortunate that many of these notebooks survive today and what we get to see is the complete randomness of what he collected. In these notebooks there are designs, sketches, thoughts and to-do lists all on the same page. It was this randomness that led to Leonardo discovering new ways to connect ideas to solve difficult problems and to paint in a way no one else had ever done.
And, I think, this is where we have gone wrong with our digital notes. It’s the randomness of your notes that will lead you to discover new ways of doing things. It will help you to be more creative and help you develop your ideas. If you try and strictly organise your notes—something a digital notes app will do—you lose those random connections. Everything will be organised by topic, thought or idea.
That does not mean that you want complete randomness. There will be projects, goals and areas of interest that you will want to keep together. A large project works best when all related notes, emails and thoughts are kept together. After all, they are connected by a common desired outcome. This is where your digital notes will excel—everything together in one place.
This is why having a project notebook or folder is a good idea. You can keep all these materials together and it gives you a central place to review your ongoing projects.
Then, there are what I would describe as critical information materials—things like your clothing and shoe sizes for the various places you buy things from. You may collect your receipts in organised months, and if you trust your digital notes, you may want to keep information such as your ID numbers, driving licence details, and health insurance certificates.
Again, digital notes are great for storing this kind of information as they make it easily retrievable whenever you need it.
What about everything else? The random thoughts and ideas you have. Well, if you want these to be useful to you at some future date, you will want to keep them random. Why is that?
Your brain works at a very high level of illogicality. This is the opposite of what a computer does. A computer operates on very strict logical lines. Even AI works logically. AI will look at data and information and give you answers that are already in existence. This often seems amazing because we had not thought of those ideas before, but someone did. That’s how AI found the answers.
And of course, as we recently discovered with Google’s AI models, there are the biases of the people programming the software—all based on existing thoughts and ideas.
It’s these notes that if you want to develop new, creative ideas that link uniquely together, they want to be maintained in a random way.
Paper notebooks make this easy. Each new thought or idea is added to a page in your notebook chronologically, and over time, your ideas will fill that notebook in the order you have them. There may be blocks of similar thoughts and ideas you collected around the same time, but on the whole, they will be completely random. Perhaps on one page, you have some ideas about how you will redesign your back garden and on another page, you have drafted out some ideas about where you and your family will go on their next holiday.
This becomes a little more difficult with digital notes because your computer and the apps you use will want to organise them logically. However, you can create randomness here, too, if you use an archive folder.
Many people think of their archive as being one step short of the trash. It’s where things you are not sure what to do with go. But stop a moment. Where would historians be without your country’s national archive? What are museums? Essentially, museums are archives of interesting things people may want to see. And there is the archive at the Vatican that holds so many treasures and documents.
An archive is not a glorified trash can. It’s a treasure trove of history. And if you create an archive notebook or folder in your digital notes you will be creating your own digital archive.
Now, because places like the National Archives in the US or UK or the archives at the Vatican City are always adding new stuff, it would be impossible to organise all these documents by theme. They may be tagged by theme, but they are organised by the date they entered the archive. If I wanted to find documents related to the Titanic, I would begin my search around April 1912. If I wanted to get a snapshot of life in 1964, I would just go to the section that housed documents from 1964.
You can do the same with your own archives. Once you have created a notebook or folder called archive, you can create sub-folders or sub-notebooks by year. Then, as you archive notes, you just add them to the year they were created.
This approach will give you the all-important randomness, yet you still have some organisation.
You can tag these notes if you wish; I do. But, and this is an important but, don’t try and be too clever here.
Imagine you were researching the Vietnam War and wanted to know how and why the war escalated in 1965. If you were at the US National Archives, you might begin your research in 1965, then Vietnam. So, the tag would be Vietnam. If you wanted to narrow down your research, you might look at the documents related to President Johnson’s decision-making, so perhaps there would be a tag for presidential papers. Beyond that, you would be trying to fine-tune things too much. You would likely see from the results you get which documents relate to meetings.
In your archive, you may have taken a trip to Paris in 2018, and while there, you came across a fantastic restaurant. Perhaps you took at picture of the menu and saved that into your notes. Now, you have two ways of retrieving that information today. If you remember the year you were in Paris, you could go straight to your 2018 archive, and as your notes will be in date order, you could scroll down to the date you were in Paris.
The alternative is if you tagged the note “Paris”, you could do a search for “Paris”. And within seconds you will have retrieved the information you wanted.
That’s how you want your notes to work. Keep them simple, so that if you want to retrieve information at a later date, you would be able to find things quickly.
What I’ve noticed is when we try and be too strict about how we organise our notes we are always fiddling and changing things. While this can be fun, at first, it becomes a drag on your productivity because the more time you spend organising, the less time you spend doing the work you need to do.
You could create separate notebooks for places and topics, but unless these are lifetime interests, keeping everything in their separate notebooks will not make retrieval any faster, and you lose that all-important randomness.
Another area where randomness really helps is with your ideas and thoughts. I’m sure you’ve had an idea about classes you may want to take or a business idea you want to investigate. You may have had ideas about starting a blog or podcast or writing a book. Many of these ideas will be passing ideas and you soon move on to the next idea. If you were intent on doing something about the idea you would begin. If you don’t begin, it’s likely a passing idea.
These passing ideas are the gold you do not want to delete. They could contain the seeds of something very special. However, on their own, they may seem redundant after a few weeks or months. It’s these notes you want to keep in your archive.
In a year or two, you may feel compelled to skim through one of your archive years, and you begin to see connections between all these ideas. Leonardo Da Vinci, sketched the mouth he eventually gave the Mona Lisa twelve years before he began painting the Mona Lisa.
Individually, these notes may mean nothing. But together, they could be your next great idea.
So, Susan, look at what you want to collect and save. Keep your projects together, these you will be working on frequently. And all those random notes you collect, store them in archives by year. As these build, you will be creating a gold mine of ideas and thoughts you will never regret keeping.
I hope that has helped and thank you for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week, I’m answering a question about the basics of building your very own time management and productivity system.
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Script | 316
Hello, and welcome to episode 316 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Do you ever feel there is too much conflicting advice on productivity and time management? There are those who tell you never to look at your email first thing in the morning and others who do (me included). Then there are those who advocate time blocking and many who don’t. And there are the proponents of the Getting Things Done system or, as I discovered recently, people who swear by their Franklin Planners.
It’s a confusing landscape, yet if you look at almost any way of doing things, there will always be conflicting advice. That’s because humans have different ways of doing things and varied tastes. There are those who say a stick-shift car is better than an automatic; others will give you different advice on how to raise your children.
So, how do you navigate all the advice on time management and productivity? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
This week’s question comes from Meg. Meg asks, Hi Carl, I’m a recent convert to your YouTube channel, and I wanted to ask if you have any recommendations for time management systems. There’s a lot of different advice, and I just want something I can use and stick to.
Hi Meg, thank you for your question.
I’ve always felt when it comes to time management and, by extension, productivity, the best place to start is with what you want to know and when.
By this, I mean, what do you want to see on your calendar, and when do you want to see it? You can set up notifications on your calendar to alert you to upcoming events, and you can choose when those notifications appear. For instance, if you work from home, perhaps you may only need a fifteen-minute alert before a meeting. If you work in an office or travel to meet clients, you may prefer to see when your next appointment is thirty minutes or an hour before.
Getting fundamentals like this right for you would be a great place to begin.
Next would be how you manage your calendars. You will likely have a work and personal calendar. I know many people also have shared calendars with their families. The question here is how you want to be able to see all these calendars.
Separating them by keeping your work calendar only on your work devices and your personal calendars on your personal devices can give you a nice clean edge between your work and personal life but can also create conflicts.
If you were sent on a one-day training course, you may need to leave home a little early to arrive at the training site. If you were also committed to taking your kids to school on that day without seeing them all on the same calendar, it would be easy to double-book yourself.
Think of it this way: you live one life, not multiple. Yes, you may have different roles in your life—a parent, a brother or sister, a son or daughter and an employee, for instance, but all those roles are just a part of your one life. When thought of that way, would it not make sense to keep that one life on one calendar?
You could separate your roles by creating different calendars within your calendar app. Each role could be allocated a different colour on a single calendar. This way, you would see everything on one calendar and easily manage conflicts, such as attending a training course and taking your kids to school.
If you work with a company that is very strict about sharing company data, you may not be able to have all your different roles in one calendar. If that is you, you could block your work times out on your personal calendar so you can identify when you have work commitments. Your calendar only needs to show you where you are meant to be. You can always refer to your work device for the details.
This will mean a little extra work when you do your weekly planning, but checking your work calendar for any unusual start or finish times shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.
How best to manage your notes can be confusing. There is a lot of conflicting advice in this area. There are thousands of different note apps and multiple ways to organise your notes.
But let’s step back a little and think about how YOU want to use your notes.
Some of you may want to store important project information in a single place, and many of you may want to keep your ideas centrally so you can access them when you need new ones. There’s something about seeing all your random ideas together that can create connections between them you never thought of.
Many parents like to keep their kids’ drawings in a digital archive, and a notes app is great for doing that. Imagine all those pictures collected over the years and being able to see them wherever you are, whenever you want. In years to come, you may use them to tease your kids.
The thing is, how do you organise all this stuff?
It’s likely you will be collecting work-related information as well as information you want to use personally. Do you keep these separate or in one place? Again, this will depend on what your employer allows you to access outside of your work devices. You will likely find having everything in one place is the most convenient. This avoids having to remember where you put something and will make finding what you are looking for seamless.
If you have no choice, keeping your work-related notes only on your work devices should not be a big inconvenience. As with having separate calendars, it does mean you will need to review multiple places to ensure you haven’t missed anything important.
Organising your notes can be a bit of a minefield. This is where there are still a lot of ideas and methods.
One way to look at this is how people organised their notes before the digital world. After all, the digital age is relatively new and we are still experimenting with methods. People used old grey filing cabinets for hundreds of years—they must have learned a thing or two about filing effectively.
With filing cabinets the most common way to organise was alphabetically. In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen also recommends organising files alphabetically. Perhaps a “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach would work best for you here.
You can keep your folders or notebooks flexible; for example, you may wish to have a folder called “Insurance”, where you keep all documents related to your insurance policies. Remember, unlike filing cabinets, you can find the right document from a simple search using your keyboard so you do not need to create sub-folders for each type of insurance policy.
While there are frameworks such as Tiago Forte’s PARA (PARA stands for Projects, Areas, Resources, and Archive) and my GAPRA (GAPRA stands for Goals, Areas, Projects, Resources, and Archive), I’m coming around to believing these more complex structures are unnecessarily complex.
Today’s notes apps have excellent search features. You can add a note, and as long as you remember a title, keyword, or date range, you will be able to find it in seconds.
The biggest difference between the digital and analogue worlds is how the digital world connects. You can have your calendar, to-do list, and all your notes on a single device in your pocket, and anything you collect will be synchronised to all your digital devices. I still marvel at how I can save a blog post or news article for reading later from my phone and move it to my iPad, and the article I just saved is there waiting for me to read.
If I go back to what you want to see and when, you may want to see your calendar in the morning while you are drinking your morning brew. This means having your today’s calendar on your phone makes sense. A quick tap on your calendar app and today’s appointments are there.
What about the things you need to do today? When would you want to see those? Perhaps the first time you need to look at these is when you sit down to begin your work day. Seeing that on your computer before you begin makes sense. A bigger screen will make a list seem less overwhelming, and you can decide when these to-dos will best be done.
The most important thing, Meg, is not to overcomplicate things. When we complicate things, systems and frameworks break. You don’t need overly complex structures for your notes. All you need is a simple alphanumeric filing system that makes sense to you. Your to-do list only needs to show you what needs to be done today. Tomorrow, next week and next month’s to-dos are not relevant today.
The goal should be to begin the day knowing where you need to be and what needs to be done. Anything that supports that will always work. Anything that leaves you having to make too many decisions or think too much about what to do does not.
I hope that has helped, Meg and thank you for your question.
Thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week’s question is all about how I use the technology I have to be more productive and better manage my time.
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Script | 315
Hello, and welcome to episode 315 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
There’s a lot of technology today that helps us be more productive. Our computers make producing work easy compared to twenty-five years ago. It’s also made producing some kinds of work a lot cheaper. Imagine the cost of studio time if you wanted to record an album in 1999. Today, all you need is a laptop and a microphone, and you are good to go.
However, with all that wonderful technology, it’s likely we have a lot of devices lying around gathering dust. I have a camera with four or five lenses sitting in a gorgeous canvas camera bag I haven’t used in over five years. Now, all I take with me when we go on a trip is my phone. I’m not a professional photographer; I don’t need all that equipment.
And don’t get me started on all the apps I find I need to purge every once in a while because I don’t use them anymore. Then, there are all the subscriptions you may be paying for that you are not using.
As an example, I recently discovered I had a Fantastical subscription. I used to use Fantastical. It was a cool calendar app that allowed me to have all my Todoist tasks and events in one place. Shortly after seeing what that did to my calendar, I stopped that integration (it was horrible. It made it look like I had no time at all for anything but work and meetings). Why was I paying for a service I was not using? I don’t know, but it did cause me to go through all my app subscriptions to see if there were any more. (I found four more services I was paying for I was no longer using).
This week’s question addresses the heart of this technology overwhelm, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.
This week’s question comes from Mark. Mark asks, hi Carl, I was wondering what digital tools you use to get your work done. You seem to be using a lot of tools, and I thought it must be very confusing to decide what to use.
Hi Mark, thank you for your question.
I remember hearing an interview with Craig Federighi in which he explained Apple’s thinking on its products. He talked about how sometimes you work on your laptop, and other times, you may find the environment more suitable for an iPad. A good example of this would be when working at your desk, you may prefer the laptop, and if you attended a meeting, the form factor and mobility of an iPad might work better. It certainly did for me when I was teaching.
I would create all my teaching materials from my computer, but when I went to the classroom I took only my iPad. That was all I needed to teach with.
Today, I no longer teach in classrooms; I work from home. However, I do like to step away from my desk and work somewhere else occasionally, and when I do that, I will only take my iPad with me. It’s great for writing and fits nicely into a small shoulder bag I carry when I go out.
But let’s look at how I use each individual device, and I will explain why.
My phone is always with me, which means it’s the perfect UCT (Universal Collection Tool). I have my phone set up so I can quickly collect tasks, ideas and articles I would like to read later.
I use Drafts, an amazing little app that connects with Todoist and Evernote. With Evernote, I have it set up so that if I have a blog post or YouTube video idea, I can send it directly to my content ideas note without having to open Evernote. Drafts also allow me to dictate my ideas, which is essential as I have most of my ideas when I am walking my dog, Louis. I can then collect my ideas and keep an eye on Louis at the same time.
When I am out and about, I process emails from my phone, but I rarely respond from there. There are better tools for responding to actionable emails. I have a process for email management which involves clearing my inbox between sessions of work and then setting aside an hour later in the day for responding. I will respond usually from my computer, but if I am away from my office, I will use my iPad.
And, of course, I use my phone for instant messages and occasionally scrolling social media when waiting for my wife (A daily activity haha).
I also have an old iPad Mini. I love that iPad. It’s my content consumption device, and on there, I will read blogs and articles I have collected through Readwise (an app for collecting articles you want to read later) and books through the Kindle app.
This iPad mini is not connected to any messaging service (Except Apple Messages) or email. It’s purely for consumption.
I should say I am not into gaming—never have been, so I have no gaming devices or apps. My guilty pleasure is reading and watching historical documentaries—which YouTube provides me in abundance. I will watch these on the big TV at home late at night when I am winding down for the day.
My iPad Pro (I think the 3rd edition) has the Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil connected, and as I mentioned, I use that as my main mobile device. The keyboard is wonderful to type on, and the Pencil is great for highlighting sections in documents. Strangely, I don’t ever use it for writing. I’m a fountain pen user, and the Apple Pencil (or any stylus, for that matter) doesn’t feel right for me. Plastic on glass doesn’t work (in my humble opinion). The feel of a 14 carat gold nib on some fountain pen-friendly Japanese paper has got to be experienced to be believed.
I also use my iPad Pro to listen to music when I am working. The battery on that thing lasts forever. I have a Bluetooth speaker in my office that has incredible bass (I love deep house music when I am working; the bass really helps)
My computer is for the heavy lifting: recording this podcast, editing my YouTube videos, and creating workbooks and documents. I also do a fair amount of my writing on my computer too. I also prefer to clear my actionable emails on my computer. All my design work is done on my computer from creating thumbnails for YouTube videos to workshop banners and online course materials.
And that’s it for devices. Now apps.
My primary productivity apps are Apple Calendar, Todoist and Evernote. I have experimented in recent months with Apple Notes, and while Apple Notes is an excellent note-taking app, Evernote has some features that Apple Notes does not. Primarily the ability to create note links that can be pasted into Todoist. You can do this in Apple Notes, but it’s fiddly, and I hate things that are fiddly.
Todoist is where I keep my tasks. It has a beautiful and simple interface, and in the ten years I have used it, it has never let me down. Todoist is on all my devices, as is Evernote, but… This is where Evernote is currently weak; I find the mobile version of Evernote poor. The text is too small, and there are too many button presses to get to where I want to be. However, as I use Drafts to get notes into my system, that’s something I can live with.
And that’s a good point to make. I’ve used Todoist for over ten years, and Evernote has been my go-to notes app for almost fifteen years. This means I have learned how to use these apps properly, I’ve come to trust them, and I don’t have to waste time trying to figure out how to do a particular action. I’ve learned everything I need to learn to use these apps optimally.
Apple Calendar has been my calendar app of choice for pretty much the last twenty years. I did try Fantastical for a couple of years, but the additional features were not very useful to me. Certainly not worth a subscription.
Now for the miscellaneous apps.
I use Acuity for my coaching scheduling service. This means my coaching clients can book a call whenever they want to, and there’s no back-and-forth trying to find a mutually convenient time.
As mentioned earlier, I use Readwise for my book highlights and for collecting articles. This is a recent change as previously I used Instapaper, but they are doubling their prices in May, and they don’t offer anywhere near the service Readwise does. The great thing is as I read a book and highlight a section or add a note, those notes and highlights are synced to Evernote in a notebook called Readwise.
For all my writing, I use Ulysses. This is a fantastically minimal writing app that, in full-screen mode, is just a dark screen with white text. There are no distractions at all and I can focus all my attention on my writing. This is synced with iCloud so if I am out and about and only have my iPad with me, I can carry on writing where I left off.
I recently looked at the number of words I have in Ulysses, and it’s now approaching three million. That just blew me away—three million words in eight years. I wrote my book, Your Time, Your Way in Ulysses, as well as all my podcast scripts, blog posts and newsletter articles. It’s a treasure trove of all my writing, and it’s all archived in iCloud. That’s one of the best things about not app-switching. You begin to create an archive of all your work in one place.
There is an exception to my writing process. I send my coaching clients written feedback after each call, and for that, I use Apple’s Pages, which is Apple’s version of Microsoft Word. Pages allows me to use a saved template for all my feedback.
For my admin and financial tasks, I use Apple’s Numbers. I don’t need the complexity of Microsoft Excel; my spreadsheet needs are simple.
And that’s about it. The only other item I use to get my work done is paper. I use an A4 Rhodia notebook as my planning book. This is where all my projects, weekly planning and YouTube video ideas get developed. I also returned to writing my journal by hand after using Day One for five years. That was because I felt my life was beginning to be dominated by screens, and it’s nice to get more use out of my fountain pen collection.
The most important thing for me is to keep the tools I use to a minimum. I’ve been down the road of trying out a lot of apps. What I discovered is that it’s not the app that does the work. It’s me. And for me to do my work in the most efficient and effective way possible, I need as few distractions as possible. Simplicity is my keyword when it comes to apps. The longer I need to spend trying to learn to use something, the less time I spend doing work. Which in turn means I spend less time with my family and doing the things I want to do. Not a very good way to manage time or be more productive.
I hope that answers your question, Mark. Thank you for sending it in and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
What can you do when your calendar’s full, your task manager is bulging at the seams, and you find yourself stuck with nowhere to turn? That’s what we are looking at today.
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Script | 314
Hello, and welcome to episode 314 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Do you feel, or often feel, that no matter what you do, there is always too much to do? Hundreds of emails that need responding to, several projects all coming to a close at the same time, and a demanding personal life?
It’s a horrible feeling, isn’t it? It feels like there’s no room to move or do anything you want to do. Turn up each day, and the noise destroys your energy, willpower and sense of being human—the “rinse and repeat” approach to life. It leaves you exhausted at the end of the day, yet with a feeling you got nothing important done.
The good news is all is not lost, but you are going to have to do something that every instinct in your body will tell you can’t do. Yet, if you do not do anything, these miserable days will continue forever.
Those who have managed to drag themselves out of that pit of despair have had to do something that was uncomfortable yet brought them the organisation and calm they were looking for. The good news is the action you need to take is not so dramatic that you need to quit your job. In fact, once you commit to taking action it can be a lot of fun. (No, really!)
So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Anthony. Anthony asks, Hi Carl, Can you help? I am completely overwhelmed with emails and tasks. I have three deadlines coming up at the end of this month, and I am so far behind I know I will miss those deadlines. How does anyone stay on top of their work?
Hi Anthony, Thank you for your question, and I hope you had time to renegotiate your deadlines before the end of February.
Okay, where to start? When anyone finds themselves caught in a spiral of never-ending tasks, emails and projects, there is only one thing you can do, and that is to stop. And this is the part every instinct in your body will scream NO! I don’t have time.
You are right in one respect; you don’t have time, but then you don’t have time to do your work either, do you? So, really, there’s nothing to lose by stopping altogether.
Let me explain why stopping altogether, at least for a couple of days, is the best thing you can do.
A lot of what you have accumulated likely does not need doing, but it is swirling around in your head or in your task manager telling you it does need doing. It’s only when you stop, step back and look at everything as a whole that you begin to see what needs doing and what likely does not. You won’t see that unless you stop.
Let’s take email as an example. At what point will responding to an email become embarrassing for you? A week, two weeks, a month or three months? If you have not replied to an email after three weeks, do you think the person who sent the email to you is still waiting, or do they even remember sending you the email in the first place?
Where is your line?
You see, there is a professional consideration here. If you have not responded to an email for three weeks, what do you think the sender will feel about you if they get a reply now? Unprofessional? Disorganised? A mess?
The thing is, if you have failed to respond to an email for three or more weeks often the best thing you can do is to leave it. Archive the email and move on. If it is important or does need your attention it will come back at some point. I would say if it has been a few weeks, the chances are things have moved on already anyway, and you won’t need to worry about it.
In my email system, Inbox Zero 2.0, I advise you to pick one of two options. A hard or soft email bankruptcy. Most people choose the soft email bankruptcy; this is where you select all the emails you have not responded to that are older than two to three weeks and move them to a new folder called “Old Inbox”. Then clear off the remaining emails in your inbox.
For these older emails you can go through them at leisure over the next few weeks and decide what to do with them. The reality is most people end up deleting this folder after a few weeks because they realise nothing in there is worth keeping.
The hard email bankruptcy is more effective but scary. Do the same as you would do with the soft email bankruptcy, but instead of moving them off to a folder, you hit the delete key and delete them.
You don’t need to worry about any retention issues; if you received an email, there will be a copy of it. Someone sent you the email in the first place, and anything you delete will sit in your trash folder for at least 30 days unless you change the defaults.
Just this action will get you back on top of your email.
However, to prevent the problem from reoccurring, you will need to change your email management practices. The best advice I can give you here is to set aside an hour a day—every day—to deal with your communications. Staying on top of email requires time each day. Miss just one day, and you will require double the amount of time the next day. It’s just not worth it. If you want a future where you are in control of your mail, you will need to deal with it every day.
I’m reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche (that’s the philosopher with the amazing moustache) who, among other things, popularised the Stoics term Amor Fati - which loosely translated means “loving your fate”. We all have to live with instant messages and emails today which means either we learn to love dealing with it or allow it to become a burden.
I prefer to find ways to make dealing with email a pleasure. I set the environment. Some great music, a comfortable chair and a warm dog sat next to me while I plough through as quickly as I can the emails I need to respond to today. Oh, and don’t forget the obligatory cup of British tea. Perfect. Now, for me, email’s a joy!
Now for the tasks in your task manager. Again, this will require some time out. Whether you have a few hundred or a few thousand tasks in your task manager, the best thing you can do is to go through this one by one and delete those that are no longer necessary, or you feel you have no time to get to this year. Your goal here is to reduce this list by at least 50%.
Your task manager really needs to be only concerned with anything you need to do in the next three months. Anything beyond that is either going to change significantly or won’t get done. Anything that you think needs to be done beyond three months can be put on your calendar as an all-day event. Or if you are not sure when you will do it or even if you ever will, you can create a list in your notes app and dump them there.
Task managers only work if they are clean and tight. In other words, if anything on your task list is something you may like to do or sounds like a good idea today but doesn’t really need to be done it should be removed.
Only tasks you know need to be done should be there, and nothing else. Wishful tasks should be in a project note or a master would-like-to-do list—in your notes. Your notes app can be the dumping ground for these, never your task manager.
The problem with dumping everything in your task manager, whether they need doing or not, is your task manager will soak them up willingly but will also want to remind you of them at some point. So what do we do? We add a date or a tag or label so we don’t forget them. And now you’ve just created overwhelm for yourself. These tasks will come back on random dates, and you will be swamped. Now, you will either reschedule them or give up altogether with the task manager—a great tool if used properly.
So, clean up your task manager and make sure only things that need to be done are on there, and nothing else.
Finally, let’s look at your calendar. The chances are when you look at your calendar, you are going to see the underlying problem fairly clearly. It is here where you will see how you are managing your time. Which is, after all, the essence of everything.
I mentioned earlier about setting aside some time each day for dealing with your communications; the question now is, what else do you need time for each day?
It’s likely you will need time for dealing with administrative tasks—those little things that need to be dealt with. Things like managing your personal finances, expense reports, arranging your next vacation and such like. What about family time or time for exercise, etc? How much time do you want for these activities each week?
This is where your calendar becomes the master. You can allocate time for these activities and block them out on your calendar so you won’t be tempted to allow anything else to get in the way.
How many meetings do you have, on average, each week? Are you spending too much time in meetings? Do you need to attend all those meetings? Could you be excused from some of them? These are questions you can ask yourself when you go through your calendar.
Could you find two to three hours, three to four times per week for deep-focused work? If so, block the time out now. Create the space you need to do the things you want to or need to do. Only your calendar will tell you if you have the time.
You may look at your calendar and instantly see you have overcommitted yourself. If that’s the case, what can you do to remove some of those commitments? Who do you need to talk to?
To get in control of your time and work, there will likely be some difficult choices to make. The issue is, though, if you don’t make those difficult choices today, the problems you are trying to solve will come back again and again.
If you try and resolve these issues without stopping and stepping back, you’ll only find yourself putting it off. There has to be a break-point. Why not do it now and get things back under control today?
Alternatively, you could block out a weekend in the near future to get everything under control. Two days, where you are completely on your own to get everything sorted out, can be great for your mental well-being. You get to see where the problems are, and once you see them, you can spend time finding the solutions.
I hope that has helped, Anthony. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.
Where does technology help, and where does it hinder your productivity? That’s what we’ll be exploring in this week’s episode.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | 313
Hello, and welcome to episode 313 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Over the last ten years or so, there’s been an explosion in the world of productivity technology. Prior to around 2010, most of our technology use was to create documents and presentations and send and reply to emails. We were in control, and technology served us.
Today, technology is creeping more and more into our lives. Now, you can use apps that will look at your task manager and your calendar and tell you when to work on what. Microsoft Outlook suggests times for focused work (not taking a walk or a rest, I notice), and many developers are promising more and more automation.
The thing is do we really need that?
When it comes to time management and productivity, I believe it’s important to retain control. My calendar or task manager telling me to work on the report when I feel exhausted is only going to leave me feeling guilty if I do what’s best for me—taking a rest.
Now, don’t get me wrong here. I think technology is great, and one of my favourite features of Spotify and Apple Music is how these apps use my listening history to create random playlists. I love playing those playlists. I like how YouTube serves up recommendations, again, based on my watch history. This is useful. I find documentaries I would otherwise have missed. However, I get to choose what to watch and when.
I was reminded of this recently with the sad death of BBC Radio 2’s DJ, Steve Wright. I was able to open YouTube and type in Steve’s name and was able to listen to some of his most iconic moments. I discovered long-lost recordings of him—stuff I would never have been able to find ten years ago.
These are some examples of where technology works and enhances our lives.
But (and there are many buts here) that nicely leads me to this week’s question. Which means, it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Scott. Scott asks, hi Carl, what do you think of apps like Motion and others that will organise your appointments and tasks for you so you no longer need to do any planning?
Hi Scott, thank you for your question.
Let’s look at where technology has an advantage. Communications. Digital communications are brilliant. They are instant, and because of that, the number of phone call interruptions has significantly reduced over the years.
Phone call interruptions are the worst, aren’t they? Your phone rings, and it’s like an alarm call that we feel obligated to answer. We have no idea what the caller is calling about or how long it will take, and that creates its own anxieties.
Today, I can see who’s calling and can decide whether to answer or not. I can also put my phone on silent so I don’t get that horrendous shock when the phone rings.
And I know a lot of you may have a downer on email, but compared to what we had thirty years ago, it’s far better. And, no, we are not getting more emails than letters. It’s about the same. The difference is with letters, we did not feel they had to be replied to instantly, and we could take our time.
Although, as an aside, in the past, large companies employed people to work in the mail room. These wonderful people’s job was to sort the mail, so you only got the correspondence that mattered. Sadly, these people are gone now, and we are left to sort our own mail. That’s where the problem is. A large proportion of people don’t set up rules in their email service to filter out the rubbish from the stuff that matters.
Give yourself a couple of hours to set up some rules, and in effect, you will have given yourself your own mail room staff.
Digital calendars are fantastic. Rather than having to carry around a large diary with all your appointments, you can now have your calendar on all your digital devices, which makes it so easy to see where you should be and with whom. It’s also a lot easier to make appointments with people with services such as Calendarly—where you send a link to the other person, and they can choose the best time for them based on your availability.
Now, things go wrong when you blindly accept meeting requests. When we had paper diaries, we had to manually enter the appointment, and we could see instantly we had already committed to something else. We either asked for another date or cancelled the previous appointment.
Today, I see so many people with conflicts in their calendars where they are double—and even triple-booked. I mean, come on. Your digital calendar makes it easy to see your conflicts. Sort them out. You cannot be in two meetings at the same time. Don’t let that happen.
The problem here, it’s far more difficult to rearrange a meeting or appointment after you have accepted it. When you get a meeting request, and it conflicts with another commitment, decline it. Or, if it’s more important than the commitment you currently have, give yourself a few minutes to sort out the conflict.
And, technology has really helped with creating reports, presentations, books and videos. Technology has brought previously prohibitively expensive tools to us all for less than $100 a year.
When I look back over the last ten years, I have been able to produce four books, over a thousand videos, 300 podcasts and millions of words in blog posts and articles. It’s mind-blowing what a computer and an internet connection give us the ability to do.
And yet, I suppose it’s human nature to go too far. It’s like discovering chocolate cake for the first time. That first experience leads to you wanting more and more and more. Forget vegetables, fruit and other healthy foods. I want cake!!!! And more of it.
Of course, only eating cake will have negative consequences, and I feel this is where time management and productivity technology is beginning to go. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.
As I alluded to, allowing your calendar to schedule your day for you is not necessarily a good thing. Your calendar does not know if you have the flu or didn’t sleep well last night. It doesn’t know whether you had a fight with your partner over the breakfast table or had a car accident on the way to work. All it knows is you have a ton of work to do in your task manager, and you have eight meeting requests. It’s programmed to schedule all that for you.
Perhaps doing all that work and attending all those meetings is not the best thing you could do that day. Maybe the best thing you could do is go back to bed or take a walk to clear your head.
On planning, I think we need to be careful here. What makes humans different from other mammals is our ability to make choices. We can choose to do one thing over an alternative. Now, each choice has a consequence, and we have sufficient intelligence to weigh the consequences against each other. Louis, my little dog, does not have that ability. Sure, he can choose to attack his squeaky ball or not, but he has no concept of the consequences.
If we allow technology to make those choices for us and we blindly follow them, we lose the very essence of being human—our freedom to make decisions about what to do.
Doing your own planning allows you to choose what you will work on and when. For example, last night, I slept well, and I had two appointments cancel on me this morning. This gave me two extra hours I was not expecting and I chose to clean up my office and write this script in that time. I didn’t need to go to my task manager to make this decision. I looked around my office and realised things needed to be tidied up. That took me twenty minutes, and this script will take around ninety minutes.
I could have chosen to read, take Louis out for a walk or go back to bed. But I chose to do work. I wanted to work, and I loved it. If a computer was telling me to do this and then that, it would take the joy out of making decisions.
Task managers are great for collecting tasks and for having everything in a central place. Where task managers are less good is showing us what needs to be worked on and when. Only you know what’s important right now and how much energy you have to do your work.
For example, over the years, I’ve come to learn when I am at my most focused and when I struggle with focus. Afternoons are a struggle if I need to sit down and focus. Yet, I find focusing very easy in the morning and later at night. This means I can structure my days based on when I know I will likely be at my best for doing specific types of work. An app based on AI is going to be using data from all over the place and will likely be based on the average of other people. You are not the average of other people. You are you, and you are unique.
When it comes to digital note-taking and information storage, technology is fantastic! You can quickly grab an idea, a webpage or a document and save it into your notes. You can then later do a search for that idea or document on any device in any location, and within a second, you have it in front of you. That’s way better than how we used to do it with large, cumbersome filing cabinets that were in a static location. Finding something often took hours.
I also like the idea that AI is then able to summarise that information into bite-sized chunks. That helps us. We have the choice to be able to go into the document for a deeper read or read the summary.
However, with all that said, technology helps us when it can speed things up that don’t need us to make decisions or choices. Technology does not help us when it starts to make those decisions and choices for us. That is where we should push back.
This means your planning should always be done by you. You decide what to work on based on the information you have to hand. You can make it fun by pulling out your pens, highlighters, and a pad of paper and letting your brain think without technology influencing your decisions.
Great thinkers from the past scribbled their thoughts down on paper, and humanity is so much the better for it today. You don’t want to lose that ability—the ability to think, decide and make choices of your own. It’s what makes you special and unique.
Thank you, Scott, for your question and that you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
How important is your calendar in your productivity toolbox? I would argue that it’s the most important tool you have and the key to finally getting control of your time.
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Script | 312
Hello, and welcome to episode 312 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Reading the comments on some of my YouTube videos, I see a lot of people trying to make their task manager their primary productivity tool. I would argue this is a mistake. A to-do list or task manager is, at its heart, a list of things you think you need to do. And no matter what you throw at it, your task manager will willingly accept it. And that is exactly what it should do. Make it fantastically easy to collect stuff.
However, after you have collected stuff, what next?
It doesn’t matter whether you have fifty, a hundred or a thousand tasks in your task manager. What matters is when you will do those tasks. There’s no limit on what you want or need to do; that’s infinite. Your limitation comes from time. You only get twenty-four hours a day to do all this stuff, and somewhere in those twenty-four hours, you’ll need to sleep, eat and wash.
Given that the limitation on what you can get done each day is time, that means that the primary tool in your productivity toolbox is always going to be your calendar.
So, with that introduction complete, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Pablo. Pablo asks, hi Carl, I noticed that you seem to be very careful about what you put on your calendar. It looks so clean. How do you keep it looking like that?
Hi Pablo, thank you for your question.
Your observation is correct. I am very protective of my calendar. To me, knowing where my commitments are and where I have space is important each day. It allows me to control my day and to ensure I am not pushing myself beyond my healthy limits.
I have an unhealthy fascination with the routines of highly successful people. It’s always interested me to learn how immensely productive people manage to get their work done. I’ve learned about Winston Churchill’s afternoon naps and late-night writing. Of Leonardo Da Vinci’s polyphasic sleeping, Maya Angelou’s hotel writing room and Albert Einstein’s love of sleep.
One thing these incredible people had in common was their understanding that to get work done, you needed to protect time. Painter Picasso hated interruptions and would go to great lengths to protect his painting time. Maya Angelou would hide herself away in a hotel room between 7:00 am and 3:00 pm to do her writing and thinking. Ian Fleming screamed at anyone who dared to interrupt his 9:00 am to 12:00 pm writing time.
I find it strange that so many people want to become better at managing their time and get more work done yet refuse to take any action to achieve that goal. It’s not the tool that will do the work for you—only you can do that—it’s carving out the time you need to do it.
And that’s where your calendar becomes your most powerful tool. It’s the only productivity tool that will never lie to you. You get a new twenty-four-hour canvas each day, and you are given the freedom to create any kind of day you wish.
You could choose to call in sick and stay in bed all day if you wished. However, you will then need to deal with the feelings of guilt and FOMO that inevitably come when you do something like this. Every decision you make has consequences.
I recently did a video on getting control of your calendar, and in my example, I had meetings and blocks of time set aside for doing my important work. There were so many comments on how neat and tidy my calendar looked.
Yet, I see so many people with two or three meetings scheduled at the same time. Why? I mean, you cannot attend all three meetings, so why do you still have three meetings booked at the same time? I don’t think my calendar looks neat and tidy. The difference is I will never allow myself to become double (or triple) booked.
I know you are busy. However, surely, when you receive a calendar invite, the ten seconds it takes to check your calendar to see if you have anything else booked in at that time is not beyond the realms of possibility. Just clicking “accept” without checking will cause you so much damage. Check before you accept. That should be a non-negotiable rule.
Not checking is like driving through a crossroads without looking. Sooner or later, you’re going to get hit by a 40-tonne truck.
One question you will find helpful to ask each day is, “Where is my protected time?” Your protected time is the time you set aside for doing your most important work. That could be writing the proposal that is due at the end of the week, or it could be taking your kids to the park to play. Whatever needs to be done will always require time.
To make things easier for myself, I protect 9:30 am to 11:30 am each day for doing creative work. Usually, that involves writing, but once a week, it will be recording a YouTube video. I know that at the start of the week, I have the time to do all the creative work I want to do that week because I have protected that time. And I chose the word “protected” deliberately. It is protected from everything but a genuine emergency. This means I refuse meetings at that time. Even my wife knows not to schedule anything between 9:30 and 11:30 am. (And that took a lot of training!)
So far, out of twenty-four hours, I am protecting two hours. That leaves me a lot of time for other things, yet each day, something creative is being produced. This is one of the most powerful lessons I learned from people like Ian Fleming, Maya Angelou and Benjamin Franklin. Protecting time for the important things.
Now, I would also recommend you protect a further two hours in your work day for admin and communications. If you are one of those people who is always reacting to every message and email that comes your way, you will, at the very least, feel frazzled. It’s extremely tough on your brain. It’s like trying to drive economically while constantly stopping and starting. It’s not smooth, and your car’s engine (or battery) will be taking a pounding.
The most economical way to drive is smooth, and that’s the same with your brain. By blocking a little time each day for responding to your messages, you will be operating at your most efficient. So, schedule time for doing your admin and communications.
I like to do my communications around 4 pm. After dinner, I do my admin. By doing my email (and other messages) at four PM, I avoid email ping pong—that’s where you end up having to respond to the same email twice in a day because you give the other person time to reply. Do your communications at 4 pm, and you will significantly reduce the number of emails you get each day.
And admin time is for all those little things that you collect that just need to be done. Expenses, sales admin, filing, booking hotels or flights, etc. Anything that gets collected that sit around because they are neither urgent nor important.
Now, a quick tip here. Match your task manager’s tags or labels with your time blocks. This way, you can give yourself a focused view of the tasks that need doing. For instance, I have a label for admin tasks. When I do my admin at the end of the day, I open up a filtered view that shows me only the admin tasks that are due today. This way, I am not distracted by anything else.
If you follow this example, you will be allocating four hours a day for specific tasks. Your important work gets two hours, and you allocate an hour each for communications and admin. Four hours out of twenty-four will put you on top of your work and avoid the build-up of backlogs.
When I look at the daily routines of people like Winston Churchill and Ian Fleming, they spent around four to six hours a day doing focused work and managed to get an incredible amount of work done each day. Yet these two people were very social people. They were entertaining guests almost every day and writing hundreds of letters—what we did before electronic communications. The key to their productivity was their non-negotiable focus time.
Think of your task manager as support for your calendar, and let your calendar run your day. Protect it—it’s the only time you have.
There are other things I will do, too. There are some days when I need to wake up very early—well, very early for me. On those days, I know I will need to take a nap at some point. So, I will schedule nap time. This way, when I do find myself tired and unable to function properly, I can jump into bed for an hour or so. No guilt. Just complete rest. It’s as Churchill said: you get to do a day and a half’s worth of work in one. You get an energy boost and can work more effectively in the afternoon.
This is why I keep my calendar clean. The only things I am committed to get on there. AND… More importantly, if I am invited to a meeting I will always check before committing. I hate having to renegotiate meetings. It’s time-consuming and involves a lot of back and forth.
Here’s another quick tip for you. Use a scheduling service. These are great. You choose the times you are available for meetings, and if anyone requests a meeting with you, you can send them the link to schedule a meeting. There’s some human psychology going on here. The person requesting a meeting is unlikely to ask for a meeting outside of your allocated times because they also know it is time-consuming to do so. It’s far easier for them to pick a time from your availability. I can promise you this will save you a lot of time and also make structuring your day far easier.
And there you go, Pablo. That’s how to keep your calendar clean and tight. It’s the most powerful productivity tool you have, and it’s worth protecting.
Thank you for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Do pen and paper have any role in your productivity system these days? If not, you might be missing out on something very special.
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Script | 311
Hello, and welcome to episode 311 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
A few weeks ago, I posted a video on YouTube that demonstrated how I have gone back to using a pen—or rather, a few of my old fountain pens—and some paper to start planning a project. I’ve since added doing my weekly planning on paper too.
This video and a subsequent follow-up video garnered a lot of interest and some fantastic questions. It also goes back to a question I was asked on this podcast last year on whether it was possible to create an analogue version of the Time Sector System.
This week’s question is a follow-up to that question, and I hope my answer will encourage you to explore some of the unique ways the humble pen and paper can aid in your productivity journey.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks, hi, Carl, I recently saw your video on going back to pen and paper. What was your thinking behind that decision?
Hi Tom, thank you for your question.
In many ways, the reason for the “experiment” was something I tried when I was flying over to Ireland for the Christmas break. I decided to take a pen and notebook with me to see if my planning and thoughts would flow better on paper rather than how I usually do it through a keyboard.
The idea came from a video I had seen with Tim Ferriss, where he discussed how he finds his ideas flow better when he puts pen to paper. Plus, I have seen Robin Sharma, Tony Robbins, Andrew Huberman and read about many historical figures such as Presidents Kennedy and Nixon as well as Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming and Charles Darwin all take copious notes on paper.
I wondered if there was something in it.
When you think about it, the chances are you spend far too long in from of a screen these days. If it’s not your computer, it’s going to be your phone or TV. We just don’t seem to be able to get away from them. When you pick up a pen and a pad of paper, you are no longer looking at a screen. The whole effect on your eyesight is going to change.
This is certainly something I was beginning to feel. Pretty much everything I do involves a screen. There’s even a heads-up display in my car! I just don’t seem to be able to get away from them.
Then there’s the type. I was recently looking through some of my old planners from 2009 and 2010 and found myself being transported back fifteen years to what I was thinking back then. It was a wonderful, nostalgic journey. My handwriting was unique; I could tell which pen I used and even the ink I was using back then.
I can look at a digital document I created ten years ago, and it’s boring Helvetica in black. It pretty much looks the same as any document I create today. There’s nothing nostalgic.
There’s a wonderful video on YouTube by Adam Savage (yes, the Adam Savage formerly of Mythbusters) where he shows an exact copy of one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Codecs. WOW! I was blown away. It looked gorgeous—even though Da Vinci wrote backwards. The aged paper, the diagrams, the pen strokes. Everything looked so beautiful.
So, as I was thinking about how I could bring pen and paper back into my system, I realised the one area where paper, for me, always works better than digital is in planning—well, certainly the initial planning stages. I also find despite Apple’s attempts at creating quick notes using the Apple Pencil, it’s still not faster than having a notebook next to you on your desk with a pen.
Now, one problem many people face with using pen and paper is you end up with a load of half-empty notebooks all over the place. I can assure you if you think there are too many productivity apps around, wait until you begin going down the notebook rabbit hole. There’s thousands of different styles, colours and papers. You’ll learn about the incredible quality of Japanese paper and what constitutes fountain pen-friendly papers. You’ll learn about dot grids, grids, graph and lined paper. Then there are the covers—leather bound, ring bound, sewn, bonded and WOW! So many decisions.
You’ve been warned.
And if you start investigating fountain pens, you’ll find yourself in serious trouble. YouTube is full of videos on what constitutes the best pens for all kinds of writers. You’ll learn about grail pens—pens everyone wants in their collection. I confess I have a soft spot for the Namiki Urushi and a Montblack 149.
Anyway, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Now, back to how I am utilising pen and paper in my system.
I have two notebooks. The main one is my planning book. This is an A4 lined notebook where I will begin any planning session. I write the title of what I am planning at the top and then brainstorm in one colour—usually blue.
Now, I find the best place to do this is at the dining table, not at my desk. There are no screens on the dining table. So all I have is my notebook and my blue inked fountain pen. This is what call my first pass.
Now, the trick here is to write whatever comes into your head and write anywhere on the page. Remember, this is the first pass. It doesn’t matter how good or bad any idea is. Just get it out of your head. Even the craziest ideas may contain a seed of something special.
Once you’ve finished and can think of nothing else, close your planning book and leave it for twenty-four hours. Let your subconscious brain do its thing.
After twenty-four hours or so, come back to your note and, with a different colour pen, expand your initial thoughts. You could also bring your highlighters to the table if you prefer.
One reason I use royal blue as an ink colour for my first session, is a simple pencil looks great next to royal blue. But I do like to use black, green colours too.
What you will find is you’ll begin adding more ideas, and the initial ideas you had will sprout new, better ideas.
This is what I call the first pass. If there is time pressure, I will move on to the next step now. However, I prefer to have time to run a second and third pass just to get all my ideas out.
So, what is the next step? This is where I scan the paper note into my notes app. From here, I can pull out the key points and ideas and begin developing the project or video idea. There’s often research to be done at this stage and also to decide what action steps I need to take. All of which will likely require a computer.
The second notebook I have is my scratch pad. Now, this could be down to my age, but even at school, I always had a pad of paper and pen next to me for jotting down quick notes and random thoughts. There’s something comforting about having it next to you. I could, for instance, be writing this script and suddenly have an idea, and I can quickly write it down on my scratch pad for later. Once it’s written down, it’s not going to be forgotten. I can deal with it later.
This notebook is an A5 ring-bound notebook. It’s a perfect size for scratching down ideas, and the ring binding allows me to lay the book flat on my desk.
At the end of the day, I will go through the captured notes to see if anything needs to be transferred to my task manager. Anything I have dealt with previously, I will simply cross out.
However, the most important thing here is stepping away from the screen, and all the distractions a computer will throw at you and just focusing on thinking about the project, goal or whatever you need to think about.
There’s something about the feel of a pen on paper that no digital tool can replicate. I’ve tried things like Remarkable 2 and many of the other so-called “paper replacements”. Sorry, but they cannot replicate that exquisite feel of a fountain pen nib flowing across paper. I suspect this is why fountain pens are still popular among so many writers today.
Handwriting is in our DNA - from the thousands of years old cave paintings to the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics we’ve been writing for years. Keyboards and typing are relatively modern, and anything you type looks the same—after all we generally use the same fonts for everything.
With handwriting, you’re creating art. It’s unique. Each new note is going to look different from a previous note. You can choose different pens and colours and take them anywhere and just sit and write. It is such a different experience from sitting at a computer screen and typing. That difference will give you different ideas and thoughts.
Funnily enough, I have returned to writing my journal by hand again after five years in the digital journaling world. While it was very convenient to be able to add a photo to each new journal entry, I realised when I was reading through my old planners and handwritten journals there was something so different about what I was reading. I rarely read through my old typed journal entries, but I was captivated by my old-written journals. I could have sat there for hours reliving my life though a handwritten page.
So, there you go, Tom. That is why I have returned to the analogue world.
I would also add, that I have started doing my weekly planning on paper too. If you are familiar with my Weekly Planning Matrix. You can draw out the four squares in your planning notebook and give yourself twenty minutes to think about what needs to be done next week. If feels like you are tapping into a different way of thinking which is clearer, more focused on the bigger picture and in a way more emotional than trying to do this digitally.
I hope that has inspired many of you to go out and get yourself a notebook and pen. Have a go at it. See what happens. You might just fall in love with pen and paper all over again. Just be careful, there’s a whole world out there of notebooks and pens. For me, my trusty old fountain pens and some Rhodia notebooks do the trick. (Although, O confess I’ve ordered some of the famous Japanese paper to test)
Thank you, Tom, for your question and thank you, to you too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Are you restricting yourself too much? Attempting to stick to a too-embracing structure? It might be time to loosen up a bit.
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The 2024 ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP
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Script | 310
Hello, and welcome to episode 310 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Having some kind of structure or routine built into your day is important if you want to consistently get the important things done. The trouble starts when you try to stick to that structure or routine too rigidly. It begins to limit what you can do and holds you back from accomplishing the things you set out to accomplish. Plus, if your plan is interrupted by the inevitable “emergencies”, the plan is usually thrown out the window, and everybody else’s problems become the focus.
I’m all for building a structure around your day and week. It’s this structure that will ensure you get the right things done on time every time. But sometimes, something will inevitably come along and stop you from sticking to your routine or structure, and then, if you don’t have built-in inflexibility, everything will come crashing down. Either you drop everything, which leads to a build-up of backlogs, or you’ll stay too rigid and miss an opportunity that could lead to bigger and better things.
This week’s question goes to the core of this dilemma, and I hope to give you some ideas to prevent it from happening to you.
So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Andre. Andre asks, Hi Carl, I love the idea of having a structured day, but I am having a hard time sticking to my plan. I never seem to have enough time to get all my work done, and I have a huge backlog of emails and project work to catch up on. It’s causing me so much stress and worry. Do you have any advice?
Hi Andre, thank you for your question.
You are right to create a structure around your day and week. Aside from weekly planning, I would say if anyone wants to become better at managing their time and ultimately more productive, they are going to need some form of structure to their day.
However, as with most things, this can be taken too far. Take time blocking, for example. Time blocking is an excellent way to make sure you have enough time to do the critical things that need doing, yet if you try to micromanage your day—that is, you block your whole calendar—you only need one meeting or one task to overrun by just a few minutes and your day is destroyed. For time blocking to work effectively, you will need plenty of blank spaces.
For example, you may wish to block two hours for some deep work in the morning, say, between 9:30 and 11:30, then an hour for managing your communications and an hour for clearing your admin tasks for the day. That way, if you work a typical eight-hour day, you have four hours for anything else that may come up.
However, this rigidity may also be coming from outside forces.
I love reading contemporary history. My favourite era is between 1945 and 1990. These were transformative years in both the US and Europe. I am particularly interested in how creative people, like Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books, managed their days.
What was noticeable was with few exceptions, there were no rigid working hours. If you worked in a factory doing physically demanding work surrounded by dangerous machinery, there were laws in most countries preventing you from being forced to work beyond eight hours. For the rest, you worked until the work got done.
And between 1940 and 1980, there were no computers helping you to do your work. If you needed to write a report, you either sat down at a typewriter and typed it yourself (no delete key with typewriters—if you got a page wrong, you began again), or you may have been lucky and were allowed to hand the work to the typing pool for typing up—and then you either needed to handwrite the report or dictate it.
And don’t let anyone tell you that people got less mail in those days. People got a ton of mail each day (often quite literally). It wasn’t electronic mail; it was physical mail, and responding to that wasn’t as simple as hitting the reply key and typing. There were conventions to a written letter. You could never write, “Please find attached the file you requested”. You had to include a greeting and an ending, then sign it by hand, stick it in an envelope and take it to to post room.
There were a lot of late nights in the office getting work finished back then. Probably a lot more than we have today. I also remember in the 1990s regularly having to come into the office on a Saturday to clear files that needed clearing before the start of a new week.
Yet people adapted, and the work got done.
In many ways, we might be attempting to structure our days in the wrong way. Let me give you an example.
I’ve recently been reading a biography of Winston Churchill. Now, Churchill had an unusual structure to his day. He would wake up around 8:00 and while in bed, read the newspapers and deal with his communications. He’d read his letters, call a secretary into his bedroom and dictate the replies.
He would get out of bed at 11 am and take a bath. Often, he’d have a secretary outside the bathroom door taking more dictations—that could be a speech he was preparing or one of the many articles or books he wrote.
Let me pause here. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, only a privileged few could afford to hire their own secretaries or assistants. Today, it’s relatively affordable to hire a virtual assistant, or you could learn to use the dictation features on your digital devices. This means you could dictate in a Churchillian way—while taking a bath and while reading your emails in bed.
After his bath, Churchill would come downstairs for lunch. This wouldn’t be a sandwich while sat at his desk. It was a full hour affair with wines and champagne. After lunch, he’d walk around his garden, feed the fish in his pond, and often paint. This was his rest time. A time when he spent some time thinking and relaxing.
Then, at 4:30 pm, it was nap time, and again, this wasn’t a quick twenty-minute nap. It was a full ninety minutes. After his nap, it was another bath, then some card games with his guests or family before a full dinner—including an array of alcoholic drinks.
At 10 pm, Churchill would disappear into his home office (or “factory” as he called it), where he would work solidly for the next four to five hours. Then it was back to bed.
If you look at Churchill’s daily structure, it was solid. It got the important work done, and it was conducted on his terms. It was unconventional by the standards of those days. His “class”—the upper class—would usually disappear to their clubs after dinner for meetings and socialising. Yet, Churchill got a huge amount of work done. He wrote almost fifty books in his lifetime, thousands of articles for newspapers and was a full-time parliamentarian.
I tell you about Churchill because his daily structure is a great illustration of what you can do when you work within your own ideals. Churchill was a night owl, not a morning person. He took advantage of that by doing his most important creative work late at night. Tim Ferriss, the author and entrepreneur, is another person who likes to do his creative work late at night.
When people see my calendar, they think I am working too much. Yet, if you look closely, I do my creative work in the mornings, then take the afternoon off (in the same way Churchill did) then return to my work after dinner. I get four or five hours of rest from work every day and can enjoy it in daylight when the cafes are open and when I can actually enjoy living close to the beach. I am also a night owl.
What Churchill did was have some solid structures in his day. These were his wake-up time (8:00 am), lunch and dinner times. If he had guests for dinner, he would stay talking with his guests until late into the evening but would still return to his home office to work until he was tired enough to go to bed.
I fear many people have come to believe it is bad to work after they finish work. But do you really ever finish work? I’m not suggesting you always take work home with you, but if you have backlogs and project deadlines approaching, perhaps giving yourself an extra hour or two in the evening to do a little more work isn’t such a bad thing.
Think about that for a moment. You have the choice of two evils. The stress and anxiety of worrying about all the work piling up and not getting done. Or extra time in the evenings to get on top of the work. One will lead to health issues, and the other is inconvenient.
I remember reading about Michael Dell’s work routines when his family was still young. He would ensure he was home by 7 pm every evening for the family dinner. After dinner, he would play with his kids until they went to bed and then go to his home office to work until midnight.
Hopefully, your days won’t be destroyed too often, Andre, but it is going to happen—that’s inevitable. The key is to be flexible. Over time, you will learn to distinguish between the genuinely urgent and the false urgencies. The thing is, and the reason I told you about Winston Churchill, is you have options beyond nine til five.
Tim Cook is famous for waking at 3:30 am and doing his email—he is clearly a morning person. Former President Jimmy Carter would go to the Oval Office at 7 am every morning to read through the reports he needed to know about that day before having a meeting with his security advisor at 8:30 am.
Productive days are not built by accident. They are built on structure. We can learn from immensely productive people like Churchill and build a structure around meal times and rest.
Insisting you must not work in the evenings is admirable, but if you have outstanding work to be done and a backlog of emails and other messages, what is that doing to your stress levels? Would it not be better for your long-term mental health to spend a few evenings or early mornings getting on top of that backlog so you give yourself less stress and more free time in the long-term?
Thank you, Andre, for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
How much time do you spend organising and reorganising your work each day? A key question to ask if you are seeking better productivity and time management.
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The 2024 ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP
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Script | 309
Hello, and welcome to episode 309 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Deciding to get organised and better at managing your time is a good goal to have. After all, when you know where everything is and what needs to be done, you will see an exponential increase in your productivity, and that means, if managed well, your time management will also improve.
However, there is a fine line between spending too much time managing your stuff and not enough time doing your stuff. When you get caught up in that trap, you are lulled into feeling you are being productive when, in fact, you are not getting anything important done.
There are many reasons why this happens, the most common of which is becoming obsessed with tools—the apps and technology that promise to make organising and doing your work easier. No, this does not happen. Sure, a solid set of tools can help, but these tools will never do the work for you. Some of the worst tools will cause you to waste a lot of time organising and maintaining them instead of helping you to do your work more effectively.
Now, before we get to the question, I’d just like to give you a heads-up about this year’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop. This will be held on Friday the 9th and 16th February. Starting at 7:30 pm Eastern Standard Time (A little under two weeks away), This workshop will cover your calendar and task management in week one. In week two, we will look at how to manage email and other communications, as well as the all-important daily and weekly planning. By the end of these two sessions, you will have the know-how to build your very own “perfect” productivity system.
But what’s more special about this workshop is when you register, you get access to four of my mini-courses for FREE, as well as a workbook for all sessons. PLUS, you get a chance to ask me anything about time management and productivity.
Now, places are going fast, so if you don’t want to be disappointed, get yourself signed up now. Full details for the workshop are in the show notes below.
So, what do you need to do to ensure you are spending the appropriate amount of time doing your work and managing the work coming in? Well, before we get to answering that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Kris. Kris asks, Hi Carl, is there a right balance between keeping my tasks and notes up to date and organised and doing the work? I find that keeping everything up to date takes me at least an hour a day and sometimes longer. It’s very frustrating.
Hi Kris, thank you for your question.
I am always very careful with these types of questions because it is a good thing to use a few tools to help you with your organisation. For instance, a well-maintained notes app will do a lot for your overall productivity because note apps today have incredible search functionality. This is far better than when we were trying to keep all our notes up to date in paper notebooks and file folders.
However, because of this search functionality, we no longer need to spend a lot of time organising notes into folders (or notebooks, as some note apps call them) and tagging. All we need to do today is make sure we are making the title of the note easily searchable. That involves ensuring you have a keyword you would naturally search for and perhaps the date in the title.
After that, all you would need to have in your notes app is a simple folder structure, so you have at least the remnants of a system. A simple work and personal folder system would work today because search is so powerful.
The more complex you make your folder structure in notes, the longer it will take you to keep things organised.
One other tip on notes. It’s likely that anything you put in your notes is not going to be urgent. Urgent things are normally things we have to do, and we would put those into our task manager or calendar. This means when it comes to cleaning up what you collected, you can do this once a week. I do this on a weekend when I do my weekly planning.
Another issue I come across is prioritising the task manager above the calendar. If you stop and think for a moment, this does not make a great deal of sense. A task is something that can be done at any time. It may need to be done on a given day, but when on that day you do it is not important. For example, you may need to call a client, but no time has been specified. This means you could call them at 9 am or at 2:30 pm. All that matters is you call them that day.
But if you were meeting a client for lunch, that would be a different matter. You would need to be in a specific place on a given day and time. That would be in your calendar.
In those two scenarios, the lunch meeting would naturally take priority over the phone call.
This means your calendar is at the top of your productivity tools hierarchy.
If I were to choose one tool that was kept up to date at all times, it would be my calendar, and to do that will likely only take two or three minutes a day.
But let’s step back a little here and look at the process for managing your tasks. If you’re listening to this, you will probably be aware of the COD system. COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do. We need to be collecting the stuff we need to do, then allocate a little time for organising that stuff and finally, we need to do the work. The ideal split between organising and doing is 95% of your time doing and 5% organising. That works out at around twenty minutes a day organising your stuff and the rest of the time doing.
You are collecting all the time, and your process for collecting needs to be quick and with a minimum of friction. Here, technology helps you because you will likely be carrying your phone with you everywhere you go. This means your phone becomes your UCT—Ubiquitous Collection Tool.
To ensure that your phone is optimised for this role, you want to make sure collecting tasks, notes and events is as easy as you can make it.
However, once you have all this stuff collected, when will you process it? I do my processing in the evening. It’s quieter, and I can process all the stuff I have collected without distractions.
Now, processing is not about moving all your stuff from your inbox to your folders. The emphasis needs to be on eliminating, not accumulating. Your thinking should be around asking yourself, “Do I really need to do this task?” not where can I put it?
There will always be more stuff to do than time available to do it, so eliminating as much as you can at this processing stage will save you a lot of anxiety and overwhelm—lists have a habit of growing uncontrollably if not checked.
The great thing about focusing on eliminating rather than accumulating is it reduces the need to spend time organising. The delete key is a lot easier to operate than adding additional information and ensuring the tasks are written in a way you will understand what they mean next week.
The thing is, if you get your processing right the first time and you are not arbitrarily adding dates so you don’t forget a task (as opposed to adding a date because the task genuinely needs doing on that date), you will not have too much reorganising to do.
I see a lot of people having to spend a lot of time rescheduling tasks every day because they were being a bit over-ambitious about what they could accomplish in a day. On a given day, that may not seem like a lot of time, but it adds up, and by the end of the week, you will have spent thirty to sixty minutes just rescheduling.
There’s an old carpenter’s saying, “Measure twice, cut once.” Well, in productivity terms, this would equate to thinking twice before dating a task and doing the task once. Every time you reschedule a task, you will mentally picture yourself doing the task and deciding you don’t have time for it right now, so it gets rescheduled. Not a very effective way to manage your time.
Think of organising tasks as collect fast, process slow. This way, you will find yourself less likely to waste time reorganising and rescheduling stuff. There’s a better chance you will get it right the first time. An extra few minutes when you process will save you a lot of reorganising later.
And now the elephant in the room—the tools you are trying to use to organise all your stuff. Be careful here. The more complex and pretty an app is, does not necessarily mean it will be better for your productivity. In fact, I find the more complex an app is, the slower you will be. All those bells and whistles mean more buttons to push.
When I compare my coaching clients’ speed at being able to find things, Apple Notes seems to be the fastest, and that is the simplest. Notion, Evernote and Obsidian may have a lot more features, but all those extra features mean it’s harder to remember where something is stored. And if you become adept at using search, you will find the complexity of getting something into your system slows you down. Avoid these attractive yet complex apps. They are procrastination traps, and it will take a superhuman effort to avoid playing and fiddling with them when you are tired or not in a very productive state.
I hope that has helped, Kris. If you get your collecting, organising and doing right, you will only need around twenty minutes a day to organise your stuff. The rest of the time, you can spend getting your work done.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Podcast 308
If you’re not in control of your time, who is? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
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Script | 308
Hello, and welcome to episode 308 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
One of the most common comments I get on my YouTube videos is about who controls your work day. The answer to that question is you. It’s always been you.
Even at its most basic level, you accepted an offer to work where you work at some point, which was a choice you exercised. Similarly, as each day begins, you could choose to stay in bed and fake sickness—not something I would recommend, of course, but you always have that choice.
And, you always have the nuclear button option—to quit at any time—although I hope it doesn’t need to come to that.
The problem with all these choices—choices you make every day—is while you are free to make these choices, you also have to accept the consequences of your decisions. So, what you are really doing is calculating the cost/benefit of the decision you make.
Staying in bed might seem a great idea on a cold, wet morning, but you probably know that by 11 am, you’ll be feeling guilty, and when thought about further, you will likely begin to feel a little anxious about all the things you might be missing out on.
But one thing you should never tell yourself is you have no choice. You do, and you always will.
Let’s put it this way: you may have an important, critical meeting with your CEO arranged at 11:00 am tomorrow morning, but if a close family member—your son or daughter, mother or father—is taken seriously ill overnight, you’re going to choose to be at the hospital with your family. (Well, at least I hope you are)
In that situation, you are exercising your choice. You cannot be in two places at once, and therefore, you have to choose your priority.
So, with all that said. Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Isaac. Isaac asks, hi Carl, I have tried time blocking, but my boss won’t let me. Every time I sit down to get on with some deep work, he’ll call or message me, and I have to answer immediately. How do you deal with these scenarios?
Hi Isaac, thank you for your question.
One of the benefits of getting organised and in control of your day is you get to clearly see what needs to be done each day. Being able to see everything that needs to be done allows you to prioritise your work.
The problems we face, though, rarely come from the work we have to do. They come from the interruptions and distractions coming at us from other people.
But let’s get serious here. Most of us are not working in jobs that involve the life or death of patients. It’s not like someone in need of urgent attention from us is being wheeled into our offices for our immediate attention. So, let’s get real about how much time we have to do the work that comes at us.
Your boss might like you to respond immediately, but I am sure they can wait, and if you have allowed them to become accustomed to your quick responses, perhaps it’s time to slowly ween them off that expectation.
In my experience, bosses who demand instant attention from their team have been conditioned to expect instant responses. It’s not often your boss’s fault; it’s yours because you do it, therefore they expect it.
In this situation, you have two options. You can have a face-to-face meeting with your boss and explain the difficulties they create when they expect instant responses and how the quality of your work and productivity would improve if they allowed you some breathing room.
The second option is to re-train them. Slowly, over a few weeks, lengthen your response times. Begin with five minutes, then ten, then fifteen and so on until you find the right balance. When I’ve tried this experiment on bosses in the past, I’ve found anywhere between fifty minutes and three hours can be gained here. If you’re lucky, you may find you have a boss who forgets they ever asked you and never chases you up. (Although, I admit they are rare)
However, Isaac, I was a little concerned with your choice of words, “I have to”. Do you? I mean, really, do you “have to”? In life, there rarely are any “I have tos”; these are concepts created by ourselves to create a sense of urgency.
If you’re listening to this podcast, you live in a free society, and that means you always have a choice. When we use the words “I have to”, we are delegating responsibility for our choices to other people. If you do that, you are never going to find a sense of peace or fulfilment. You’ll always be waiting for instructions from someone. It’s never “I have to”; it should always be “I choose to” because that is the truth. You choose to allow your boss to interrupt you.
When you reframe things to “I choose”, you take responsibility for your actions and that will give you a little more assertiveness when it comes to working with your boss or customers and clients.
One of the most effective things I ever did when working in a law firm with demanding clients and bosses was to create what I called “protected time”. I learned this when I was working in sales. If I didn’t have an hour or two each day when I wasn’t available for customers, I would drop the ball on almost everything. I needed that time to sort out the sales admin and to ensure the deliveries to my customers were on time.
When working in a busy law office, I came across the same issue. Always being available meant too many things were not getting done. Sure, I was a hero to my colleagues and clients until they found I didn’t get around to doing what they were asking me to do. I was prioritising the here and now, instead of what was genuinely important—ie the commitments I’d already made.
You cannot sustain that. Allowing all these interruptions is going to catch up with you and not only leave you exhausted and stressed out, but it will also destroy your career.
Now, you’re not likely to be able to suddenly impose one or two hours of protected time each day if you’ve allowed yourself to always be available. You’ve set expectations, and you are going to have to change those expectations. The most effective way to change things is to have a talk with your boss. Explain your dilemma and ask him (or her) to allow you one or two hours a day for deep, focused work. Explain to them how this will benefit them and how it will ensure you will be able to produce better quality work and service to your customers.
You could ignore this advice. But if you want things to change, something’s going to have to change that change must begin with you and the way you approach your day.
The only way I was able to get control was to initiate the “protected time” protocol. I chose the quietest time of the day to do this. When I was in sales, that was from 9:00 to 10:30 am. When I was in the law office, it was 8:30 am to 11:00 am. After that, the phones lit up, and it was go go go.
But I was relaxed. I’d got the most important work done that day, and aside from answering some random questions about ongoing cases, it was plain sailing. Sure, there were some days that it didn’t work; emergencies inevitably crop up from time to time. But you just deal with those when they come up. They don’t happen every day, and if they do seem to happen every day, you can look at your strategies and see where you can make changes.
If you’ve got overlapping commitments on your calendar and no space to get on and do the work you’re employed to do, you’ve got serious time management problems. It’s time to stop, look at your calendar and decide what you can and cannot attend.
I know it’s hard. It’s very hard. As humans, we are naturally wired to please people. But you’re not pleasing people when you let them down by not being able to carry through with your commitments. And then consider the toll on your family life. If you leave yourself exhausted at the end of the day and have to take work home with you, what does that say to your family about your priorities?
I like to think of it this way. I was not employed to be a people pleaser. I was employed to do a job. That could be selling a lot of cars or helping people with their legal problems. That does not mean you should not be polite and respectful, but when someone interrupts you, they are not respecting your time, and that needs to be addressed.
I’ve often said that the best time management hack is the learn to say no politely. The best strategy I’ve found is to say yes but impose your time frame. For example, if a colleague or boss asks you to do something, you can say you will do it once you have completed your current work or project. Then tell them you can do it next week. That often gets them to pause and then say, “Don’t worry, I’ll get someone else to do it.”
That’s not a poor reflection on you; you will soon begin to shine because the quality of your work will improve. You’ll not miss deadlines, and your reliability will increase. It’s a win-win for everyone in the end.
Ultimately, it comes down to you deciding where your priorities lay. I’m reminded of the story of the consultant working for a large famous consultancy who was asked to come in on a Saturday to help prepare for an important presentation the following Monday. She apologised and said, I’m sorry, I cannot come in on Saturday as I have an agreement with my husband to spend Saturday with him and our daughter. Her boss was frustrated at first but accepted her reason. A few days later, he called the consultant into his office and thanked her. Her refusal to come in on Saturday because of the agreement with her family inspired him, and he decided he would never ask his team to come in on a weekend. He even imposed the family rule on himself, which he later credited for saving his marriage.
I’m not suggesting taking action on this with your boss will change the culture in your company, but that story is a good example of how sticking to your principles can earn you a lot more respect from your peers.
I hope that helps, Isaac. And thank you for your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
How much time do you spend organising and shuffling your work? And how much time do you spend doing the work? That’s what we’re looking at in this week’s episode.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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Script | 307
Hello, and welcome to episode 307 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
One of the great things about deciding to get organised, becoming better at managing time and being more productive is a sense of being in control and on top of everything coming at us. Nothing beats that feeling of knowing what needs to be done and that you have sufficient time today to get it done.
However, there is a dark side to all this. That is elevating the tools and practices above actually doing the work. It’s great that all your tasks are neatly organised in a task manager, and your notes are all perfectly tagged and in their respective folders. But is the return on the time invested in maintaining all that worth it?
I would go as far as to say that with all the technology built into your apps’ search engines, 90% of what you are doing to maintain all these apps and tools is wasted time. You don’t need to spend all that time doing it because a couple of hours spent learning how to search on your devices will render most of these maintenance activities redundant.
And that is where this week’s question comes in. How much time do we need to spend each day organising and processing? The answer to that is probably a lot less than you think.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alysha. Alysha asks, hi Carl, I have been on a quest to get myself organised and become better at managing my time, but all the books and articles I read seem to tell me I have to spend hours each week organising, tagging and filing and I wonder if that is actually the best use of my time. Do you have any thoughts on this area?
Hi Alysha, you make a very good point and one I often find myself despairing at when I see some of the questions I get in the comments section on my YouTube videos.
It seems a lot of people are not actually interested in getting better at managing time or being more productive. They are much more interested in playing with the tools instead of doing the work.
Let me explain. The tools and devices you use to be more productive are around 0.005% of what it takes to be more productive.
To be more productive is about what you are producing. It's not about how well your task manager is organised or how precisely you have your notes tagged or organised.
I mean, let’s be honest here, you can be exceptionally productive armed only with a paper notebook and a calendar. You don’t need anything more. All these wonderful digital tools are great, don’t get me wrong, but if they become the main focus of your whole system, then they become the distraction and prevent you from doing what needs to be done to be productive—that’s doing the work.
Recently, I’ve been re-reading some older time management and productivity books. Books from the late 1980s and early 90s. These books were written before the massive advances in computer technology in the workplace and yet, the problems people were facing back then are the same fundamental problems people are facing today.
There are the parents who are trying to juggle their career with raising their children. There’s the busy executive who is struggling to get their core work done because they are always having to be in meetings or dealing with clients calling them all the time. And there are the people struggling to respond to all the letters and messages they receive each day.
The tools and channels may have changed, but the problems in managing all this work have not. It’s still there, and I am sure it will still be there in fifty or a hundred years’ time.
The thing is, it’s never been about the tools. You can have the best, most advanced tools available today, but if you are not getting on and doing the work, you will still have backlogs and be overwhelmed. If you are not keeping control of your calendar and allowing other people to schedule meetings for you, you will be overwhelmed and unable to do your core work.
I was reminded of this recently when listening to David Goggins on the Andrew Huberman podcast. In one part, they talk about all the supplements and protocols we are supposed to be taking and doing. Yet, unless you put on your running shoes and get out and do the run, none of these supplements or protocols will help you. They should never be used as an excuse not to do the work.
Yet, that is what so many people are doing today. They are using the tools to avoid doing the hard thing. The actual work.
If you have a twenty-page report to write for your boss, open up your computer, click on the Microsoft Word icon and write it. If you need to email a client, open up your email app and write it. You do not need to have a thirty-minute debate with yourself about which is the best tool to use to write the report, and you don’t need to clear your email inbox to send the email to your client.
What I have noticed over the last few years is a lot of people are using their tools as an excuse to procrastinate on doing the hard work. People will spend hours on YouTube or an app-finding website looking for the miracle app that will somehow miraculously do the work for them.
It’s a little like the person who wants to lose weight and get fit and invests all their time and money in supplements and training gear but never goes out and does any exercise. You know that will never work. You’ve got to do the work.
Planning and organising do have their place. It is important to know where everything is and what needs to be done. But that should never be at the expense of doing the work.
Yesterday, as I was recording and editing this week’s YouTube video, my little studio was a mess, and my desktop was covered in footage and screenshots. Everything appeared disorganised and messed up. Yet, the video was recorded, and the editing was done. During the five or six hours I was working on that video, my only focus was the output. I didn’t care about how untidy everything looked. That did not matter. What mattered was the video was recorded, edited and posted.
When I’d finished, then I could clean things up. Move all the stuff from my desktop to the folder and cross off the task in my task manager. Job done.
The focus is always on getting the work done, not how beautifully everything is organised.
One of the biggest problems with digital tools these days is the battle app developers are having to stand out in a very crowded productivity field. In order to stand out, they are adding more and more features, and that leaves us with more and more things to fiddle with.
I see people spending a lot of money on apps like Super Human and Hey email apps. These apps claim to sort your email for you, moving to the top of the list of the emails they think are the most important. Now, I am sure most of the time, they get this right, but the reality is you can do this yourself in apps like Outlook, Gmail and Apple Mail. You do not need expensive apps for this.
But as a new toy to play with, these apps are great. They will stop you from getting on and clearing your backlog and give you something new and interesting to play with. But is that the goal? I hope not.
If you want to clear your email backlog, you have to get on and clear it. No app will ever do that for you.
If you have subscribed to hundreds of newsletters and signed up to get the news delivered to your inbox every morning and are overwhelmed by the hundreds of emails you are receiving, perhaps the problem is not the tool but you. You signed up for these. You can give yourself an hour or two and unsubscribe from them any time.
One of the most common questions I get is about how to organise projects. Now, many projects have a lot of moving parts, and tasks need to be done in order to keep them moving forward so the deadlines are met.
But do you really need a complex system to organise these projects? I have a project at the moment to update my free COD course. I have my notes and the outline neatly organised, and each week, I review the project. Yet this week, the project hasn’t moved forward. Why? Because I am ignoring the obvious thing. I need to do the work. I need to set up my studio and begin recording it.
I can spend the next six weeks shuffling files, but that won’t result in an updated course. The only way that will happen is if I go into the studio and record it.
And that’s the same for you, too. If you want to be more productive, then you need to do productive things. That means doing the work. There is no other way, and there certainly is no app out there that will do that for you.
If your car needs washing, then take your car to the car wash centre.
If you need to clean up your home, then when you get home today, do it.
If your email is out of control, then open up your email and get it under control.
If you need to lose weight, put down the cookie, put on your exercise gear and exercise.
None of this is complex. It might be difficult, and you may not want to do it, but if it needs to be done, you will have to do it sometime. Why not now?
The bottom line is if you genuinely want to get control of everything going on in your professional and personal life, you need to do the work. Planning, organising and searching for better tools will not do that. They are less than 1% of what it takes. The only thing that worked forty years ago is the same thing that only works today. Doing the work.
I know this may not be what you want to hear. But the reality is the miracle tool does not exist, and if it did, you would soon find yourself out of a job.
The most effective way to become more productive and better at managing our time is to develop processes for doing your work so you become more effective and efficient at doing it. That way, you will get faster, and that, in turn, will leave you less overwhelmed and with more time to do the things you want to do.
Thank you, Alysha, for your question, and thank you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Are you guilty of attempting to do too much each day? If you are, you may be suffering from something called “hero syndrome”, and it’s not a very productive way to manage your life.
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Script | 306
Welcome to episode 306 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
I remember a few years ago someone commented on a post I had written about only having 24 hours a day. The lady suggested that this was not strictly true because some people had more privileges than others. For instance a CEO might have an army of assistants, or a wealthy individual may have cooks, nannies and butlers in their home to do a lot of the work less privileged people need to do.
I don’t disagree with her. What she pointed out is true. But, no matter who you are, you still only get 24 hours. A CEO is employed to make decisions, meet with key people within the organisation which their army of assistants cannot do for them, and if the wealthy individual wants to sit around all day with nothing to do drinking champagne and canapés, then good luck to them. It’s not a life I would like to live.
The key to becoming more productive and better at managing your time is in how you make the most of your twenty-four hours. Knowing what your essentials are would be the first step, but what else can you do to ensure you are making the most of each day while ensuring you are getting enough rest and relaxation? Well, that’s the subject of this week’s question.
Speaking of which, that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery podcast voice.
This week’s question comes from Richard. Richard asks, hi Carl, I’ve always struggled to get everything I need to do done and when I get home at the end of the day, I’m just too exhausted to do anything but crash on the couch. Do you have any suggestions on better managing my time?
Hi Richard, thank you for your question.
It looks like what you describe is part of the journey to becoming better at managing your time. The first step is to acknowledge that things could be better. Your question suggests you are at that stage.
One thing I would recommend is to do a task audit. What tasks are you trying to complete each day? Are they strictly necessary and if they are, could you group similar tasks together so you develop processes for getting them done.
Let me give you an example.
Most days I cook my own dinner. I also like to do my fair share of the house chores. So, I found a way to group cleaning up the kitchen and dining room while I cook my dinner. At first it felt a little overwhelming—watching my dinner cook while I was cleaning down the fridge or vacuuming the floors, yet today, it’s just something I automatically do. I no longer need to think about what I am doing.
I’ve also taken to sorting out the laundry at the same time now. The laundry room is just off from the kitchen so it just seemed logical to either put a load of washing on or to fold the freshly laundered clothes. Now, I am cooking dinner, cleaning the kitchen and dining area and checking the washing.
Now if I put all those tasks onto a task list, it would look ridiculously overwhelming. Yet it isn’t. It’s surprising what you can do in three and 3/4 minutes while you wait for your eggs to boil.
The great thing is, I no longer need any of these chores on my list. When I make dinner, that’s my trigger to do the chores.
Doing a task audit will likely highlight a lot of inefficiencies. I certainly found a lot. The key is to look at different areas of your life and work and to find better ways of doing it.
It will naturally feel strange at first. You’re changing a habit and that’s always hard. Yet, the long-term benefits are huge.
I’m reminded of a story about the former Ferrari Formula 1 Technical Director, Ross Brawn. When he started his own team, Brawn Racing in 2009, he quickly discovered that he didn’t have time to read all the documents and emails he was receiving. One of his team members suggested printing out all the documentation and emails and placing them in a folder he could then read as he was commuting in to work. The commute was one hour each way, so this gave him two hours of reading time each day.
Being self-employed, I generally eat my lunch alone. I use this time for reading articles related to my work. This gives me around forty-five minutes each day for reading.
This way of managing our work is called leveraging time. We cannot change the amount of time we have each day, but we can seek ways to maximise what we do in the time we have.
Wealthy people do this by hiring people to do work for them, we probably do not have that luxury, but we can still leverage our time by being smart about how we use time.
Now, life is not just about doing our employed work. There is a lot more to living life. There’s time spent with the people that matter to us and exercise, for example. Where do we fit all that in when we are already busy?
You mentioned in your question you are “too exhausted” to do anything other than crash on the couch when you get home. Now, unless you are working a job that involves a lot of running around, that tiredness is likely mental tiredness. I would suggest in the evenings you get out and move. Do some form of exercise. This could be taking a walk, or doing a few body-weight exercises for twenty-minutes or so.
I know this will go against every instinct. You’re exhausted and all you want to do is crash. The problem with this is once you stop and slow down your body is not going to want to get up again. This is when you will likely get caught in the cycle of mind numbing scrolling and streaming TV shows. While there is a time for this kind of activity, doing it every day is not going to be healthy for you in the long-term.
Physical activity in whatever form will help to prevent you crashing at the end of the day. It will reduce your stress levels and help you to sleep better. It will also give you what is called a “second-wind” where your energy levels will rise a second time in the day. It will also leave you feeling a lot more positive which in turn will help your relationships because you will be much more engaged in any conversation.
Earlier, I mentioned building processes to help you to maximise your time. I remember discovering processes as the key to becoming much more efficient with the work I do. For instance, I used to get anxious about all the admin tasks that seemed to build up each day. It wasn’t until I realised that admin was a part of life that would never go away that I decided to do something about it. Admin tasks are relentless and never go away. Sure, some days you may not have much, but others you will—I refer you to the tax submission season, for example.
Now, I have a block of one hour each day dedicated to dealing with admin. Most days, I don’t need the full hour, but it’s there if I need it. What this has done is taken the anxiety of not having enough time away. I know I have time. I have up to seven hours a week for it, and that’s more than enough to manage all those little admin tasks.
I do this with email, too. Communication is an inevitable part of your life today. If it’s not emails, it’s text messages. The question is, how much time do you need each day to keep on top of it?
The problem with not having a dedicated time for responding to your messages is you will allow incoming messages to distract you. I recently read that the average person is checking email every six minutes! Wow! How on earth would you ever be able to get any meaningful work done if you were allowing yourself to be distracted that often?
Not just the fact you are being interrupted, it’s also the mental energy required to do that much task switching. If you are doing this, Richard, no wonder you are crashing at the end of the day. Your brain was not designed to work that way.
Here’s the science bit. Our brains work in cycles of 90 minutes—interestingly it does this in sleep as well. You can focus your attention on deep meaningful work for around 90 minutes. After that you will be fatigued and need to rest. Now that rest does not mean you check email or scroll social media, it means you should switch things around. So, you could break your day up into 90 minute segments. Deep work followed by something light and physical. You do not need to do physical activity for 90 minutes, but a ten to twenty minute walk would do wonders for your focus, mental energy and overall feeling of wellbeing. It gets the blood flowing and clears out your brain ready for the next session of work.
One final bit of advice I can give you is to start with what you want time for. Work is generally eight hours of your twenty-four. Aside from work, what do you want time for? Start with that. Build that into your calendar first. The great thing about our employed work is that time is already fixed. Using the tips I’ve shared with help you manage your work there.
So what do you want time for? How much sleep do you need or want? Get these fixed into your daily routine and calendar and build from there. You’ll be much happier and more energetic this way. The only thing you need do then is to experiment, find the right balance and pretty soon all that end of day exhaustion will disappear.
I hope this has helped, Richard, Thank you for sending your question in and than you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very very productive week.
Hello and welcome to 2024! And in this episode, I’m answering a question about sticking with your New Year plans.
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Script | 305
Welcome to episode 305 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
So, 2024 is here. A New Year with a lot of potential new opportunities and plans. The challenge you will face (because we all face this challenge) is executing on all the ideas and plans you have for this year without a loss of enthusiasm or energy.
And that will happen because no matter how well you have planned the year, things will not work out as you imagine. Some things will go exactly how you expect them to, but most will not. And that’s the same for everyone. If you deliver all your plans and projects exactly as conceived, you are not ambitious enough to move forward. You’re making things too easy.
So how do you avoid the loss of enthusiasm and energy that you will need to see you through the year? Well, that’s the topic of this week’s question, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for the question.
This week’s question comes from Carrie. Carrie asks, hi Carl, every year I get excited about all the things I want to do, and when it gets to February or March, I lose all my enthusiasm because I haven’t done anything I had planned to do. Do you have any advice on avoiding this?
Hi Carrie, thank you for your question and Happy New Year to you too.
One thing I can tell you straight up is you are not alone. It turns out 92% of those who set New Year goals or resolutions have given up by 16th February. Only 8% manage to achieve some of their goals.
This means we need to learn what those eight percent do that is different from the 92%.
The first thing I discovered about the 8% is they have no more than three goals for the year. And those three are very specific. For example, they may have a financial, a physical and perhaps a career goal. And that’s it.
If we use these as an example, the financial goal is possibly the easiest. Imagine your financial goal is to save $5,000 this year. You can break that down into twelve months and send $417.00 per month to your savings account. On the 31st of December, you will have a little over $5,000 in it.
On a task level, this is a 30-second task once a month where you send the $417.00 to your account.
Now, if your finances are tight, you may have to review what you are spending money on and make some changes to what you spend, but the action to take is just thirty seconds per month.
Physical goals can be a little more complex. Not everyone does exercise to lose weight. Some just want to improve their overall health; others would like to challenge themselves physically by running a marathon or climbing a big mountain. However, whatever the purpose or “what” the goal is, physical goals mean you need to find time for regular exercise. The essence of the goal is to find the time and do the exercise, and that will almost certainly achieve your goal.
The difficulty with these types of goals is the starting point. If you have not exercised for a number of years and are not in great shape, it is going to be hard. This is like pulling a large truck. The hardest part of pulling a truck is the start. When the rope you are attached to takes the strain to get the truck moving, it takes an inordinate amount of strength. However, once the truck begins to move, it gets easier and easier. The difficulty then becomes stopping the truck.
Starting an exercise programme is the same. It’s incredibly hard to begin with. The first session’s never that bad until you wake up the following morning. When you step out of bed, your muscles scream out in pain, and you’ll wonder how on earth you will be able to repeat your exercise again today.
The thing is, getting fit and staying fit is the same. It’s all about turning up and doing the exercise. But it doesn’t have to be the same exercise each day. Jog one day, walk the next. Then perhaps go for a swim or do some light weights in the gym on other days. Fitness is all about movement, so find time each day for movement.
What I’ve discovered about fitness is that it’s all about routine. It needs to be built into your day, and the time of day you do it needs to work for you. Once it becomes a routine and you get through the first fourteen days, it becomes much easier, and there’s rarely any muscle soreness (and when you do get sore, you feel a sense of achievement because you know you had a good session the day before).
What about a career goal? This is likely to be the most complex of goals. There are likely to be multiple different parts to it. Skills acquisition, experience and time are all involved. So, finding out what skills you need to move up the corporate ladder would be one task. Arranging a meeting with your boss or HR to discuss your goal would be a first step.
Once you know what you need to do, you can then formulate a plan to make it happen. If you need to go back to school, then you can research how best to do that. Then you will need to find the time to study. Again, like exercise, this needs to be scheduled. You won’t achieve educational goals by winging it. You need to set aside dedicated time for studying.
A number of my coaching clients have dedicated days for learning. Two of my clients use the weekends for studying and taking courses or having coaching sessions. Saturday mornings seem to be the most common time for this, but it will depend on your own schedule.
Just one piece of advice here, avoid Sunday nights. These are not the best times for studying. You’ll be distracted by what you have to do next week and likely be tired from all your social activities. The thought of sitting down to study after an eventful weekend would be off-putting for most.
Ultimately, if you want to successfully achieve your goals in 2024, then you will need to establish some habits and routines. This does not need to be overwhelming. You can do as much or as little as you feel capable of. For example, if you plan to read twenty-five books in 2024, that’s one book every two weeks. If you spent an average of forty-five minutes reading each day, you would easily accomplish that goal. This means the only question you need to answer is, when? When will you do your reading?
Perhaps you could include this as part of your morning routine, or instead of watching TV late at night, you read a book.
I will confess that in the last six months, I have spent far too much time watching TV in the evenings. In 2024, instead of watching TV, I intend to read. I have already prepared a comfortable corner to read. It’s a place Louis, my little dog, likes to cuddle up to me in the evenings, and I’m already looking forward to it.
I will still watch TV. However, I have created a list of TV shows and YouTube videos to watch, and I have allocated Saturday evenings to TV watching. If I find I have the urge to watch something, I will add it to the list, and then on Saturday, I can open the list and choose from that list.
What about daily and weekly planning? This is something that will bring you so many rewards. Having a plan for the week is a no-brainer for me. I know what happens when I don’t have a plan. The week goes south very quickly and then I am in overwhelm territory just trying to keep up with silly little things.
When I have a plan for the week, I am more focused. The right things get done, and I have the mental space to deal with the unknowns and urgencies of others without losing focus.
This is something I would recommend to everyone. Make it a habit in 2024 to do both the weekly and daily planning sessions. This one habit will do so much for you when it comes to achieving your goals in 2024.
One thing I must stress, though, is to keep your list of goals as short as you can. Two or three goals is about the right number. Any more than that, and you will be overwhelmed and unable to stay focused on what needs to be done.
Remember, we are all a work in progress. You do not have to change everything in twelve months. Pick the two or three things that are most on your mind right now.
I neglected my fitness in 2023, and regaining my fitness is my number one goal in 2024. Today, I will be heading out for a run, no matter what the weather is. It’s the first day of the year, and it’s not about how well or far I run; it’s about re-establishing the habit of exercising each day. Get the 1st of January in the bag, and tomorrow I can do a few push-ups or go for a long walk.
My goal in January is to do some form of exercise every day. I’m not worried about February right now. If I get through January having done exercise on 25 or more days, that’s a result I will accept. It’s not perfect, but it’s 25 days of exercise—that’s something to celebrate! I can then decide what I will do in February to maintain my momentum.
And that’s what setting and achieving goals is all about. You are not going to be perfect every day or week. But that does not mean you failed. It just means you had a bad day. You can pick it back up the next day or week. It’s not what you achieve in one day; it’s what you have accomplished over 365 days. (Or 366 days this year)
So there you go, Carrie. Keep your list of goals short, and look for habits and routines you can build so that the action you need to take becomes automatic. And remember, just because you had a bad day or week doesn’t mean you failed. You can pick yourself up at any time and get moving again.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive 2024.
In this week’s episode, how can you stay motivated and productive in retirement?
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Script | 304
Hello, and welcome to episode 304 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
We often think time management and productivity are the realms of students and busy people trying to maintain a growing career and balance a growing family. The truth is once we begin making decisions for ourselves, how we use our time becomes a deciding factor in what we do each day.
This means once we leave the workforce and take full responsibility for what we do each day, managing our time becomes even more important. If you think about it, when we are in work, there’s often a time we need to be in the office, an array of meetings and deadlines for projects that need to be completed. These deadlines and commitments are often given to us by our bosses and customers.
Once you retire, those deadlines are no longer handed out by bosses and customers. Now you have complete control over what you do each day. You can go to bed and wake up whenever you like; you no longer need to wait for the weekends or evenings to meet up with friends, and all those activities you promised yourself you would do once you retire can now be done.
Just because you are retired and no longer working does not mean you no longer need to worry about how you manage your time. In many ways, now you have complete control over what you do each day time management and productivity practices are more important than ever.
And that neatly leads me to this week’s question, and to give you the question it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.
This week’s question comes from Kai Yee. Kai Yee asks: Hi Carl, how would you suggest a person apply your systems after they have retired?
Hi Kai Yee, thank you for your question.
One of the things I’ve learned is that no matter where you are in life, there will always be things to do. In many ways, when you are working, managing your time is much easier because your work gives you structure to your day. You have a time to wake up, a regular place to be at a set time each day and a finish time.
When you retire, that structure disappears, and it can be disorientating. You no longer need to wake up to be somewhere at a given time, and without a plan or a reason to get up, time will disappear incredibly fast.
So the first thing you should do is to give yourself a solid structure which means bringing your calendar into play.
What do you want time for each day? You could begin with your wake-up and going-to-sleep times. Get these fixed into your calendar. If I were in the fortunate position to retire today, I would set my wake-up time at 8:30 am and bedtime at 1:00 am. I love the quiet between 11 and 1 am, and I get a lot of reading or learning done at that time. Your wake-up and going to bed times will act as the bookends for your day.
One of the most important things you can do when you retire is to find time each day for exercise. And as I have mentioned before, exercise does not necessarily mean going to the gym or out for a run. All it means is movement.
When you don’t have any commitments for the day, it can be tempting to wake up, make your morning beverage sit down and not do anything all day. Time will just slip away.
I experience this frequently when I head over to Ireland for the Christmas holidays. I don’t have a structure, so after waking up, I will make coffee, sit down and read the news or scroll social media and before I know it, it’s lunchtime, and I haven’t done anything. To overcome this, I give myself some structure.
This year, for example, my wife and I have decided we will go out for a morning run as soon as the sun comes up. The act of getting into our running gear, going out for thirty to forty minutes, coming back and preparing for the day will give us structure and ensure we don’t gain too much weight over the holidays.
What is your preferred way to get some movement into your day? That could be going out for a walk or a bike ride. It could mean you go to a gym or an exercise class. Or perhaps you do some resistance band exercises. Maintaining your mobility is going to be very important, and that means you can use movement and exercise as part of your daily structure.
What else would you like time for each day? Perhaps there will be things that don’t necessarily need to be done daily but weekly. Get these into your calendar. All of these things are going to give you structure.
There are a number of things that will always form a part of your life. Movement, eating, sleeping, learning, hobbies and socialising. All these are important. The question is, where will you put them into your calendar?
One thing I noticed with my parents, who are both retired, is they still have tasks to do. My father, for instance, has maintained his love of animals and still runs a small farm, not for profit, but to give him something he enjoys doing. Waking up and going out to feed the animals is all a part of his structure, but each week he needs to go and buy feed and do maintenance tasks around his small farm. Repairing fences, fixing leaking roofs and cleaning up are always on his list of things to do.
It’s easy to imagine that once you retire, you no longer need to keep up with your calendar or task list. Would it be that simple? Just because you stop working, it doesn’t mean there in nothing to do. In reality, while some things will drop off your lists, other things will replace them.
I know a lot of people say when they retire, they will redecorate their home and do up the garden (back yard if you live across the pond), yet when the time arrives, nothing happens. It all seems overwhelming. Yet, if you set about planning out your projects and making sure your areas of focus remain the central part of your life, you will have the structure to ensure these things happen. This means you will still need a way to manage all those tasks and appointments.
Always remember, the work won’t get done unless you do the work.
In many ways, the biggest challenge you will face is no longer having someone to keep you accountable for your projects. Instead of a boss or customers expecting things from you, the only person holding you accountable is going to be you, and that can be hard. This is why building structure into your days is going to be so important.
What time will you begin the day? What kind of things will you do in the morning? When will you eat? What time will you finish t the day?
There are a lot of questions you can ask yourself that will help you to build some structure into your day. As with when you were working, consistency and a structured plan are going to ensure the right things are getting done each day.
When you finally finish your working life, it doesn’t mean life ends. In fact, a lot of what you likely planned to do in life will suddenly become doable. You have the time and, hopefully, the financial resources to do those things. The only question you need to answer is when? When will you do those things? Once you know when you can then go about working on the how. How will you do them?
All of these questions are no different from when you were in full-time employment.
It’s easy to believe when you retire, things will change. And sure, they do change, but you will still have stuff to do. That will never change.
So, if you want to get the most out of your retirement, make a plan. Begin at the year level; what would you like to do this year (or perhaps next year now, given that it’s only a couple of weeks away)? Think in terms of projects you want to complete and places you want to visit. Once you have that list, create four boxes, each representing a quarter. Then spread out these projects and activities you want to do across those quarters.
For instance, if you want to work on your garden, perhaps Q2 and Q3 would be the best quarters for that activity. What about the places you want to travel to? When will you do your travelling? And finally, for the winter quarters (Q1 and Q4), what activities could you do in those months?
Having a mapped-out year will give you a sense of purpose. It will give you structure, and it will prevent you from procrastinating.
Procrastination is going to be the biggest challenge you face. You have all this apparent time, no boss shouting at you, and no customers waiting for you. It’s all on you, and without that accountability, you will suffer. Make sure you build it into your day.
So there you go, Kai Yee, just because you are retired, it does not mean you don’t need to maintain your activities. In many ways, it can be harder to motivate yourself. However, with a bit of planning, being clear about what you want and know what needs to be done each day, you will soon find yourself moving towards a healthy, happy and fulfilling retirement,
Thank you for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
I and many other people in the productivity world talk a lot about planning your day. However, what happens when your plans are frequently destroyed by other people?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 303 \ Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 303 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
As the Scottish poet Robert Burns once wrote “The best-laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley”. “Gang aft agley” can be translated as go awry. This means that no matter how well you plan your day or week, things are not going to go according to plan. Similarly, one of my favourite quotes that is often attributed to Mike Tyson is, “Everyone has a plan until they are punched in the face.” And it’s so true.
One of the reasons so few people actually do a daily or weekly plan is because they believe that no matter what they plan, it is going to be torpedoed once they begin the day. A simple text message or email can derail the whole day. Yet, I still believe it is important to have a plan. Without a plan, you will be waiting for others to give you something to do. You will feel lost and never get anything important to you done, and you are guaranteed to build horrendous backlogs.
This leads me to this week’s question, and for that, it means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.
This week’s question comes from Sasha. Sasha asks, Hi Carl, what tips do you have for me to harden my system so that it doesn't constantly wobble when life experiences significant deviations outside of the planned week?
Hi Sasha, thank you for your question.
Now, I know there is a little more background to your question. Specifically, managing two young children and both yourself and your wife working full time.
So with that in mind the first problem people face is with being too structured. What I mean by this is being too specific about what you want to get done each day. Most of the things we want to get done around the house do not really need to be done on a specific day. For instance, I like to give my home office a really good clean on a Saturday morning, but more often than not something will come up that prevents me from being able to do that.
Now if I want to follow my calendar religiously, it would annoy me if I was prevented from doing what I had planned, but really, does my office need a good clean specifically on a Saturday morning? No of course not. It would be nice, but it really doesn’t matter if I do it on Saturday morning or Sunday afternoon. The only thing that really matters is at some point in the week I do it. (But even then that is debatable).
This problem can be exacerbated if you have young kids. With kids under the age of 13, there’s no way you will be able to maintain a well structured home. Kids were born with the natural ability to destroy all well intentioned plans. And that’s fantastic. It’s all part of the experience of raising children. If it didn’t happen, you’d miss out on one of life’s joys.
I can promise you on the day your kids turn 13 you will miss all that disruption. Your kids are going to go from being entirely dependent on you to wanting to have nothing to do with you as they go through adolescence.
For most of you, I hope, your family comes first. This means if you get irritated because a family member ungently, and unexpectedly, needs you you should be happy. It might be inconvenient, but family comes first. There’s no debate. If there is a debate, then perhaps family (or this particular family member) is not really your number one.
One thing I’ve learned over the years is as soon as you involve another living creature in your plans, you are going to need to be flexible. My wife, for example, has no concept of time when it comes to family plans. She’s spot on with her time when it comes to friends or strangers, but when it comes to her family, her buffer is two or three hours. I remember not long after being married I used to have to lie to her about when we needed to be at the airport. If check in time was at 9:00am I would tell her it was 8:00am. This meant we were able to build buffer time into our plans. Today, she’s much better—I must have coached her well, but it did take ten years to get her to that state.
And there will always be the unexpected. As you say, kids get sick and that changes everything.
Now, as you both work, what contingency plans do you have in place for when a child cannot go to school or daycare centre? This is critical because you cannot plan for a child being sick. This is contingency planning and as soon as the decision to keep you child at home, what needs to happen? Do you call your parents and ask them to take care of your child, or does one of you need to stay at home? Ensuring your contingency plan is in place and ready to roll should the unexpected happen will save you a lot of stress and panic.
Now the question arises; what do you do with all the work you had planned to do when the unexpected takes over your day? Well, if you are planning for the week, all it means is you reschedule what you wanted to do to some other time in the week. It’s likely you will have a few days to reschedule things over and you may be able to renegotiate some of your commitments.
A few years ago we had a family emergency that became apparent at 7:30am. I had a full day of work planned, yet this was family and I immediately took action to deal with the emergency. This essentially destroyed my plan for the day and the repercussions continued into the next day. However, I was able to sit down for ten minutes later in the afternoon and I messaged my appointments scheduled for the next day to tell them I was going to be unable to attend. I was then able to get back to the emergency.
The most important thing is you deal with the issue in front of you first and once everything is back under control, you can review what you have on your plate and reschedule where necessary.
Life is never going to be a straight line and no matter how well planned you are, things are going to go wrong. In a previous episode I spoke with Simon Jeffries, former UK Special Forces officer and Simon mentioned about when in the special forces you know before you begin things are not going to go according to plan. However, the important thing is to know precisely what you objective is and you stay focused on accomplishing that. Special forces soldiers do consider everything that could go wrong and what they would do in those situations, but the most important thing is they keep their eye on the objective.
If you have ever seen the news footage of the the British SAS storming the Iranian Embassy in 1980, you may have seen one of the SAS soldiers getting caught in the rope he was descending on. His colleagues did their best to cut him down, but the mission still went on. They dealt with the emergency quickly and as efficiently as possible then got straight back to doing what they had planned to do.
It’s this approach we want to be bringing to our lives too. Things are not going to go according to plan. However, when you are clear about what must be done that day, you put yourself in a much stronger position because you are more focused and disruptions will just bounce off you.
Now you don’t want to be setting yourself too many objectives. I only set myself one or two. I know that I will get those done 99% of the time. Yesterday was a very disrupted day, yet I had two things to complete. I needed to go to the bank and record and edit my YouTube video. My wife woke up feeling rather unwell, so I took her to the doctors. While she was there I realised I could call in to the bank, so I did that (there’s long queues at this time of the year to see a doctor). Once done at the bank, I picked my wife up from the doctors.
I had to go to the pharmacy to get her prescription once I’d got her home and tucked up in bed. After a short sleep, my wife was feeling a lot better, so I was able to pick up the video recording and editing. There are other things on my list for the day, and a few of those I needed to reschedule, but when I finished for the day, I was surprised how much I’d actually got done.
The important thing is not to panic. Accept the disruption for what it is, a disruption that needs to be dealt with then move back onto your objectives. Things will always calm down and return to normal, so there really is no need to panic. If meetings need to be postponed or cancelled, get on and do it as soon as you can. If planned work needs to be rescheduled, then do that. Just don’t overthink things.
The great thing about having a plan for the week (because you did a weekly planning session) you have a plan to get back on to. This means no matter what disruptions that come your way, you only need a few minutes to review your plan and decide what still must be done and what can be renegotiated.
In worst case scenarios, you may feel the need to do a weekly planning session to get yourself back on track. That’s okay. Sometimes that’s the wisest thing to. I think over the last year, I’ve had to do that once or twice. It’s not something you will need to do often, but if you feel that’s the only way you will get back on track, then by all means do it. You’ll feel a lot better and much more focused.
I hope that helps, Sasha. Thank you so much for your question.
It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, what to do when your day, or week, turns sour and you’re left feeling overwhelmed and stressed out.
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Episode 302 \ Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 302 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
In my weekly newsletter last week, I wrote about how, for some reason, the end of the year seems to throw up a lot of stuff that suddenly needs to be finished before the end of year.
While deadlines are always around us, it seems December is the month that projects and tasks, that were slowly moving along just fine, become urgent and must be complete in the next two weeks or so.
This leaves you feeling stressed out and under pressure at a time of year you want to be slowing down and relaxing.
This week’s question talks directly to this phenomenon and I want to give you a number of strategies that will help you to stay on top of things and get through to the end of year break feeling in control and ready to enjoy Christmas and the New Year celebrations.
So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Brett. Brett asks, hi Carl, I want to know if you ever feel under pressure or overwhelmed at the end of the year. And if not, what do you do to stay in control when everyone around you is demanding their projects are completed before the Christmas holidays?
Hi Brett, thank you for your question.
You’re right, for some reason before any long holiday there does seem to be a big rush to get things finished. Whether it is Christmas, Eid, Yom Kippur or the end of the calendar year bosses and colleagues suddenly wake up and realise they are behind on a number of projects and so the panic sets in and everything needs to be completed yesterday.
The truth is, it shouldn’t matter where you are in the year, if you have planned things out and developed a timeline for getting things done, there should never be a rush to complete things at the last minute.
Now, when I say planned things out and developed a timeline, I don’t mean micro-managed plans, but a rough set of milestones for each project that needs to be completed in the year.
One trick I use is to divide my year up into quarters and to limit the number of projects I allow to no more than four each quarter. That still means I get between ten and twelve big projects complete each year but I do it in a way that ensures I am not overly stressing my system and I have sufficient breathing room between each one that allows for small over-runs and delays.
Sure, I could set about trying to complete ten or more projects each quarter, but then most of them won’t be finished and all I am doing is letting people down by constantly missing deadlines. That’s not something I will allow myself to do.
Now, when I talk about projects here I am talking about projects that will take four to ten weeks to complete. A lot of what I do each week are things I do every week. Preparing this podcast is not a project, it’s part of my core work and is a process. Likewise my blog posts and YouTube videos are all a part of my core work and I have processes for getting these done each week.
For me, a project is something like developing a new course, or redesigning my website or even writing a book—which I confess took up three quarters this year. And on that subject, the book is now being edited and the cover design is close to completion. We are still looking at publication early next year. And even if I say so myself, this is a fantastic book. I’ve loved writing it AND reading through it.
Anyway, back to staying in control as we approach the end of year.
So the first tip is, where possible make sure you retain control over the number of projects you are committed to each quarter. There is a limit and you need to ensure the people you report to know where you are in terms of the workload you have and what time availability to you have.
If you are in the habit of automatically saying yes to everything you are asked to do, then you are not in control. Instead, it means other people are controlling you. It’s your responsibility to communicate with your pears and bosses so they know what you have on, and what space you have for new tasks and projects. If you re not willing to, or are afraid to do that, you will never find the answers in YouTube videos or podcasts like this. This is one area where you need to do the difficult thing and speak up. Explain your workload and ensure the people you work with know your limits.
Next up is to understand there are only twenty-four hours in the day. Obvious yes? Well, it seems not. I see a lot of people’s to-do lists and it clear to me most people believe they can do a lot more than time will permit. No, you are not going to be able to attend five one hour meetings, deal with 200 emails and write the proposal your boss is screaming for. Something has to give.
This means you need to know what is and is not important. Is completing the proposal more important than one or two of those five meetings you have planned? Could you excuse yourself from the meeting rather than using it as an excuse for not doing your work?
Again, it comes back to you taking on the responsibility for your time and not hoping time will miraculously expand so you can do everything in one day.
Remember whether you are the CEO or an intern, you can always negotiate deadlines. The worst that can happen is the person you are negotiating with is a better negotiator than you and you have to do whatever you are being asked to do. But at least your voice is heard and the chances are you will be allowed extra time to complete the work.
I’ve found when things are chaotic, the most important thing you can do is to double down on your daily and weekly planning. This is about getting clear on what needs to be completed that day or week. When chaos surrounds you, the worst thing you can do is not be clear about what the day’s objective is. Sure, you may spend the day dodging bullets, but at least you stay focused on your objective and that’s how you get the important things done.
Today, I have what appears to be 101 tiny things to do, but I am focused on the two most important objectives. Ge this script written and edit and send out a video to a conference organiser. My focus is on this script right now and prior to writing this, I completed the video edits and sent them out. Those 101 tiny things that appear to need doing, I will do as many of them as I can today, but not worry too much about the ones I did not do. I can decide later when I do my planning for tomorrow which ones must be done then.
Be very clear about what your objectives are for the day. If you stay focused on those one or two things, you will find they get done and most of the other, less important things will find their own solutions.
When are you at your most focused? Are you a morning person or more of a night owl? Take advantage of the time of day you are at your most focused. For most of us that will be between 9:00 and 11:00 am. Do whatever you can to protect that time. Block it out where possible in your calendar so no one can schedule meetings for you.
It’s important that once you have that time blocked out, you intentionally decide what you will use it for before you start the day. Too often I find people waste the first thirty minutes scrolling through their to-do list looking for something to do. No. Don’t do that. Decide beforehand what you will use it for.
This way, when you sit down to do your work, you know what you will do and you can get started immediately.
Most of our time management problems are not because of the volume of work. With the right processes in place and strict control over your calendar, you can maintain control of your inbox, routine tasks and core work and have sufficient space to deal with the unknowns.
It’s much easier to blame the volume of work, than to address the real problem which is we are allowing other people to control what we do each day.
I know many of us need to be available for clients and colleagues, but if you are available eight hours a day, you will never get on top of your work—you will always be doing the work of others and that results in you developing huge backlogs that requires you to work beyond your regular working hours and at weekends. Probably not something you want to do.
Look at it this way; if you were to reserve two hours each day for doing the work you are employed to do—your core work—you would still have six hours for dealing with everything else. If you were to tag an extra hour for dealing with your communications, you still have five hours each day for everyone else. That’s twenty-five hours a week dedicated to serving others. Surely that’s enough time?
Based on what I’ve learned over the years, the cure for overwhelm and overload are the planning sessions. It’s when you skip those that things begin to back up and become urgent. When you give yourself thirty minutes or so on a weekend to plan the following week from a big picture perspective and to allow ten minutes or so at the end of each day for reviewing your plan and making any necessary adjustments you stay in control.
It also means you know where you are at any point in the week and can adjust, reschedule and renegotiate where necessary.
Above all, though, never be afraid to renegotiate your commitments either with yourself or with others. There’s nothing wrong with doing that and rather than being a sign of weakness it is a sign of strength. You’re a human, not a machine. Accept that and work with it. It’s far better to have one or two bad days each week than pushing yourself towards illness that requires you to take a long break.
I hope that helps, Brett and thank you for your question.
Thank you to you too for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, how do you decide what to work on or put another way, how do you prioritise all the stuff you need to do?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Podcast 301 \ Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 301 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
This week’s question is on a subject I am sure you come across from time to time. That is how do you decide what to work on when you have an overwhelming list of tasks to choose from.
In my role as a productivity and time management coach, I get to see how many tasks clients have in their today view and I am often shocked to see upwards of 30 tasks. Let’s be honest here, you are not going to complete 30+ tasks in a day. If you begin the day with this many tasks, your day is already destroyed.
you see the problem is when you begin the day you will likely find it quite easy to choose which of those tasks to do. However, as the day proceeds and your decision-making abilities decline—something that happens to all of us; it’s called “Decision fatigue” and is a recognised condition that affects us all. This means as you head into the afternoon and still have 20+ tasks left you find increasingly difficult to decide what to do. this slows you down alarmingly and you find yourself reaching the end of the day with fifteen to twenty tasks still to do.
Now, a lot of people will blame their task manager at this point. “My task manager cannot be working because I keep getting to the end of the day with tasks still to do.” Well, no. It’s not the task manager. It’s you. You allowed yourself to start the day with all those tasks. You added the dates. What did you expect to happen?
So, with that little warning out of the way, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Lionel. Lionel asks, hi Carl, I’ve followed you for some time now and have always wanted to ask you how best to prioritise my tasks so I stand a chance of completing them all. This is my biggest challenge, and I just cannot find a way to make my list more manageable.
Hi Lionel, thank you for your question.
The first step here is to do a little bit of analysis. While you may be starting the day with say 20 tasks, how many on average are you getting done? You can go into your completed area of your task manager and collect this data. if you use Todoist, you can go into your productivity areas (The Karma points section) and it will give you the total number of tasks you have completed over the last four weeks. Take those numbers and divide it by 28. That will give you your average number of tasks you complete each day.
This number is your optimum number.
So to give you a benchmark, my average over the last four weeks is 79 tasks which means I average around 11 tasks per day over seven days.
Now I cannot argue with that, that’s the historical data. I might like to think I can complete 20 or more tasks per day, but the evidence tells me I complete around 11 tasks per day.
I should say I do not add things like drink five cups of water or take my vitamins in Todoist. The tasks I have in Todoist are work or home related. Tasks such as write this script, record my YouTube video or write my coaching client feedback. The average duration of a task for me is going to be at least forty minutes.
I also don’t add individual emails or telephone calls. I have these in my notes or email app. Todoist triggers me to go to email or my notes and do the work.
So, the first thing to establish is how many tasks per day are you really doing.
Once you have that number, you can now plan your days. If, for instance, you find your optimum number is fifteen tasks, then at the end of the day when you plan the next, you see you have twenty-five tasks, you know you need to go in and reduce that number down. And that means you need to prioritise your list.
How do you do that?
Well, first go through the list and ask yourself if all these tasks really do need to be done tomorrow. You’ll likely find that 40 to 60% of them don’t. You’ll also discover that a few of them no longer need doing and you can remove these immediately.
The chances are, this first step will get your list down to a more realistic number on it’s own.
However, if you still have five or six tasks over your optimum number, the next step is to look through what you have on your list against your core work. Your core work is the work you are employed to do, not the work you volunteered to do. For instance, salespeople sell which means any activity involving selling is your core work. Writing up activity reports and doing your expenses while may need doing, are not your core work. Your core work takes priority over non-core work.
I know sometimes your accounts department may be hassling you for your expenses, but if you have promised a customer you will send them a pro-forma invoice, the invoice get’s done first.
The next line of prioritisation is your areas of focus. these can be difficult to justify because if they were on the Eisenhower Matrix, they would be in quadrant 2–the important, not urgent quadrant. However, what I’ve noticed is the most productive people I’ve ever met or read about never neglect these and ensure they are prioritised each day.
For example, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Dwayne Johnson will never miss an exercise session. Exercise is a non-negotiable part of their identity and areas of focus. They will say no to other things before even considering missing a session.
Robbin Sharma, will never skip his self-development time and Warren Buffett will never skip his reading time. These areas of focus are non-negotiable.
It’s hard, I know, if you’ve come from a background of dropping everything to please other people to justify these changes in the way you manage your time. But, unless you do make these changes, you cannot expect to ever put an end to the tyranny of task overwhelm. there’s an unlimited number of people hoping you will do things for them. The trouble is, you only have a limited amount of time to do everything you want to or need to do.
Now, let’s look at your calendar.
The calendar is the core to you having the time to complete your work each day. if you only rely on your task manager to tell you what need doing, you will always be overwhelmed. Task managers do not understand time. they can only tell you what you think you have to do. you calendar shows you how much time you actually have after taking into account your sleep, eating and collecting your kids from school.
I’ve always recommended you use your calendar to block out categories of work. For instance, if you group all your communications together—email, messages and phone calls and do them all in a dedicated block of time, you will find you get a lot more done. You will be less distracted and you are focused on one thing—communication. Similarly, for deeper work, work that requires you to focus and concentrate, block a couple of hours out in the morning. I find 9:30 to 11:30am is my best time for deep work. So four days out of seven I have those two hours blocked out for creative work.
You need to find time on your calendar where you don’t have regular meetings and block them out. Be ruthless here and protect that time. It’s surprising how much you can get done in two hours when you know you will not be interrupted.
Remember, if someone asks you if you can meet tomorrow at 10am you can always say: “not 10am but I’m free after 11:30am”. You’ll find 90% of the time they will say great! See you at 11:30. And on those rare occasions where the only time you can meet is 10am, then okay, it’s just one day. it’s not going to break the week. You can reschedule your time block to another time in the week.
The trick with the calendar is to pre-block sufficient time to cover your core work and areas of focus. You can do this when you do your weekly planning sessions. Make sure these critical tasks have enough time allocated for them before you allow the week to run away with you (and it will if you have no plan). That way you know before the week begins if you respect your calendar, you will have sufficient time to get all your critical work done and have sufficient time left over for the things that will inevitably pop up once the week begins.
I’ve often said, if you want to become more productive, the key is to do the backend work. Establish what is important to you bother professionally and personally and ensure you have enough time set aside in your calendar for getting the associated tasks completed when they need to be completed. This means working out what your areas of focus and core work are. then putting the associated events such as as exercise time in your calendar and tasks like sending money to your savings account each month in your task manager.
But above all, work out what your optimum number of tasks per day is. We all have that number. Find it and use it to plan out your day so you are completing everything that needs to be done and eliminating everything else.
I hope that helps, Lionel and thank you for your question.
and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
It’s the official 300th birthday of this podcast! And to celebrate, I’ve been digging into the archive to put together a comprehensive guide to getting better at managing your time and mastering productivity.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 300 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 300 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Over the last six years—yes, that’s how long this podcast has been around—I’ve answered around 300 questions sent in by you, and I’ve noticed there are a few common themes where a lot of people struggle. So, in this special episode, I thought it would be a good way to celebrate to give you some tips and tricks you can use every day to solve many of these common issues.
So, let’s get started.
The first issue many people face is the one of overwhelm. I would guess around 70% of the questions that have come in relate in some way to this problem.
Now, overwhelming lists are created by us. We make these lists. Sure, other people may have given us all these tasks in the first place, but we accepted the tasks and added them to our lists. So, ultimately, the responsibility for these overwhelming lists rests with us. We could have explained we were already “fully committed”, so to speak, but we didn’t. We said yes, and that has led to a situation where we now have too many tasks and too little time to deal with them.
The solution here is to learn to say no, but that is too simple, right? So what else can we do to eliminate this problem?
Well, first is to group all similar tasks together. For example, all your admin tasks can be grouped, equally, and your communications, errands, and deeper-focused work can all be grouped together. You can use tags or labels in your task manager to do this.
Next is to create time blocks on your calendar for these critical sessions of work. I’ve found admin and communications need to be allocated time each day, but project work and other unique types of work can be spread out throughout the week. For example, I have one project work session each week because I don’t have many projects to work on. I do have a lot of processes to get my work done each week, but unique project work is quite low. You may be different and have multiple projects going on at one time. If that’s the case, ask yourself how much time each week you need to stay on top of your project commitments.
Grouping similar tasks together and working on them at specific times each day has a number of advantages. Primary of these is you reduce the number of times you are attention shifting, which is a huge drain on your mental energy. It also means at specific times of the day, you know what you should be doing and that reduces the number of decisions you need to make.
Another advantage is you are working on these every day, and while you may not be able to clear everything each day, you will at least be keeping things under control, and nothing will get missed—which creates issues later.
I would also add that you want to stop trying to complete everything in a day. Most things do not need to be completed in a day. A lot of overwhelm is created by our false belief that everything must be finished today. While some things may need to be done today, a lot of what you have on your plate doesn’t.
Doing a little spread out over a few days will result in less stress and overwhelm and give you better results than rushing to complete something in a day.
However, that means you will need to be doing a weekly planning session to ensure you know when the deadlines are.
And that leads me nicely to the importance of a weekly planning session. Now, if I am being honest, most of your plans for the week will be torpedoed by Wednesday. And that is perfectly okay. Weekly planning is not about creating a plan you rigidly stick to. That would be impossible—there are far too many unknown emergencies and unexpected deadlines.
The purpose of the weekly planning session is to give you a clear view of what needs your attention that week. I see it as setting out a number of objectives that enable me to stay on top of my work and my projects and goals.
In essence, the weekly plan is where you get to decide what needs to be done and allocate sufficient time for those tasks and activities to be done. It goes you a direction and, more importantly, if something new comes in, you can judge whether you have sufficient time or not to complete them.
With that knowledge, you can confidently explain to someone that you will be unable to do something this week but can do it the following week. (Or whenever) This is a polite way of saying “no”.
When you don’t do a weekly planning session, you will be less likely to know what’s on your plate and will accept new work and rushed deadlines, which will result in you not doing your more important work, which will lead to more and more backlog.
I know it’s hard to say no—particularly to your boss or an important client, but if you do not learn to do this, you will never be able to reduce your lists and will always be overwhelmed.
The art of saying no is really all about learning to negotiate. You’re not really saying no you won’t do whatever you are being asked to do; what you are doing is negotiating the deadline. If you have six hours of meetings today and 200 emails to deal with, you are not going to be able to put together a “quick presentation” for your boss. But you may be able to do it tomorrow afternoon when you don’t have any meetings.
And always remember, the worst that can happen is your boss insists you do it today. And given that you have no choice, you can then review your plan for the day and decide what you won’t do in order to accommodate your boss.
Another area where you can quickly become overwhelmed is to create long lists of follow-up and waiting for items. There can be a lot going on here. If you have a long list of tasks you are following up with your team, you have a trust issue, not a follow-up issue. If you ask a team member to do something and you feel the need to add that to a list of follow-up items, that means you do not trust your team member to do their work. Perhaps it’s easier to follow up with them than to address the trust issue, but if you want to reduce your follow-up lists, that is something you will need to do.
But there is something else here. Waiting for and follow-up items are an indication of an incomplete task. For instance, if I ask my colleague Jenny for a copy of a document, the task is to get a copy of the document. Until I have that document, the task is not complete. The task was not to ask Jenny for the document. Until I have the document, I cannot complete the task; therefore after asking Jenny for it, I simply reschedule the task a day or two in the future. I may add a note in the comments section to say I asked Jenny for the document, but until the document is in my hands, the task is not complete.
How many waiting-for and follow-up tasks do you have like that? You could radically reduce that list if you remove them.
The next one causes me a dilemma. As a teacher, I know how important it is to help people develop the habit of collecting everything into their inboxes for processing later. This is a critical first step in developing a good productivity system. Collect everything, then allow yourself a little time at the end of the day to process what you collected. However, the more you collect, the more time you need to spend processing and processing is not doing the work.
Part of the solution here is to use your inbox as a filter. Rather than treating everything in there as something that needs to get into your system, you want to view this as a place where you get to decide whether something needs doing or not. I generally delete 40% of what I collect because, on further reflection, I realise the task does not need doing.
Always remember, a task that does not need doing and is deleted is one less thing for you to do. And, if, at some later date, the task does need doing, there will be a trigger, and you can re-add it. Once you learn to get comfortable with deleting, you soon find very few things come back onto your list of things to do.
The goal is to keep your task list as clean and tight as possible. Only allow things that genuinely need to be done to get into your system. While I encourage you to collect everything, that does not mean everything has to be processed into your system. Look for the things that don’t need to be done and remove those.
Now, back to the planning. I mentioned earlier the weekly planning sessions; well, equally important are the daily planning sessions. Now, don’t worry; the daily planning sessions are easy. All that’s involved is looking at your calendar for tomorrow and making sure what’s scheduled is realistic and you have not forgotten anything important. Your daily planning can be done in less than five minutes at a push, although it’s a good idea to take a look at your inbox to make sure there are no fires burning in there, and if you have time, clear that inbox. However, cleaning the inbox is less important than knowing what you have planned tomorrow and knowing it’s realistic.
And that’s how you avoid overwhelm. Matching categories of work with time blocks on your calendar, being consistent with your weekly planning. Learning to say no politely and making sure when you finish the day, tomorrow is set up and realistic.
Simple things to do; the only question is, will you do it? I can promise you it’s worth it. No more overwhelm and backlogs. Just easily controlled days where whatever is thrown at you, you can handle.
Thank you for following this podcast. It’s been a wonderful journey, and it’s not stopping. You can email me anytime with your questions. Just put Podcast in the title, and I will be sure to answer your questions.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week, it’s all about preventing yourself from becoming overwhelmed and learning to build more realistic days.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
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The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme
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Episode 299 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 299 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
How much “stuff” do you have to do today? Do you think you will complete it all? Does it even have to be all done today? These are just some of the questions you can ask yourself that will help you to see whether you are running close to being overwhelmed or are already overwhelmed.
There are a number of reasons why you may find yourself consistently overwhelmed. One of which is not having any prioritisation techniques in place. If you cannot, or do not, prioritise the stuff coming at you, you will treat everything as being important and given you cannot do everything all at once, your brain will slide into panic mode, leaving you feeling overwhelmed and not knowing where to begin.
Another reason is because you believe you can do a lot more than you realistically can. You cannot do fifty tasks, attend six, forty-five-minute meetings and deal with over 200 emails in a day. Nobody can. Even if you went without sleep, didn’t eat or bathe, you would still not get through all those meetings, tasks and emails.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Paolo. Paolo asks, hi Carl, I’ve learned a lot from you over the last two or three years, and I am very grateful to you. My question is, I still feel overwhelmed by everything I have to do and was wondering if you have any tips or tricks that will help me to stop feeling overwhelmed.
Hi Paolo, thank you for your question.
This is one area I have thought a lot about over the years—why is it, with all the technology we have today, do we feel more overworked and overwhelmed than ever before? I mean, technology is supposed to make our lives easier, not more stressful, yet life isn’t easier or less stressful.
Part of the problem is with the technology. It’s more convenient than ever to collect stuff. If you wanted to learn more about Yoga, you would have had to find a few hours to go to your local library to research the subject. Today, you can read thousands of websites without leaving your sofa.
Email is easier to send than a letter. A text or Team message is easier to compose than making a phone call, and adding another to-do to a task list is much easier than pulling out a notebook, finding our pen and writing it down. When something is easy, we will do more of it than if it were difficult.
The other problem with technology and apps, in particular, is these are designed to keep you hooked. This means we are encouraged to pour more and more stuff into them and spend time organising and moving stuff around so we can tell everyone how wonderful a particular app is. Just look at how Notion hooks people. It has a ton of features; you can create beautifully designed templates and share them with the world, and this encourages you to join more and more groups looking for more and more templates to download and try out.
Just remember, with all this “playing” and organising, you are not doing any work. So, while you have great-looking and fantastically organised tools, you have an ever-growing list of things that are not getting done. When we realise we have to do some of the work we are organising, it’s a huge disappointment and the fun stops.
This is one of the reasons why I often say our apps need to be boring. If they are boring, we spend as little time as possible in them, which is great because if we are not organising and fiddling, we have no choice but to do the work. Which, in turn, reduces the overwhelming lists that are accumulating.
But let’s return to the prioritisation point. The starting point here is to know what your core work is. What are you employed to do, and what does that look like at a task level? It’s no good saying I am employed to sell, or teach or design. That tells you nothing at a task level. What does selling involve? How many calls do you need to make each day? How many appointments per day will enable you to reach your sales target each month?
It’s making those calls and setting up those appointments that are the tasks you need to be doing each day before anything else. That is your priority.
Beyond your work, knowing what your areas of focus are, what they mean to you and what you must do each day or week to keep them in balance is critical if you want to ensure that what you do each day serves you and moves you towards building the life you want to live.
One of the first books on Time Management I read was a book by Hyrum Smith. Hyrum Smith was the creator of the Franklin Planner, and his book, the 10 Natural Laws of Time And Life Management, was the book that launched Franklin Planner. By the way, you can still buy that book on Amazon. (You can also still buy the Franklin Planner too)
Smith spends around a quarter of the book discussing the importance of governing values. These are the values you hold dear, and by observing them, you have a natural prioritisation workflow. For example, if you place your family above your work, if your boss asks you to stay behind to do some extra work when it’s your daughter or son’s birthday, you would not hesitate to say no to your boss.
There is a hierarchy of values, and there is a hierarchy of areas of focus. At different times in your life, your areas of focus hierarchy will change. When you are in school, self-development will be near the top; as you get older, finances and health and fitness will likely rise. Perhaps in your thirties, your career or business will be close to the top. It’s in this area where we are all different.
The key is knowing what your areas of focus are and what’s most important right now and ensuring you are prioritising anything that will help you accomplish what you want to accomplish there.
Now, that’s all the background stuff. Spending a little time there and working out what is most important to you right now will help you make decisions faster.
Now, what about strategy?
The simplest way to get on top of everything is to group similar tasks together and do them in one single session. For example, email and communications. Rather than reacting every time an email comes in and responding to it, move the main to an action folder for later. Then, at the allocated time, open up that folder and begin with the oldest one and work your way down. Do as many as you can in the time you have allowed for this activity. If you consistently do this every day, you will soon find yourself on top of your mail.
Let’s be honest: if you have 400 hundred actionable emails, you won’t be able to do them all in one day. So don’t try. Focus on spending an hour each day on it and watch what happens.
Do the same for admin. Schedule an hour a day for your admin. We all have admin to do. That could be activity reports, expenses, banking or attendance records. Don’t let it become a backlog. Allocate time each day for doing it. This consistency will soon have you back on top of everything.
The great thing about having a consistent time for doing things like communications and admin, it very quickly becomes a habit. I cannot imagine going to dinner without clearing my actionable email. Similarly, once dinner is over, I love sitting down with a cup of tea and doing my admin. Sure, admin is boring, but a great cup of tea and a bit of music can do wonders for monotonous tasks like admin.
Now for more meaningful work—work that requires an hour or more; if you know this to be the case, you will need to find the time for it. There’s no point in hoping you will find the time; you won’t. Time does not like a vacuum, so you will always be doing something. Sleeping, watching TV, reading, playing computer games or whatever. So the key is to be intentional with your time.
Sure, rest time should be included. If you feel tired, make the decision to stop and take a break. Equally, if you know you have an important piece of work to do, and it will take you longer than an hour or so, schedule the time. Be intentional. It won’t happen by accident.
A strategy I use is to block out two hours each day on my calendar for focused work. Every morning between 9:30 and 11:30 am, I do something meaningful. That could be writing, working on a project or doing client work. My calendar tells me what type of work I will be doing, and my task manager gives me a list of tasks associated with that activity. It’s simple; it allows me to get focused work done each day.
It’s having this structure and consistency built into your days that ensure you get your work done. You don’t have to do everything in one day; you just need to know what you will do in your two hours. I knew before I began today I would be writing this script today in my two hours. I know tomorrow I will be finishing off this week’s newsletter and sending it out. If you work a typical eight-hour day, you still have four hours free for other things (allowing for your one hour for communications and an hour for admin). That’s more than enough for emergencies, sudden requests from clients and customers and other unknowns.
I hope that helps, Paolo and thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
How do you find a solution to your time management and productivity problems if you have no time to stop and find those solutions? That’s what we are exploring this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme
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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script | Episode 298
Hello, and welcome to episode 297 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
Have you ever stopped and given some thought to why you are struggling with managing time and productivity? I mean, asked yourself why you have over a thousand emails in your inbox, a desktop full of files, images and PDFs, and are unable to find anything you need to get your work done.
One of the first steps to becoming better organised, getting in control of your time and completing your work on time is to establish what the problem is. Knowing that will help you to find the solution to getting everything back in control.
Too often, people look for a solution to a problem that has not been fully explored. Or worse, shut down the possibility of a solution because they feel their situation is unique. It isn’t. Millions of people have been in the same position and have found a working solution. It may mean having to make some difficult decisions and perhaps upset a few people who have been exploiting your good nature, but I can promise you there is a solution.
This is what this week’s question is all about. Finding solutions to the issues that are causing you to lose control of your time and feel out of control.
So, let me take this opportunity to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Julie. Julie asks, hi Carl, I am struggling to keep my head above water with my work. I was recently promoted to managing a team of eight people, and now I am getting hundreds of emails, need to attend double the number of meetings I used to attend and have to work an extra three or four hours a day just to stay on top. Is there any advice you could give me?
Hi Julie, thank you for your question.
Starting a new position is always challenging. Your core work changes, and that means the routines and processes you had in place before your promotion will need to change. It can be disorientating and, worse, very time-consuming as you adapt and develop new routines and processes. You will need to give it a little time to get these in place.
However, there are a few other factors to take into consideration, and that is things like a sudden doubling in the number of meetings you need to attend. Let’s say you had five one-hour meetings a week before your promotion, and now you have ten hours. This means you have effectively lost five hours of your work week or one hour a day. If you were busy before, you are now busy and having to cram everything in with five hours a week less.
The problem with meetings is more often than not; you will come away from each one with more tasks to do. So, five hours lost and more tasks to do. Not a great situation to find yourself in.
A question I would ask is, do you really need to attend all those meetings? You have a team of eight people. Would it be possible to delegate attendance at some of these meetings to your team? They can take notes and fill you in if there is anything important for you to know.
There must be hundreds of meetings going on at Microsoft every day, but I am sure Satya Nadella does not attend all of them. He has to be very selective about which meetings he attends.
Part of moving into a leadership role is learning to delegate, and to do that, you need to learn to trust your team.
The great thing about delegation is you learn very quickly the strengths and weaknesses of your team members. This will help you become a better leader. And you can decide which of your team needs extra training.
Now, that’s the leadership side of things. What about your personal work? Well, here, as I alluded to at the start you need to stop and take a step back and see where you are struggling. Without that, you will be running around in circles, not being able to find a solution.
One area I find people struggle with today is the volume of messages coming at them. We’re receiving fewer phone calls—which is a good thing—but a lot more instant messages and messages. However, the good news here is this is something we can control.
For example, a lot of issues with messages is we have too many channels. If you’re using WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, instant messages and many more, the problem has a simple solution. Reduce the number of channels you are available on.
I’m sure you’ve heard of Dolly Parton, the legendary country and western singer; she has a fantastic solution to too many messages. She only communicates via fax. Now, you could laugh at that, but in reality, it’s genius. How many companies and people want to reach out to Dolly? Thousands. For anyone to reach out to her, they would genuinely want to. The inconvenience they would have to go through to communicate with her is tremendous. This means the only messages she gets are genuine ones. No spam, no CC’d emails, nothing. Just genuine messages.
Now, I am not suggesting you need to move to communicating via fax, but the principle is fantastic. Force people to communicate with you on your terms.
You see, the reason why we are inundated with messages today is because of the ease it is to send a message. With it being so easy, people don’t think if what they are sending is helpful or a distraction. Most CC’d messages, for instance, are not helpful. I work with many top executives, and to them, all these CC’d messages are not only a distraction, they are annoying, which knocks off their focus and places them in a terrible mood.
When it’s a little more difficult to contact you, if someone really does need to contact you, they will find a way.
I heard today that Sadique Khan, the Mayor of London, refused to join WhatsApp during the COVID pandemic so central government ministers could join him in group chats. The ministers in the central government had to send him emails instead.
Theoretically, the Mayor of London is junior to the Health Minister in Westminster, yet he had no problem saying no to joining WhatsApp. And in the end, he got a lot less rubbish, and what he did receive was meaningful and helpful. (It also prevented him from being criticised in the UK Government’s COVID enquiry.)
Always remember that you chose to join these messaging services, so it’s nobody else’s fault if you become inundated with messages. This is also the same with email. If you freely give out your name card and give your email address to any company that asks for it, then you need to find a way to deal with the consequences of those choices.
It may be your company’s policy to communicate through Teams or Slack, and if that is the case, then you will need to work with it. One thing I would suggest is to turn on your do not disturb at some times throughout the day. If you can develop the habit of doing some undisturbed focus work, say between 9:30 and 11:30 am, turn on Do Not Disturb. If anyone complains, explain that is the time you do your work. You will only need to explain that once. Clients, bosses and colleagues quickly learn your habits and respect them.
If you don’t believe me, try it for a week. If you do get called in by your boss, talk to them. Explain the situation. Bosses are not evil, you know? They will probably adopt your practice and give you a bonus for having such a brilliant idea.
I recently watched a talk by Jim Donovan, vice chairman of global client coverage at Goldman Sachs, who was talking about “Optimal Client Service”. Of the points he spoke about, all of them made sense until he began talking about always being available for your clients. He argued that you should always be instantly available for your clients at any time of the day. For me, this is a big no-no.
You see, the problem with this is not the idea. It’s a good idea if you are in client services. The problem is this approach is not sustainable 100% of the time.
While many flights do have WIFI these days, it’s not reliable, and I know from experience when flying between Asia and Europe, I am not going to be able to respond to messages or emails for the 15-hour flight. Equally, you should never be expected to be instantly available for your clients when not working, or are sick or even when visiting the bathroom. There needs to be some barriers.
If something is not 100% sustainable, then you are setting too high an expectation and breaking that expectation just once will damage both your and your company’s reputation. It’s far better to be upfront with your clients and explain the best way to contact you and a reasonable time in which to respond.
Sure, it’s hard to do that when you are trying to win the client over, but your future self will thank you for doing that hard thing now.
The final piece of advice is to write out what your priorities are each week. This does not need to take up hours and hours of your time, twenty minutes max. But when you move towards a leadership role, you do not have time for dealing with trivial things. You need to keep your eye on the majors. Again, you will need to trust your team. Give them space to do their work and delegate so you can remain focused on the priorities.
Where do you find your priorities? What are your team’s objectives? Are you meeting them? What are your responsibilities? Are you adhering to your responsibilities? Staying focused on these each week will reduce the work you have to do and allow you to spread the load a little with your team.
I hope that has helped, Julie. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
How do you use your calendar? Is it just a place for your appointments or a powerful way to manage your daily activities?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 297 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 297 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.
For centuries, the great and the good (and not so good) have all used a simple time management system. It’s a system that has largely been unaffected by digital technology and one that has enabled such great things as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling painting, Charles Darwin’s Origins of Species, and the Apollo Space program’s moon landing. Without this method and tool, none of these amazing iconic events would have happened.
What system am I talking about? The calendar. Or rather your diary.
I was reminded of this recently while helping a high school student prepare for a particularly intensive period of exams and assignments. We began talking about where he was keeping his course notes and how he was managing his time. We considered using a task manager, which he rejected as being just another thing to manage (good point, I thought), and it was when we began talking about using his calendar that I could see instantly that here was the key to helping him through this busy time.
So, just how can a calendar help you with your time management and productivity, and what should you be putting on there? Well, that’s for this week’s question to ask. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks; hi Carl, I’ve heard you talk a lot about your calendar and was wondering if you have any advice on using it better. At the moment, I only use my calendar for my meetings and public holidays.
Hi Alan, Thank you for your question.
I consider myself very lucky today because my introduction to the world of time management systems was a simple A4 desk diary. When opened, that diary showed my full week, and I had space at the bottom of each day for my tasks.
At a glance, I could instantly see how busy I was on a given day, and it was that diary and then a Franklin Planner, from around 1993, that managed my life until 2009, when I went all in digitally.
This meant that my core beliefs about how I managed my time and did my work were centred around my calendar and what I had time for.
Now, the way I use my calendar is for three critical things.
The first, unsurprisingly, is for my appointments. All my appointments, whether manually added by myself or ones that come from my coaching programme’s scheduling service, are automatically added to my calendar.
Now, a quick word about my scheduling service. I have complete control over what is scheduled here. I set the times I am available, and only people who have the link can schedule appointments. This has been a big time saver for me because most of my clients are based in the US or Europe. That means there is a significant time difference between where I am and where they are.
Instead of going back and forth negotiating a suitable time, my clients can pick and choose based on what’s convenient for them without having to waste time sending countless emails. Once they have selected a time, I get a notification, and the time is blocked out in my calendar.
However, the advantage of using a scheduling service is you give yourself greater control over your day. For example, if you want to protect your mornings for focused work, you can set your available times for between 1 pm and 4 pm each day. Doing that would mean over a five-day period, you would be available for fifteen hours. For most of you, I am sure that would be enough time for all your meetings and appointments.
The great thing about scheduling services is your boss, clients, and colleagues enjoy the flexibility and not only do you save time for yourself, but you also save time for everyone else. All they need do is go to your scheduling service, select a time that suits them, and the appointment will then be pushed to your calendar. Job done with no input from you at all.
The two services I know are Acuity, the one I use because it’s built into my website and Calendly. I believe Calendly has a free option if you want to test it out first.
The second item that goes onto my calendar is date-specific events. These are things like bills to pay, public holidays or if my wife is going to be away.
Now, a lot of my bill payments are set up as automatic payments, but I still add the payment date to my calendar because I want to make sure there are sufficient funds in my account to cover the payment.
If you are viewing your calendar as a week to view rather than a month or day to view, when you do your weekly plan, you will instantly see anything that is date-specific that you need to be aware of and can plan accordingly.
Another type of date-specific event you can put here is your project deadlines or if you need to call someone on a given day, and they can be called at any time. (If you need to call them at a specific time, you add the call to that time slot on the appropriate day.)
Another type of date-specific information you can put here would be travel notices. For example, if your town or city or a city you will be visiting that day has a major road closure, you need to be aware of. For example, a couple of weeks ago, the town we live in had the main coastal road closed for five hours while they ran the annual marathon. While I do not often use that road, it is something useful to know in case we decided to go out for lunch or do an errand.
Rail strikes in the UK are usually pre-notified. If you use the rail service and you know there will be a strike coming up, you can add that to your calendar.
All these date-specific events and information should be placed at the top of your calendar as all-day events. That way, they don’t interfere with your timed schedule but act as notices you need to know about.
And finally, your time blocks for focused work. If you have followed this podcast for a while, you will have heard me talking about core work—the work you are employed to do. To get this work done on time every time, you need to make sure you have enough time blocked out for doing it. If, for example, you block your mornings for doing focused work, that would give you a further fifteen hours a week for undisturbed, focused work. Imagine that. Knowing, confidently, you have fifteen hours each week to get on—undisturbed—with work that must be done each week. How productive would you be in that situation?
I don’t block every morning for focused work, though. Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays are blocked. I keep Thursdays open for calls (my clients on the West Coast of North America are currently sixteen hours behind me). I work Saturdays as well, and I keep Saturdays open, so I have the flexibility to catch up with anything I have not had time to do or am a little behind.
Now, if you pause a moment and look at what you could have here. Imagine you work a regular forty-hour week. You have fifteen hours available for meetings and collaboration and fifteen hours for focused work, which leaves you with ten hours for flexible work—the unexpected and urgent. Would that be enough for you?
Now, none of this should ever be set in concrete. There needs to be some flexibility. If you consistently do a daily planning session, then you can move things around to better suit the week you are in and what needs to be done that week.
For example, once a month, I will have one or two days blocked out completely for project days. This gives me the time I need to dedicate a full day to a bigger project.
There is one more item I would suggest you block out. That is an hour a day for dealing with your communications. Let’s be honest; we all get too many emails and messages that need to be dealt with. If you do not set aside time for dealing with them, when will you do it? You cannot ignore most of these messages and emails (although I am sure you wish you could do so sometimes).
If you know you have an hour dedicated to responding to your email each day, you will find you are less reactive about it and much more proactive. You don’t panic when a message or email comes in because you know you have an hour set aside later in the day to focus on your responses.
There are a lot of ways to get the most out of your calendar, and I would strongly advise you to find ways you can use it to bring a sense of calm and focus to your day. There are little things you can do. For example, I only allow people to schedule either thirty or fifty-minute appointments. That then gives me time to prepare for the next call if I have back-to-back meetings.
You are now likely wondering about where the task manager fits into this system. Well, like the calendar, the to-do list has been around for a long time. However, the to-do list was and should still be considered a subsidiary of the calendar. If something must be done on a given day, it goes into the calendar; if it can be done at any time, it goes into your task manager.
With the Time Sector System, you group your tasks by when you would like to get them done. You can date these tasks for specific days, and if you see you have several calls or follow-ups to do, you can block out an hour or so for follow-ups or communications to take care of these. Your time sectors are holding pens that help you to structure your day. You structure your day in your calendar, and your task manager acts as a feeder for all the little things you need to do in the time you have available.
For example, in my task manager today, I have three writing tasks, which I have done in the three hours I set aside for writing today. I also have a number of admin tasks to complete, which I will do in the admin hour I have scheduled later today. My calendar tells me what I should type of work I should be doing, and my task manager takes care of the tasks I should perform at that time.
When you use your calendar as your primary productivity tool and your task manager as the feeder, you quickly see what you have time for each day and can then reschedule or renegotiate commitments to ensure you are not overstretching yourself.
So there you go, Alan. I hope that has helped, and thank you for your question.
Thank you to you, too, for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.
Have you ever wondered what one thing you could change that would have a significant impact on your productivity and time management? In this episode, I’m going to share with you that one thing.
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Hello, and welcome to episode 296 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
I’ve spent a lot of time reading, watching and studying time management and productivity strategies and practices. And while a lot of what I’ve read rarely works in the real world, there are many that do and most of these are time tested and have been around for a long time.
For example, use a calendar. People have carried around calendars for decades—well before the digital age. It’s logical when you think about it. Have a single source that tells you where you need to be and when and make sure you carry that with you everywhere you go.
Of course, being humans and having a natural instinct to over-complicate things, digital calendars are now trying to do everything for us and as a result they have become less helpful. Cramming your day full of appointments and tasks you don’t really need to do, has made the calendar a place few people enjoy going to anymore. What’s worse is delegating responsibility for your time to other people by allowing them to schedule appointments for you. Gee why did it go so wrong?
There is one time management and productivity practice that technology has so far been unable to influence. It’s the one skill that the most productive people have mastered above everything else and if you are not skilled and confident enough to do it, you will never be productive and worse, ever be successful in your work.
However, before we get to that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, Hi Carl, I’ve always wanted to ask you what you consider to be the critical skill needed to be good at managing time and being productive?
Hi Greg, thank you for your question.
That’s something I’ve spent years trying to figure out, and there is one skill I have noticed in all incredibly productive people that very few people seem to possess.
That’s the ability to make decisions quickly.
You see, if you want to be more productive and less overwhelmed by what you have to do, quickly (and confidently) deciding what to work on right now is the only thing you can do.
Naturally, executing on that decision is the next important thing, but you first need to make a decision about what you will do right now. Writing this script at this moment was a decision I made twenty minutes ago, and writing it was the execution of that decision.
There are a multiple other things I could be doing right now—walking my dog, going to the gym, taking a nap, responding to my email etc. But I made the decision to sit down and write this script. It’s got to be done sometime, right? Why not now? (Although asking for an excuse why you should not be doing something is probably the wrong question to ask)
The time it took me to make that decision and begin writing was perhaps three seconds. And that is how productive people become productive. They make a decision and execute immediately.
What will hold you back and prevent you from being productive is being unable to make a decision about what to do now.
So, if you asked what skill you could develop that would radically improve your time management and productivity skills, I would say become better at making decisions.
But it is a bit more than that. You see, making decisions is something you will already be able to do. Even the most indecisive people make decisions. What time you rolled out of bed this morning was a decision, what you ate for breakfast was a decision. We are making decisions all the time.
However, the skill you need to develop is the skill of confidently making decisions. Writing this script was a confident decision. I have around twenty actionable emails sitting in my Action This Day folder, I have four unread messages in my messaging app and fifteen tasks to do in my task manager. But I am writing this right now. That’s because I am confident that writing this is the best use of my time, currently.
Everything else I have to do today can wait. Most of it will get done, some of it won’t and I am comfortable with that.
That’s the state you want to be training yourself to be in. And I use the work “training” intentionally.
Your brain has a natural tendency to overthink things. It has no sense of past, present or future. So as far as your brain is concerned, everything must be done right now. That’s why it’s important to get everything on your mind out of your mind and into an external place. A task manager or notes app or a piece of paper. It’s there where you can make the right choices about what to work on next.
But how do you make the right choices?
That begins with your Areas of Focus and core work. Knowing what these mean to you is a brilliant way to pre-decide what to work on next.
Your areas of focus shows you your priorities based on the eight areas of life we all have in common. Things like your finances, family and relationships, career and purpose. When you know what these areas mean to you, decisions based on what to do next become obvious.
For instance, if a client wants to have a dinner meeting with you on Wednesday and that’s your wedding anniversary and you’ve promised to take your partner out for dinner what do you do? If you prioritise your career above your family and relationships, then you will have dinner with your client. You may not want to admit that, but if you make that choice, that’s effectively what has happened. Your career is more important than your family and relationships.
However, if your family and relationships are more important than your career, you ask your client if you can have dinner on an alternative night, or if they are only in town for one day, perhaps you can have lunch or a coffee in the afternoon.
Knowing your core work works in the same way. Your core work is the work you are employed to do. That does not mean extra meetings, chatting with your colleague about next week’s off site event or reorganising your documents and emails.
Core work requires time and that’s why it’s important that before the week begins you have the time blocked out for doing your core work. No excuses. get that time protected. Once it’s protected, you now have less decisions to make. If you should be finishing off a client proposal and you are asked to join meeting about next quarter’s targets, you don’t go to the meeting, you write the client proposal. The proposal writing is your core work, the meeting is not. You can always ask a colleague to give you a copy of their notes.
If you observe the most productive people, you will notice they know what is important and are obsessively focused on getting the important stuff done. They don’t become distracted by trivialities such as email and Teams or Slack messages when they are working on their important tasks for that day.
Those decisions are made before the day begins. Which is why planning the day becomes a critical part of your end of day routine. Plan the day before you finish the previous day and you will sleep better (always good for being productive) will be a lot less stressed and much more focused.
So, the way to become better at managing your time and being more productive is to know what is important and what is not. What can wait and what needs dealing with immediately. And the easiest way to determine that is to know what your areas of focus and core work are.
That means you do need to allow some time to work on your areas of focus and core work. This is what I call the backend work. Spend a couple of weekends determining these areas of your life and the time investment you make will reward you massively later.
The issue I find is the people who most need to do this, are the ones who make the excuse they are too busy to do it. It seems like a luxury they cannot afford to do because they have too much to do already.
But why do you have too much to do? That’s because you don’t know what is important and what is not which means everything’s important. and when everything’s important, nothing is. And now you’re stuck in a vicious cycle that can only be broken if you stop, step back and work on your areas of focus and core work.
Now, the good news is that we have entered the annual planning season. The three months before the start of a new year. If you want to go into 2024 with a focus, a lot less stress and a determination to move your goals and projects forward, use the remaining days of 2023 to build out your areas of focus and core work.
Work out what tasks you need to do to keep these areas in balance, get them into your task manager and set them to repeat as often as they need to be repeated. This will give you consistency and when you get consistent with something you can refine and develop processes for getting this work done without much effort at all.
Ultimately, it will come down to how effective your processes are. With a process you can improve and refine them so you become faster at doing them. I have a process for doing my daily admin. Six years ago when I began doing my daily admin, it took me around an hour and half to do the tasks. Today, I can do the same tasks in the same order in less than twenty minutes. That has only happened because I have consistently done the work and refined the process for doing the work.
So there you go, Greg. Those are the critical skills. The most important one of all, though is making decisions quickly and confidently and anyone can learn to do that. All it takes is a little bit of practice.
I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, what’s holding you back from becoming better at managing your time and ultimately being more productive?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Hello, and welcome to episode 295 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
A lot of getting better with your time management and being more productive is finding ways to do your work more effectively and quicker. I was reminded of that last weekend when the McLaren Formula One team broke the world record for a pit stop. They managed to change four tired in 1.8 seconds. Think about that for a moment. In the time it takes you to pick up your coffee cup, take a sip and put it back on the table, the McLaren pitstop crew will have taken four tires off and put four new ones on.
How did they do that? Well, it’s more than just practising. Of course, practising will play a large part in it, but it will start with someone breaking down the process and looking for better and faster ways to do each part.
Now, how much of the work you do is similar in nature? My guess is it will be 80 to 90%. You may not think so, but if you are a salesperson, there is a process to selling. If you are a doctor, there is a process for diagnosing a patient, and if you are a designer, there will be a process you follow to create your designs.
Now, each customer, patient and design will be different, but how you begin and do your work will be the same steps.
It’s here where you will discover ways to do your work more efficiently, and that leads to you having more time for other things and giving you a wealth of information you can use to make your processes better and faster. That’s how McLaren broke the world pitstop record, and it’s how you can save yourself a lot more time.
Now, before I get into the details, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ryan. Ryan asks, hi Carl, I’ve been following you for a long time now, and I’ve always wanted to ask you, how do you become more efficient at getting your work done?
Hi Ryan, Thank you for your question.
One of the things I’ve always found fascinating is observing how skilled, productive people get their work done. That could be an author, a bricklayer or a Formula One Mechanic. There’s an art to doing our work; it’s how we become better and how we master the skills we have.
I feel so fortunate that I have been able to work for large and small companies. To watch brilliant people do their work. I remember working in a very fancy restaurant many years ago as the bar manager, and each day, I got to see one of the UK’s top chefs do his work. The food he created was exquisite, and how he created it was simply brilliant.
I got to see how he chose ingredients, how he experimented with ideas and how he designed the food he served to customers. It was an obsessive attention to detail, breaking down the ingredients, creating the recipes and workflows to cooking the food and ensuring the standards were always maintained.
Three or four times a year, he would change the menus, and the process (there’s that word again) of changing the menus was followed each time. He learned the process from his mentor, and he passed it on to the chefs he was mentoring.
One thing I noticed was none of them ever considered it as a project. It was simply a process. When the season began to change, there was a week when the kitchen team disappeared in the afternoons and tested, experimented and appeared to have a lot of fun. It was hard work; these chefs were starting early and finishing late, but at the end of the week, there was a finished new menu.
Today, I will consume as many videos and articles as I can find on how successful people do their work. These people are successful because of what they do, and I want to know how they do it. How did they learn their skills, and more importantly, what do they do each day to master their skills?
So, Ryan, a lot of my ideas have come from other people.
One thing that stands out about highly efficient people is they are incredibly strict about how they use their time. They say “no” far more than “yes”, and rather than accept a meeting request, will challenge the host to justify their presence (even if it’s their boss) Most people will not do that. They are afraid to challenge and question. There seems to be a preference to complain rather than take action.
This is about knowing the value of your time. This was probably the hardest thing to learn. Once you know the value of your time and that one day, you will no longer have any time left, you start to realise all those yeses need to mean something important.
The most productive people I have learned about, both historical and contemporary, have something in common. They value their solitude. They will lock themselves away for several hours a day to do their work without distractions. I found it interesting that Jeffrey Archer, the author, will not have a phone or computer in his writing room. He writes by hand. Similarly, John Grisham’s writing room has no internet or telephone. The thinking is writing time is sacred, and nothing should be allowed to interrupt that.
How could you better protect your time? You don’t have to be extreme. You only need to find an hour or two each day. Could you do that?
However, one other way I can improve the way I work is not to be afraid to experiment. It’s through experimentation that I learn what works and what does not.
My email process was developed ten years ago. I was getting thirty to fifty emails a day, and it was becoming overwhelming. I needed a better way to manage it all. So, I did some research, tested a few different approaches, and eventually, Inbox Zero 2.0 was born. It’s simple, fast and has meant email is never overwhelming. Today, I get around 120 to 150 emails a day, and it’s never a problem.
But that did not happen overnight. It took many months of practice, evolution and adjustments. It also meant I had to stick to a single email app. The only way this would work is the tools I used needed to be consistent.
Think about it for a moment: would McLaren have been able to break the world record for pitstops if they were constantly changing the equipment? No chance. The wheel gun operator knows their wheel gun intimately. They’ve used it thousands of times, and they have a feel for it. They know how to micro-adjust it so it hits the mark perfectly.
This is the same thing with your tools. You need to get a “feel” for them. To understand them inside out so when things go wrong, and they will go wrong, you can fix the problem in minutes instead of wasting a whole day searching around on YouTube or Google trying to figure out how to fix the problem.
Ultimately, it all comes back to processes. As I mentioned earlier, the vast majority of what you day at work will be a process, not a project. The key is to find that process, externalise it by writing out the steps and then looking at each one to see where you can do it better.
One key part of this is timing. For me, I am at my most creative in the mornings. I’ve tried doing creative work in the afternoons and struggled. I also find I am creative in the evenings too. Armed with this information, has meant I can structure my day to optimise my effectiveness.
It turns out most people are at their most creative in the mornings; it’s when your brain is at its freshest. So, spending all morning dealing with email and sitting in meetings is such a waste of your creative energy. Far better to push meetings and email writing until the afternoons when that little extra stimulation from other people can help you push through the afternoon slump.
And then there are the three unsung heroes of productivity—sleep, diet and movement. If you think you are going to be productive on two and a half hours of sleep, you’re fooling yourself. You will not be. Likewise, if your lunches are a feat of carbohydrates, you’ve just destroyed your afternoon. You’ll spend all afternoon struggling to keep your eyes open. And if you rarely move from your seat, all your blood will drain to your feet, and you’ll run out of creative energy. (Not really, but it will feel like that).
You need enough sleep, a low-carbohydrate diet and movement. Even walking up the stairs once or twice between sessions of work will do wonders for your productivity. You don’t need to go to the gym or out for a run. You just need to move.
And that’s really about it, Ryan. A willingness to experiment, defaulting to finding the process rather than thinking everything is a project. Figuring out where I can make those processes more efficient and making sure I know the tools I use inside out.
Everything productive people do is doable by you. It’s not easy, but it’s simple. Avoiding distractions, protecting your time and getting very good at saying “no”.
Plus, understanding your own biorhythms. When are you at your most productive, and when not? Then, structure your day around your most focused times. Make it easy for yourself rather than fighting between wanting to check Instagram and doing the focused work you know you need to do.
And trust me, if you take a stand on your time and challenge people to justify “stealing” your time, they will fall into line—even your boss!
I hope that helps, Ryan and thank you for your question.
Thank you to you, too, for listening; it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week’s question is all about managing the unknown “urgencies” that will come up each day.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Hello, and welcome to episode 294 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
How often are your planned days destroyed by something you never even considered when you began your day? It’s likely to be frequent. That’s just the nature of life. It’s always been that way, and it always will be that way. It’s something we need to work with, though, and to develop ways to overcome the worst effects of these unknowns.
That’s one of the reasons why the Time Sector System can be so powerful. If you set things up—knowing what your areas of focus and core work are, then you have a built-in prioritisation method that will help you to sort the important urgencies from the less important ones.
I have to be honest. I have never worked in a job where everything was predictable. There has never been a day where nothing unexpected happened. Take today as an example. When I began the day, I had four hours of meetings booked in the morning and three hours in the evening. By the time I had completed my morning routines, half of those morning meetings had been cancelled.
So, with all that explained, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alex. Alex asks, Hi Carl, I like the idea of the Time Sector System, but the bit I am not sure about is how you deal with all the unknown tasks that need to be done in a given week. What do you do with those tasks?
Hi Alex, thank you for your question.
This has always been an issue for people since the first humans evolved many hundreds of thousands of years ago. After a night’s rest, we would wake up with the plan to find food. If, during the night, you were surrounded by some hungry predators, your focus at that moment was no longer on finding food but on finding safety. Your survival instincts kicked in and overrode your hunger instincts.
Today, while things are no longer as black and white, we are still facing similar dilemmas. Now, instead of a choice between food and safety, we are faced with a choice between writing the report that needs to be finished tomorrow or dealing with our boss’s demand for an update on a project you are working on.
Or, as in the case of a client of mine attending a meeting or dealing with a flat tire she just discovered.
It’s very rare for your day to go according to plan, yet I would still recommend you make a plan.
Making a plan is less about what you intend to do and more about setting the direction for the day. For example, one of my tasks today is to write this podcast script. It would be fantastic if I were able to finish it in a single day, but the chances of that happening are slim. However, if I can make a start on it and get, say, 30 or 40% of it written before the day’s end, that would be good enough. I would be happy with the outcome.
The Time Sector system is about setting yourself realistic expectations about what can be accomplished in the week. It’s about identifying what is really important and being able to recognise when something that appears important is not really important at all. Once you know what is important, you very quickly learn what is not and can either ignore it or delegate it.
Let’s imagine you have decided that anything your boss asks you to do on top of the work you are employed to do is urgent and important; then what you have decided is to allow yourself to be overwhelmed and stressed. There’s a limit to what you can do each day and week. If you prioritise the unknown over the known, you’ve just set yourself up for a very stressful life.
The Time Sector System teaches you to quickly identify what is important so that when something does come across your desk (or through Teams or email), you can identify whether it needs your attention right now or can wait until another day.
I saw that someone had written on a discussion board that the Time Sector System doesn’t work because it does not allow for sudden tasks coming in. That’s not an accurate assessment of what the Time Sector System is. What is an accurate description is you prioritise the important so that when something new does come in, you can make a qualified decision based on what you have identified as being important that week.
Right now, my accountant is drawing up my annual accounts. Each day, she sends me requests for further information, which I need to action that same day. I have no idea what she will ask me for; all I know is there will be something requested. There’s no point in me scheduling time each day for this, as sometimes it may only require ten minutes; other times, it could require an hour to find the information. However, when a request comes in, I measure its importance against what else I have planned for the day and can decide whether I need to reschedule something or work a little longer that day.
The important thing is I know what I want to and need to do that day before I begin the day. If I have sudden urgent requests to deal with, then great, I can decide that is where I will apply my time that day.
Whether you use the Time Sector System or not, you will still need to deal with a lot of unknowns. These are a part of life and always will be. Having a method or a strategy for handling these is a critical step to becoming more productive.
It’s also important to ensure you have a solid collecting system. Many things will come at you today while you are working on something important or are with a customer. You are not going to be able to stop and deal with that immediately, so you should be collecting it somewhere where you can assess its importance when you finish what you are doing.
However, before you can accurately assess what is important, you need to know what important looks like. This is why there are two critical preliminary parts to creating a solid productivity system. That is to identify and define what your areas of focus are—while we all share the same eight areas, how we define these will be different for all of us. Equally, the action steps we need to take to keep these in balance will also be different. The second part is to define what your core work is—the work you are employed to do.
If you want to learn how to define and develop your areas of focus, you can download the FREE Areas Of Focus Workbook from my website’s downloads page. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes
If you skip working on these two parts, everything that comes at you will be considered important. You have no frame of reference to determine what is critical and what is not. This means a demand from a boss or client will be very loud, and you’ll panic and rush to get whatever you are being asked to do done instead of pausing and assessing whether it is important or not.
Now, if you have decided dealing with any request from your boss or customers is part of your core work, then fine. You made that decision, and when a demand comes in, you deal with it. However, for the most part, requests from customers and bosses are not always going to be “urgent”; they can wait until you have finished whatever it is you are doing or what is the most important thing that needs doing right now.
Another reason why you should be pausing and not rushing to deal with demands as they come in is you miss the opportunity to chunk similar tasks together. Chunking (or grouping) similar tasks is one of the most effective and efficient ways to deal with your work. It prevents context switching—which is very draining on your mental energy—and because you are working on similar tasks at the same time, you will be more focused.
A good example of this is managing messages. It’s accepted that going in and out of your email and Teams inbox all day is not a very effective strategy if you want to get important work done. It’s why one of the best new features in the last ten years or so has been the ability to turn on Do Not Disturb so you can focus on the work in front of you instead of being inundated with notifications and distracted.
How often do you use this feature?
Managing email and messages should be broken down into two parts. The processing—where you decide what something is and what needs to be done with it—and the doing, where you deal with all your actionable messages.
Processing can be done anytime, although I recommend you do this in between sessions of work. For example, when in a meeting, you turn on Do Not Disturb so you can focus on the meeting. Once the meeting ends, you can open up your mail and messages and move anything actionable into an Action this Day folder.
Then, later in the day—as late in the day as you feel comfortable with, you set aside time to focus on dealing with those messages. I’ve found that those who do this are more focused and less stressed. Those that don’t are not.
At it’s very basic, Alex; you collect throughout the day, then before you finish, you go through what you collected and decide what needs to be done and when you will do it. If it needs to be done this week, then you can decide when you will do it based on the other work you have and what your calendar tells you about how much time you have available. If you are squeezed and have little time, you always have the option to “negotiate” with the other person about when you will do it—and that means your bosses and clients. You’ll be surprised how accommodating people are—after all, they are likely to be just as busy as you.
I hope that has helped, Alex. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all. Very, very productive week.
This week, I’m answering a question about the fundamentals and why it’s important to master the basics before worrying about everything else.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Hello, and welcome to episode 293 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Last week, in my newsletter, I wrote about the lessons I learned from rushing about looking for quick fixes and hacks to improve my productivity. In many ways, I was lucky I was doing this in the 1990s before the plethora of digital tools were available, yet the mistakes I made back then are the same mistakes I see so many people making today.
There’s a lot to say about the advantages of hindsight and experience. It does help you to avoid mistakes made in the past and gives you a level of knowledge that helps you to assess new ideas through a framework of experience. What works and what does not work.
For example, I’ve learned the more complexity and levels a task management system has the less likely you will use it effectively in the future. It’s exciting a fun to play with in the beginning, but once it comes face to face with a busy day or week, it breaks down, you stop using it and you then lose trust in it.
Anyway, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jono. Jono asks, hi Carl, I see you often talk about keeping things simple, and I was wondering what you consider to be a simple system. I try to keep mine simple, but it is so hard to do so with so many new tools coming out each month. A little help here would be appreciated.
Hi Jono, thank you for your question.
To answer your question for me a simple system is one that works in the background so you can focus on your work without feeling overwhelmed, stressed out or swamped. The trouble is to get to that level, you will need to go through a few gates and that means initially things will not feel simple.
Take the first stage of getting something into your system, the collecting stage. If you’ve never used a task manager before, one of the most difficult habits to build is to collect everything that comes across your desk into an inbox.
If you’ve spent a large part of your life trying to remember to do something and never writing it down, doing the opposite will feel unnatural. I remember when I turned to a completely digital system and pulling out my phone every time I remembered to do something felt very unnatural. Having a laptop or later an iPad in a meeting felt uncomfortable.
Today, almost everyone is in a meeting with a laptop or iPad, but twelve years ago, it was not common at all. There was a fear that people felt you were doing your email or responding to Facebook massages while in the meeting. It was uncomfortable.
And that is where one of the initial problems lie. Changing an old behaviour.
However, the good news is it only take a few weeks for it to become natural. It’s funny today, when my wife asks me to do something and I don’t immediately pull out my phone, my wife will stop and say: are you going to write it down? Not only has my behaviour changed, so has hers. She knows if I put it into my phone I will not forget. If I don’t, I will forget.
However, that means the way you collect stuff needs to be fast and easy. Back in the days when I travelled around the city visiting clients, I used the subway and bus system. I carried a bag (I hate backpacks, they destroy the cut of your suit—which weirdly I no longer wear) This meant I needed to be able to collect ideas and tasks while moving from one train to another or walking through a subway station.
I developed a test I called the changing train test. The test was could I collect a task into my task manager while I was changing trains? If I needed to stop walking, it failed the test. This was one of the many reasons why Todoist became my task manager of choice. It was simple and fast to get stuff into it.
The introduction of Siri in 2014 really helped. I was able dictate my tasks to my phone and later, when Siri developed, I was able to set it up with Apple’s Shortcuts to make collecting even faster.
So the first test for me is to ensure collecting is optimised to be fast and require as few button taps or pushes to get get something into my system.
Today, it’s all about getting things into my system using my laptop computer as that is where I am mostly when doing my work. I no longer visit clients. The principles, though, have not changed. Speed and simplicity. Using keyboard shortcuts to get things into my system is critical to me today. Again, simple, and fast.
The philosophy I follow is the less time I spend in my productivity tools, the more time I have for doing the work. The more time I spend doing the work, the more time I have at the end of the day for other things like hobbies, interests and family.
This means that the next step, the organising also needs to be simple.
I’ve travelled down the road of building complex organisation structures in my notes and files. I remember around seven years ago the trend of developing a complex tagging structure in Evernote. That all began from a blog post Michael Hyatt posted in 2016 where he explained how he used Evernote notebooks and tags. Oh how we all jumped on that ship. It was so much fun creating hierarchical tags structures.
The problems was, it took hours each week just to maintain it. When You collected a new note you had to go through your tagging structure to ensure you attached the right tags to the note or the system would fail.
Fortunately, Evernote helped to wean us off that method by significantly improving their search. Today, I have a very loose notebook structure and use search to find what I need. It’s much faster and simpler and means I have very little organising to do.
Similarly with Todoist, removing all the old project folders and focusing on when I will do a task and slimming down the number of labels I use (I use eight and no more) processing my inbox takes a fraction of the time it used to.
Everything is geared towards simplicity and speed so I spend more time doing the work and less time “playing” with the tools that organise my work.
Over the last few months, I’ve been creating content encouraging people to discover the processes for doing their work. That simplifies how you do your work and when that is simplified you are on the way to speeding it up. However, the great thing about having processes is you can take a single part of you process and find ways to make it better.
This, I realise is what I do with my whole productivity system. I have broken it down in to three parts: collecting, organising and doing. If I feel organising my work is too slow, I can look at how I am organising my work and find a better faster way. I will do that every three months or so. I look at the whole system, and ask the question, how can I do this better.
As the tools I use are being updated regularly, I find every three months enables me to review the updates to see if anything that has been changed helps me to make the system faster. For example, Evernote have recently introduced AI. This has given us faster search results AND, you can use their AI to organise an individual note into a cleaner order.
This means I can take scattered meeting notes and let Evernote organise those notes into a cleaner, more logical order. It puts the highlights at the top of the note which makes for faster scanning for the important points. This means less time organising and more time doing. Always a win.
However, all this comes back to keeping things as simple as possible. We know the less moving parts a motor has, the less likely it will go wrong. That true for motors, it’s also true for your productivity system. The less you have, the less there is to go wrong.
This is why I ditched add ons and plugins a long time ago. I used to use IFTTT to connect different apps together. Unfortunately, these often stoped working or lost the connection and that broke my system. Removing these from the critical tools (task manager, notes and calendar) and allowing them toward independently of each other meant no more stoppages or issues.
Instead, I bought a 32 inch monitor and when I do my planning I have the screen real-estate to have my calendar and task manager open side by side. Remove as many moving parts as possible and there is less to go wrong.
And finally, all the new tools coming out. Yes, it’s exciting and very tempting to keep trying all these new tools. However, what is your objective here. To get your work done as quickly as possible to the highest standards or to play with new tools.
None of these new productivity tools will do the work for you—never forget that. I have asked myself in the past does Notion do what Evernote does for me significantly faster and better? The answer was and is no. Does Tick Tick organise my tasks significantly better and faster than Todoist? No. So there’s not need for me to change.
Changing tools slows you down. There’s the transfer cost, the learning cost and the unfamiliarity cost. All of which dramatically slows things down and I do not want to be spending more time doing work when I could be with my family enjoying an evening stroll by the beach or cooking a surprise dinner for them.
So there you, Jono. I hope that has helped a little. Thank you for your question.
And just a heads up, over the last two years or so, I have been asked for some kind of membership programme in my learning centre. It’s taken me a while to find the right programme for such a membership. But now I am happy to announce that you can join a membership programme.
The purpose of the programme is to give you access to all my courses and workshops when and how you want to access them. But, the biggest part of the programme is the coaching element. My goal is to keep you accountable for your goals and productivity aspirations.
The membership runs for one year. During that year, you will get a monthly coaching call with me, where we discuss how you performed that month. And find simple changes you can make to improve things where they need improving.
Because of the individual coaching, I have limited the membership to twenty people initially. There are a few places left if you want to join., and I urge you to act quickly. These places will and are running out fast.
Oh, and you also can join my exclusive community where you can ask me anything, chat with other members and get the occasional unique content. It’s a brilliant programme, and I hope you will consider joining and allowing me to help you become better organised and more productive.
You can get full details at my website carlpullein.com or in the show notes.
Thank you for listening and it remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Are you planning, playing and fiddling, or are you doing? That’s what I am looking at in this week’s episode.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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The All-New Time And Life Mastery Course
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Episode 292 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 292 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
The area of time management and productivity is like many areas in that there is a lot of planning, thinking, tools and systems to play with and much more that is anything but doing.
Yet of all the different areas, time management and productivity is the one that is meant to focus on execution and getting stuff done. Sadly, over the last twenty years or so, certainly since the digital explosion began around the mid-1990s, the focus seems to have moved away from doing the work and more towards organising the work.
Now a limited amount of organising is important, after all, knowing where something is does help you to be more productive. But, moving something from one area to another is not being productive. It’s just moving stuff around. It’s not doing the work. A document that needs to be finished, needs to be opened and finished. Moving it from one folder to another will not write the document. All it does is moves it from one place to another. That’s not being productive. That’s procrastination.
And it’s on this subject that this week’s question is about. How to focus less on the minors and more on the majors—the activities that get the work done.
And so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Caroline. Caroline asks, hi Carl, I recently took your COD course and I am struggling to meet the target of only spending 20 minutes a day on organising and planning my day. I find I need a lot more than twenty minutes. Is there a reason why this is important?
Hi Caroline, thank you for your question.
The twenty-minute rule, so to speak, is not necessarily a strict number, it more a way to help people understand that planning and organising, if not checked, will become a dangerous form of procrastination.
We often use the excuse of something needing more time for planning or thinking about to avoid doing the work. If you think about it, how long does it take to decide something? The answer is no time. You either do it or you don’t. Now that does not mean some things need researching, but researching is different from thinking about and planning.
To give you an example. One of my bigger projects this year was to redesign my website. It’s been on my list since January the first, and I’ve used the excuse all year that I need to think more and plan what to put there and what to remove.
Yet, really, I already know those answers and I could very easily have written them out in around ten minutes. That extra thinking time was just an excuse to avoid doing the many hours of work that I know is involved in redesigning a website.
In the end, I decided to just get it started. I opened up a Keynote document, planned out the design, asked my wife to choose three complimentary colours (she’s better with colours than I am) and mapped everything out. That took one hour (I felt a fool—not only did it only take an hour, I really enjoyed it.)
The next evening, I sat down and cleaned up my website—removing old pages and cleaning up all the others and implemented the typeface and colour changes. That was two hours of pure joy (really, silly me. There I was procrastinating on the project most of the year and it turned into a very enjoyable project).
A couple of days later the hard lift work had been done and all I was left with was the tidying up. Project completed in just over a week.
There really was no excuse. It turned out easier than I imagined, it was fun and it was completed in less than ten days.
Looking back now I feel such a fool. I procrastinated most of the year because I thought it would be long, difficult and boring and it turned out to be the opposite of that.
How many projects do you have lying around sitting there in your projects list with nothing happening? Why? What’s stopping you from starting the project?
Try this little experiment. Pick one of those projects you feel needs more thinking and planning, open up your notes and write out what you think needs to be done to get it started—the very first thing. You do do not need to worry about the second task or the third. Just focus your attention on the very next task to get it started and do that task. That is doing.
The issue with trying to plan out every individual next step is you will be wrong. Many of those steps you think you need to do will not need doing and things you never thought of will need doing.
With my website redesign, I guessed right on about 30% of the tasks. The remaining 70% came up as I was working on the project. You do not want to be wasting time trying to think of all the steps you will have to take. Just do the first one. The next tasks will present itself before you finish the first. This is also a great way to prevent procrastinating on a complete project.
Let’s be honest here, you cannot do a project. You can only do the tasks required to complete that project. So, focus on the next task. Don’t worry too much about what comes next.
Strange how old sayings keep coming back. Saying like:
A journey of a 1,000 miles begins with the first step.
Well, that very true for your projects. You just have to start wit the first step. The next step will present itself before you finish the first.
Imagine you decide to decorate your living room. You’ve chosen the colour, so the next step is to clear or cover the furniture. While you are doing that you can be planning which wall you will begin with. You do not need to waste time sitting in front of a screen planning out what steps you will take. Begin with the first. Get the furniture out or covered and then tape over the fixed furnishings and power sockets.
The great thing with beginning like this is once you’ve started you’re committed. You’re not going to leave your living room furniture stacked up outside your living room. You’re going to get the painting done as quickly as possible so you can get the furniture back in.
I wasn’t going to leave my website redesign half finished. Once I began, I was committed and it had to get finished as quickly as possible. No chance of further procrastination then.
Now organising tasks in a task list can be fun when you have just switched your task manager to a new one. All those new bells and whistles to play with. It’s a lot of fun. We convince ourselves that once we’ve moved everything over to our new app, then we will be productive. Trouble is, we’re not.
The reason people keep switching apps is because they don’t want to do the work, and moving everything around is just an excuse for not doing the work.
And have I repeated that mistake a lot? I’ve been down that road too many times. Feeling great because I can collect all these new tasks and ideas and it all looks nice and pretty, yet what I forget to notice is while I am admiring my organisational work, the real work is not getting done.
This is the reason I emphasise the importance of restricting your organising time. It’s the easy part of having a productivity system. The hard part is just doing the work. It can be boring, time consuming and difficult. The trouble is the organising can wait, the work rarely can.
The key to better productivity, less overwhelm and improved time management is more time doing the work and less time organising it.
I know this is not for everyone, but I love sitting down on the sofa after a hard day’s work and cleaning everything up. The work for the day has been done, I can put something mildly interesting on the TV, have my laptop on my knee and simply move files, and other stuff to their rightful place.
It’s being away from my usual work environment and in a more relaxed state that makes this process fun. I usually process my Todoist inbox at this time too. As I say, that might not be for everyone, but this means that the work comes first. The cleaning up and organising comes later.
Now, if you are starting out with a new system, there’s a learning curve to go through and that curve is slow. When I devised my email process, for example, clearing forty emails from my inbox would take thirty minutes or so. Today, having run the process every day (almost) for the last eight years, I can process 120 emails in less than twenty minutes. It’s repeating the same process every day for a period of time that speeds you up.
My daily closing down admin routines used to take an hour. Now it can be done in little more than fifteen minutes. Over time I have improved my process for doing that routine. It’s admin, it’s non-critical on a daily basis, but if I allow it to build up over a few days, it’s no longer a fifteen minute task, it’s more than an hour. Now my brain is not going to want to do an hour of boring admin tasks and will try and convince me to put it off again. Nope. I’ve learned that lesson. Far better to have fifteen minutes of boring admin than over an hour of it.
So, Caroline, if you are just starting out on your COD journey, your organising and processing at the end of the day will take longer than twenty minutes. The important thing is you stick with it and build so called muscle memory. Very soon you will notice you get faster at it and the time it takes begins to tumble.
Really, that’s the secret to better productivity and time management. Building processes, running them consistently so you get faster at them.
With all that said, the focus should always be on getting the work done first. If you need to spend a little extra time organising, that could be a sign you are getting a lot of work done. However, never mistake activity for motion. Be hyper aware of what you are doing the majority of your time. Are you moving the right things forward? If not, and you are spending too much time planning, organising and thinking about how to complete a project, that’s when you want to stop, look for the very next tasks and do that.
I hope that helps, Caroline. Than you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
When does a task become an event, and when does an event become a task? That’s the question I am answering this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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Episode 291 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 291 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Last week, in my YouTube video, I shared how to get the most out of Todoist’s latest new feature, task duration. This feature allows you to add a duration time to your task so you can estimate how much time you will need. As I explained in the video, this is not a feature I personally would use but I know a lot of people have been requesting this for some time.
This sparked a lot of comments on the subject of Todoist introducing a calendar so people can drag and drop tasks onto a calendar and I know this type of feature appeals to a lot of people. However, there are problems with this approach to task management and this week’s question asks me to explain why this would be a problem. So, I decided to oblige and explain why this is something you do not want to be doing.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Steve. Steve asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you say in the past that you should not be putting tasks on your calendar and events onto you to-do list. Could you explain your thinking behind that approach?
Hi Steve, thank you for your question.
In the early days of Mac OS 10, in the early 2000s, Apple brought tasks into their calendar app and they lived on the right hand side of the calendar. It seemed logical. Here was a list of all your appointments and on the right hand side there was a list of all the things you needed to do that day.
It soon became apparent that this was not working. You see tasks and appointments are two very different things. An appointment is a commitment to another person or persons that you will be in a specific place at a specific time. That could be a meeting room, a place or in front of your computer with either Zoom or Teams open.
A task on the other hand is something you decide needs doing but can be done at any time. You might find you have twenty minutes while waiting for a doctors appointment and you could call the people you need to call or send out those emails you need to send.
In my case, I might have a blog post to write but it doesn’t matter whether I write it in the morning, afternoon or evening. The only thing that matters is I write it. I could decide to postpone it until tomorrow because I have too many appointments today and that would be fine. I am not letting anyone down.
The way I look at it is, my calendar is there to tell me what I have committed to and with whom. My task manager tells me what I need to do when I have some free time.
Now, time does not accept a vacuum. We cannot do nothing, ever. If you think about it laying on the sofa mindlessly scrolling through news or social media feeds is doing something. Similarly, taking an afternoon nap is still doing something. You are always doing something whether you are consciously aware of it or not.
Now, one of the most important things you can do if you want to be on top of your work is to maintain flexibility. Flexibility means you can direct your attention where it needs to be when it needs to be there. If you cram your calendar full of tasks, you immediately lose that flexibility. It also means if one or two of your meetings overrun, you get held up in a traffic jam or something goes wrong with your company’s CRM system, your carefully curated tasks and appointments are destroyed.
Now that in itself is not really a disaster, you can reschedule all those tasks, but now you’ve just added another step. Instead of being able to pick the tasks you are able to do in the moment—responding to your messages while being stuck in a traffic jam, for instance, you begin to panic about how much time you are losing and all the work you will now have to reschedule on your calendar.
This also means you calendar loses it’s power. If you schedule tasks to be done at say, 2pm but you are running behind so you ignore those tasks, what’s the point of your calendar? You took the time to put those tasks there but you just ignore them, what’s the point?
Because you are human, you need flexibility. You want to be able to choose the right work for the way you are feeling and what’s on your mind at that moment.
Then there is the human factor. You are not a machine. When planning your day, you will be thinking you will be fully alert, energetic and focused. When you are working the day, you will be tired, distracted and suffering from diminishing energy levels. What you really need is to take a break, but no! You have tasks to complete because you calendar tells you at 2pm you have to spend the next ninety minutes doing your tasks.
Finally, when you look at your calendar and you see almost ever minute of your day taken up with appointments and tasks it can be demoralising. It just drags you down and leaves you feeling busy, stressed and overwhelmed. Not a great state to be in if you want to make the right decisions about what to do with a clear mind.
One way to prevent this from happening, and I alluded to this in my YouTube video, is to operate a time blocking system in your calendar.
What this means is if you have a number of similar tasks to perform, you can block time out for doing this kind of work. For instance, let’s say you need an hour a day for doing your admin and an hour a day to deal with your messages and emails. You could put time blocks in for these.
I do this every day. At 4pm I have an hour time block for communications. This means I have a dedicated amount of time each day for managing my messages. At 4pm, I will sit down and clear my action folders. Sometimes most of that time is spent in email, other days it might be mainly spend in my messaging apps.
When I start the day, I have no idea how many communication tasks I will have, but I don’t need to worry because I know I have an hour to deal with them later that day.
I also have an admin hour blocked in my calendar each day. This hour is for dealing with any administrative tasks I need to do for my accountant, or clients that require a particular type of tax receipt.
I also use time blocks for the kind of work I do. For example, I do a lot of writing, so I have three, two hour blocks in my calendar. One on Monday, one on Tuesday and one on Friday. In my task manager, I have a label for all the writing tasks I have to do and all I need do is search for any writing tasks dated for that day and I can choose which ones to do. I have the flexibility. If I am feeling great, full of energy and focused I will pick the hardest ones. If I am not feeling great, lacking in focus and tired, I will choose the easier ones. I know I have more writing blocks in the week so it really doesn’t matter which ones I do.
I do the same with project and my audio/visual work. I have time blocked in the week for working on these tasks. I also make sure that any focused work (writing and project work) is done in the morning—when I am at my most focused.
However, the key here is blocking time out for the type of work, not the individual tasks. This ensures I maintain flexibility and can decide what to do based on my physical and mental state at that time.
It also means my calendar never looks overwhelming. You want to ensure there are sufficient gaps between time blocks so you have the flexibility to take a break when needed and pick up anything urgent that may have come in that day.
Using this method means I am only managing tasks in one place. When I do my daily planning, I can see on my calendar I have a two hour writing block the next day and I can then choose which writing tasks should be done in that time from my writing list in my task manager. If things change overnight, I have the flexibility to change the tasks around the next day if needs be.
If you go back to the COD principles (Collect, organise and do), you want to be spending a little time as possible organising so you maximise your doing time. I am collecting tasks in my task manager all day, and I will spend around 95% of my work day doing the work. This leaves me with around twenty-minutes each day for the organising and planning. All I need do is look at my calendar for the next day, see what time block I have—lets say an audio visual time block, I can then date any tasks related to audio visual for the next day.
When the next day arrives, I can then decide which of those tasks I will do based on my energy levels, what is important and what deadlines I have.
If you are trying to manage individual tasks on your calendar (as well as your task manager) not only are you now duplicating, but you have just given yourself a lot more organising to do.
I hope that clarifies things for you, Steve. Thank you for your question and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Do you have any big tasks or projects that just need a few days of focused work to get completed but you keep putting off? Yep, I think we all have some of those.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The All-New Time And Life Mastery Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 290 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 290 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
One of the best things you can do is to structure your day so you get your core work and routines done almost automatically. This is the most important work you have to do each day and week. But that can often create a Parkinson’s Law situation—where activity fills the time available, which means you don’t have time to work on those unique, one-off projects.
This then leads to those one-off projects being postponed and delayed particularly if there are no hard deadlines for them.
This week’s question is on how to find the time for additional projects when you already have your core work and routines set up and getting done every day.
Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, I would just like to let you know that the all encompassing Time and Live Mastery course, my biggest and best course has just been completely re-recorded.
This course covers everything from discovering what you want out of life to turning what you want into a pathway to accomplishing it. As the headline for the course says: How to create the life you want to live and find the time to live it.
The course includes lessons on COD (Collect, Organise and Do) and building your own Time Sector System. It also also includes the Vision Roadmap, how achieve your goals and so much more.
If you only want one course, a course you can return to over and over again, this is the one for you. You also get incredible bonuses. Free access to my Mini Course Library AND every few months I will be doing a FREE live session where you can ask any questions you have to me directly.
This course will change your life. It will give you a direction and focus and the tools you need in order to achieve the things you want to achieve.
Full details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jen. Jen asks, hi Carl, I took your Time Sector System Course recently and it’s working exceptionally well for me. The only problem I have is getting one off projects completed. I am doing my core work each week, but that leaves me with little time to do some of my projects. Do you have any suggestions on how to include working on these projects?
Hi Jen, thank you for your question.
With the Time Sector System it’s about first making sure you have sufficient time for your critical work each day. If you’re not doing that, everything falls apart because you end up neglecting clients or missing important deadlines for work you are employed to do. It’s often easier to make sure you have the time for that first before moving on to finding time for unique, one-off projects.
However, if you are employing time blocking into your system, you can dedicate an afternoon or a morning one of two times per week for project work. I do this on a Tuesday, for example. On Tuesdays, I have a couple of morning calls that finish at 9:00am, and I keep the rest of the day free for project work. I avoid scheduling meetings after 9:00am on a Tuesday. It’s only one day a week, and that leaves me plenty of spaces the rest of the week for meetings.
However, one of the beneficial things about the Time Sector System is the automation it builds into your week. You are doing the critical tasks at the same time each day or week which means you develop highly efficient processes for doing this work.
For example, I track my subscriber and sales data each day. I have a spreadsheet that I enter this data on and when I first began doing this it would take me around an hour. Today, I can collect all the data and enter it into my spreadsheet in around fifteen minutes. Over the years I have refined and polished my process for collecting and entering this data.
The same goes with managing email. I used to waste so much time checking and responding to emails. Today, it’s ten to fifteen minutes in the morning clearing my inbox and around forty minutes in the afternoon replying to the actionable mails. It’s not something I even think or worry about anymore.
So, if you are new to the Time Sector System, as with anything new, it takes time to bed in and become automatic.
I learned to drive using a manual gearbox (stick shift), I remember when I first began driving I had to keep thinking about the gear I was in and run a mental checklist to change gear each time. It was slow, but after a few weeks, it became automatic. I don’t need to think about when or how to change gear now. It’s purely a feel thing. I can hear the engine, I know where third or fourth gear is without looking at the gear stick and I change gear as soon as I feel it’s time to change.
And that’s what the Time Sector System encourages. Automating your work processes so you know instinctively how long something will take and can accurately schedule sufficient time for doing it.
However, we all have these bigger one-off projects that do not fit neatly into our carefully curated week. The challenge we face is finding time for doing them.
Over the last two weeks I have been working on the Time And Life Mastery Course update. It’s required a lot of hours recording, editing and writing worksheets. I do have a process for creating courses, but this one is five or six time bigger than my usual courses. I calculated it would require around forty hours to complete.
Finding twenty additional hours each week is difficult. However, there are things you can do.
First up is to accept you may have to work a few extra hours each week while you are working on this project. Last week—the final week before launch—I did a couple of sixteen-hour days. That’s not normal for me, but it’s only two days, and I knew I would need to do it if I was to get this project over the line by the end of the week.
You can also look at your core work and decide what can be skipped. There’s always something. For example, I see part of my core work as writing a weekly blog post, doing this podcast and publishing a YouTube video each week.
When you do the weekly planning, you can decide what can be skipped. I chose to skip my blog post. which saved me around three hours. I also reduced the time I was available for coaching calls which meant I had less feedback to write saving me around another six hours that week.
Sometimes, I feel we are guilty of looking at things too narrowly. Does that email from your boss really need to be replied to today? Could it not wait until tomorrow morning? Instinct may tell you it MUST be responded to today, logic will tell you no it doesn’t.
Have you ever noticed the least stressed people always appear to be on top of their work and commitments? The reason is because they structure their days. Satya Nadella at Microsoft has a well structured day that begins with a morning run, breakfast with his family before heading into the office. You can be confident he has a process and system for dealing with his emails and messages.
Maya Angelou had a brilliantly structured way to write her books and poems. She would block out a month in her diary, book herself into a local hotel and write. She still went home at the end of the day, did her grocery shopping, cooked for her family and ate breakfast with them. It was a structured life. She only needed to do that once or twice a year. The rest of the time she got on with her core work and life.
It’s important, Jen, to look at things in the whole. How much time do you need to complete these projects? When do they need to be finished? How long you need may be a guess, but based on your experience it’s likely to be an educated guess.
If you estimate you need twenty hours to complete a project, then break it down over a couple of weeks. That means you need to find ten hours each week. If you accept you may need to work an extra hour each day for the next two weeks, you’ve just found yourself ten hours. Then it’s about finding one extra hour in your day. Could you cancel a few meetings—or postpone them? Could you put other work on hold for a couple of weeks?
There’s a lot of ways to find an extra hour or so each day. However, if you are not sitting down at the end of the week and planning out the next, you will find your week is hijacked by other people and work, and will mean the project does not get done.
I remember when I redecorated the bedroom in my home back in the UK. I blocked a weekend out for doing it. I made sure I had the paint, rollers and brushes before I began and I told all my friends I would not be available that weekend. I planned out that I could strip the wallpaper and apply the undercoat on Saturday. I could eave it overnight to dry and I would apply the top coat on Sunday.
It didn’t go exactly to plan. Stripping the wallpaper was a lot more difficult than I expected, but after an 18 hour day on Saturday, the room was primed and ready for the top coat on Sunday.
One of the great things about that weekend is I still remember it and I look back on it fondly. It was the first time I had redecorated a room, I had the radio on all day, I got covered in paint and ate an amazing pizza on Saturday night feeling incredibly proud of myself. I didn’t worry about what was going on outside. My total focus was getting the room finished by Sunday night and that is exactly what happened.
And you know what? While I was cocooned in my home painting, the world did not end. Nobody was angry with me because I was not available for a couple of days and life went back to normal that Monday morning, except, I had a completely redecorated bedroom that I completed in the two days I allocated for it.
So, Jen, if you have projects that need completing. Make sure when you do your weekly planning you set aside sufficient time to work on it. If necessary reduce some of your core work and inform the people that matter you will be less available while you complete the project.
I hope that helps and thank you for your question. Thank you to you too for listening and don’t forget to check out the Time And Life Mastery course. It will change your life.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, I am sharing a few ideas you can use to get some time back for the things you want time for.
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Episode 289 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 289 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Do you ever wish you had more time each day? Not necessarily time for more work, but just time to do what you want.
Many years ago, this is how I felt. I wished there was more time for doing the things I wanted. I looked at my heroes from the past—being able to come home from a hard day in the factory physically exhausting themselves, to spend the evenings in a garden shed inventing the future. People like Frank Whittle (inventor of the jet engine) and James Dyson, the inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner.
I often wondered how they were able to do it. It then dawned on me that we are not able to make more time; that is fixed. People like Frank Whittle, James Dyson, Marie Curie and others had the same amount of time you and I do. However, what these people did was decide what they would and would not do with their time so they could maximise what they had doing the things they loved doing.
Is that not possible for you? Could you decide what you will and will not do with your time? Are you currently doing some things that may not be conducive to what you really want to do?
Well, this week’s question had me thinking more about this, and the results of that thinking are all in this podcast. So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Patrick. Patricks asks, Hi Carl, I’ve often wondered if you have any tips on making better use of your time. Is there anything you do that saves you time each day or week?
Hi Patrick, thank you for your question.
I must confess that your question was the inspiration behind the video I posted on YouTube last week on how I can save around 16 hours each week following a few simple practices.
Now, I should point out that some of what I will talk about here may not work for you, how they work for me, but that does not mean they definitely won’t work for you. You can modify them so that do work. All I ask is you keep an open mind and see how you could adopt them into your life.
First up. Always have a plan for the day. I know; I have spoken about this a lot. But it just saves you so much time. It stops you from being dragged off doing unimportant things and keeps you focused on what needs to be done.
Now, I am not suggesting you plan out every minute of the day; that would be impractical and never works. Instead, what I am suggesting you plan out what must be done. The things that need to be done and tasks that will prevent bigger problems in the future. When you start the day, know what you will do and when you will do it.
For example, today, I had a few calls this morning, so I kept my morning free for calls. This afternoon, this script was to be written. Now, it did not matter when precisely I would write this script; all I decided was I would write this script before taking my dog out for his walk.
Beyond that, the only thing that was planned was an hour for responding to my emails and messages and more calls this evening.
The problem you will have when you don’t have a plan is your day will be hijacked by fake urgencies and emergencies from other people. Fake because you will grab onto anything to avoid having nothing to do. Having a plan focuses you and ensures that what you do is relevant to your goals, projects and areas of focus.
All this saves you time because what you do each day is moving the right things forward so they get done on time and without a lot of fuss. And you are not wasting time trying to decide what to do.
The next tip is to reduce the number of channels you are contactable through. I found it amusing a few years ago when everyone was getting excited about apps like WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams and Facebook Messenger.
At the time, I could not understand what all the fuss was about because we already had email, and text messaging was great. You could see what would happen when groups in these new apps were created. Instead of a conversation with one person, there were going to be conversations with numerous people, which meant a message thread would be constantly updating; to catch up with what was going on, you had to scroll back and read through everything.
WOW! The time wasting that happens now because of these so-called marvellous inventions. The best tip I can give you is to avoid these groups as much as possible. I am proud to say I am not a part of any group—well, there is one. I still teach an English class, and the four students in that group and I have a group chat where we can communicate our absences. But that’s it.
Sadly, companies have now jumped on this bandwagon and forced employees to be a part of a Teams or Slack group. Now bosses can constantly check in with you, asking for updates and requesting you do things. And, of course, because our boss expects us to be reading these messages instantly, we have to drop everything to confirm we have received the message and are working on it.
If you want to be productive, being a part of all these channels of communication will destroy any chance. Aside from the attention switching cost, which can be high, it means you are losing as much as three to four hours a day just checking, confirming and replying to these messages.
You need to find a way to remove yourself from these groups or have a set time each day for dealing with them. For instance, if you are part of a work group chat, perhaps you could check and deal with messages twice a day. Mid to late morning and mid to late afternoon.
Don’t worry, your team and boss soon learn your patterns, and once they are used to it, they are unlikely to bother you.
This is one of those that you may be saying to yourself that would be impossible for me. Perhaps, but have you tried? Have you considered a different way from the way things are working right now? Or are you happy losing as much as three to four hours a day? I will leave that one with you.
Here’s one I began using around ten years ago that has saved me hours and hours. Eat the same thing every day. Now, I know with this one, most of you will immediately say, “NO WAY!” But I am going to say it and let you decide if it could work for you.
Eat the same things every day.
Okay, I better explain. First, I am not a foodie. Food doesn’t excite me, and I see it only as fuel. If you are a foodie and love trying new and exciting things, this tip will not work for you, and I would not suggest you change. However, here’s how it saves time.
As I have been eating pretty much the same thing every day for the last ten years or so, I have learned the fastest and most efficient way to cook my meals. It is also easy to ensure I have all the ingredients in stock at home, and I know how long it takes to cook, eat and wash up afterwards.
This means I can use meal times as stakes in the ground for my day. I do intermittent fasting, so my meal times are 11:00 AM for breakfast and 6:00 PM for dinner. So, I have a two-hour session of work in the morning before breakfast, and at 4:30 PM, I stop whatever I am working on for an hour to deal with my communications. After dinner, I have another ninety minutes of work before my evening calls begin.
The biggest time saving here, though, is I do not need to waste time each day trying to decide what to eat or negotiating with my wife about what she wants. She’s more of a foodie and likes to prepare her own meals, and she eats at different times than me. She also does intermittent fasting, but because her mornings are always busy, her eating window is from 2 pm to 10 pm.
We do eat together on Saturdays, though, and I will eat whatever we decide to eat that day. That’s my cheat day.
Next up, use a scheduling service.
This will save you so much time and put you in control of when you are available for meetings. Now, I know not all of you will be able to do this because your work calendar is controlled by other people. But, if you work with clients, this will be a huge time-saving for you.
Scheduling services allow you to allocate slots of time when you are available for meetings, and your clients and colleagues can schedule times with you that are convenient for them as well as you.
Using a scheduling service means you are not going back and forth trying to find a mutually convenient time; instead, the other person can choose a time, and it will be automatically booked on your calendar.
And no, people do not find it rude. Everyone I work with finds it much more convenient because they get to choose and schedule a meeting with you when they are ready rather than wasting time either calling, messaging or emailing you.
Now what about finding time for those side hobbies, the things you want time for? How do you find time for that? If you study people like Frank Whittle, Marie Currie or James Dyson, you will discover they made time for their hobbies. Now, for Marie Currie, there was no TV, and TV was a rare thing during Frank Whittle’s early life. In those days, people found their own entertainment.
There are times in the day when you have complete control over what you do. I remember when I was watching a lot of Gary Vaynerchuk’s YouTube videos, and he preached you should use 11 PM to 1 AM as your development time—when you worked on your “side hustle”.
Today, the word “side hustle” has gone out of fashion somewhat and in many ways, that’s probably a good thing. But as usual, when something goes out of fashion, we throw everything away when there may be some grains of value in it.
For example, I use the late evening for studying. Sometimes I will read; other times, I will watch educational videos on YouTube. It depends on what I feel like learning. But for me, that study time is precious. It helps me to wind down at the end of the day, and while I am not doing this too late, usually around 10:30 pm to midnight, it still gives me some quiet time for things I am interested in.
However, I like to watch some TV shows, and I reserve them for Saturday nights. This way, I have something to look forward to and can relax.
So these are just a few of the less common ways you can save yourself time. There are a few more in my latest YouTube video; I’ll link to that in the show notes for you. But to give you a flavour, there are chunking similar tasks together, getting outside to do your thinking and decision making and finding the process, not the project.
Hope these help, Patrick and thank you for sending in your question. Thank you to you, too, for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Are you still creating projects out of the work you regularly do? If so, you might be causing yourself more work than you really need.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 288 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 288 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
This week, I have an interesting question about why projects are bad, and processes are good. It’s something I discovered around five years ago, yet never realised I had switched away from creating projects for any multi-step job I had to do.
When I look at what I do, for instance, writing a blog post is a process. I sit down at my desk, open my writing software and begin writing. Once the first draft is written around one hour later, I leave it for twenty-four hours before again sitting down and editing it. Once the edit is complete, I design the image and post the blog post. Job done.
I have similar processes for my YouTube videos, this podcast and the newsletters I write.
What I discovered around five years ago is if I treat everything that involved two or more steps as a project, it changed how I felt about the work. I felt there was a need to plan things out, create a list of tasks and choose a start date. All steps that are rendered obsolete when you have a process.
With processes, all you need to know is when you are going to get on and do the work. Because you have a process, you already know what needs to be done, and you can get on and do it without the need for excessive planning and preparation.
But it can be difficult to alter your way of thinking from project to process-based thinking, and that is what this week’s question is all about.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Linda. Linda asks, Hi Carl, I found your recent newsletter on projects versus processes interesting, but I am struggling to work out how to turn my work into projects. I work with clients, and they each have unique needs, which means I need to treat each one as a project. Do you have any advice that will help me to find the processes?
Hi Linda, thank you for your question.
Working with clients can be challenging when it comes to following a process. Each client likely needs individual attention, and each task related to the client could be unique.
However, looking at it that way does create confusion. Fortunately, Your processes will begin from the moment of your first contact with your client. What do you do at the first contact with a client?
For example, with my coaching clients, the process begins once I receive a completed questionnaire from the client. That questionnaire is placed in a special folder in my email until the first call. Twenty minutes before that call, I retrieve the questionnaire, copy and paste it into a new client note and then archive the original email.
That begins the process. After that, things can go in multiple directions. But during all my coaching calls, I keep notes; if there is anything specific I need to do for the client, I will add it to the note. After the call, the note is flagged until I write my feedback, which I do as a chunk. I have a one-hour block each day for writing feedback, so I will see what I have committed myself to when I write the client’s feedback.
I can then decide what needs to be done to complete that commitment.
Building processes is not about having a single process. It’s about creating multiple processes for the work you regularly do.
Now that may sound very complex or difficult, yet if you stop for a moment and think about it, you are already using processes for almost everything you do. I noticed when I wash my dishes after breakfast or dinner; I wash things in exactly the same way. I don’t stand there, trying to decide what to wash first. I begin with my bowl and then my cutlery, and then my glass. It’s the same when I prepare to go to bed. I brush my teeth and turn off all the lights before getting into bed. It’s the same process each day.
The great thing about processes is they become automatic. You don’t think about each step involved in brushing your teeth. You just do it.
And the same applies to your work processes. I don’t think about what to do when I have a new client. There’s a process I follow.
Now, processes do not work for everything. A process is used for anything you may repeat frequently. It’s unlikely you will redecorate your bedroom frequently. Doing a job like that will be a project. But what would it be if you were a painter and decorator? In that case, you would have a process for decorating different types of rooms. When you begin painting a new room, you would follow the same process. Clear the furniture or cover it with dust sheets, wipe down the walls and set up your ladders, paint and brushes. (That’s a guess. I’m not a painter and decorator).
I recently read about the former Ferrari Formula 1 team’s technical director when they were last dominant in the sport (2000 to 2007). His name was Ross Braun, and he developed a process for preparing the next year’s car.
The FIA, Formula 1’s governing body, would issue the technical directives for the following year at the end of March. Once he received them, he would use April to go through the new rules and regulations and then. there would be a day-long technical team meeting on the first Monday of May each year where they would discuss the new regulations and allocate team members to begin building the new car. By the end of that week, they had started the new car build.
Each different department had a process for making whatever they were responsible for, be that the chassis, engine or aerodynamics. Nothing was considered a project. It was a process that was followed each year.
Now, in Formula 1, the team’s objective is very clear. To build a car that wins. No team goes into building a new car with the thought of coming second or third. They build to win. Motivating team members isn’t particularly difficult.
Every Monday, there was a team meeting to discuss progress and to see where Ross Brawn could help to move things forward. But ultimately, everything was a process.
This quote from the book really nails it for me:
“Develop and apply a set of rhythms and routines. Having established an integrated team and structure, Ross instituted rhythms and routines that ensured the completeness of the process of designing, manufacturing and racing cars. These routines constantly reinforced alignment around a shared vision.”
That shared vision was to have a championship-winning car and driver.
The great thing about building processes is once you have them, you can then isolate areas where things are not working as well as you would like them to.
For example, I came up with my email management system through a series of refinements over a number of years. As the volume of emails increased, I found it increasingly difficult to stay on top of it. My old system, or process, for managing it no longer worked. I need to look at the process and see where I could make it better.
Collecting email was not a problem. That was a part I had no control over, but I did realise that part of the problem with volume was I was too ready to give out my email address to anyone who asked for it. I soon realised that meant my email address was ending up in databases, and that was part of the problem. So, I created a new email address for all non-important occasions when I needed an email address and kept that as webmail only.
Then I looked at how I was processing mail, and that led to my Inbox Zero 2.0 system. It was a refined version of Merlin Mann’s original Inbox Zero methodology. It works effortlessly now and has never let me down since I modified the process around ten years ago.
A good friend of mine is a copywriter here in Korea. She’s a brilliant copywriter, and each new job that comes her way follows the same process. She takes notes in Apple Notes when she meets the client for the first time. She finds out what they want, the tone of the words and anything else relevant.
Then it gets added to her list of work as a task in Reminders. The task is simple: “Work on new client’s job.” And she works through her jobs in chronological order.
Working on the task means she opens Text Edit on her computer and does all her work there until she sends the first draft to the client.
Her whole process works. She’s consistent and on time, and it’s made her life so easy. Her calendar is blocked out for focused work and meetings with clients, and she’s strict about what goes on it. It’s all process. Never a project.
You see, the problem with projects is we waste so much time planning, organising and thinking about what we need to do. We feel obligated to write out what we think needs to happen, much of which does not need to be done anyway, and we then procrastinate about where and when to start.
With processes, you already know where to start, so the only decision you need to make is when to start. There’s no procrastinating because you already know what the first step is.
Plus, you also have a much better idea of how long something will take. Processes are naturally broken down into different components, and the more you run that process, the more you learn how long something will take.
The best way to build processes is to track how you are doing different parts of your work. Where are the natural breaks? As I mentioned with writing my blog posts. There’s writing the first draft (approximately one hour), editing (around forty minutes), image selection, and posting another forty minutes. There are three key parts, so scheduling my work is easy now. I know I need around two-and-a-half hours. And that’s it.
Keep things as simple as possible, and look for the natural components. Then build processes from there.
I hope that has helped, Linda. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Are you confused with all the time management and productivity advice floating around? I know I was, and all this information can and does cause inaction. This week I will show a way through the deluge of information.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Episode 287 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 286 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
When I began my journey into the digital time management and productivity world in 2009, there was a lot of information on how to use the new technology emerging with smart phones. This evolution (or maybe revolution) in the world of productivity was exciting and blogs and podcasts were full of information on turning your digital devices into productivity powerhouses that promised to automate the work we were doing.
The trouble is, back then, as now, much of that information was contradictory. Common ones are things like don’t check mail in the morning, (silly advice) and micro-manage your calendar (more silly advice).
The reality is when it comes to productivity and managing your time it’s important to find a way that works for you. It’s about knowing when you are at your most focused and when you are easily distracted. Trying to squeeze yourself into the way other people work is not going to work for you and the way you work.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks: hi Carl, over the last year or so I’ve become so overwhelmed with my work and life. I was given more responsibilities at work and at the same time my wife gave birth to twin daughters that need a lot of attention. I began reading and watching content on getting better organised and being more productive and have just become so confused. Everyone is giving different advice. How would you build better habits and routines that would make you more productive?
Hi Michael, great question.
In many ways, I am lucky because my journey into becoming better at managing time and being more productive began in the late 1980s / early 90s. There were no blogs, podcasts and YouTube channels then. All we had were books and the occasional article in magazines and newspapers. This meant, while there were still contradictions, it also slowed us down and allowed us time to test ideas and concepts and give them enough time before attempting to try something else.
And that is often the first big mistake people make. Not giving a concept or idea long enough to work.
Change is hard. Changing behaviour is even harder and takes time. You are not going to get a new concept working in 24 hours, a week or even two or three months. You need to give anything new at least six months. You need to learn to use the system, develop the habits and muscle memory.
And that means if you change an app, you put yourself under a moratorium for six months. You do not change it for six months. This has two benefits. It gives you time to really learn how to use the app and it causes you to hesitate before changing something. If you know that by changing your task manager means you are stuck with whatever you change to for six months, you will question yourself about whether the time and energy cost is worth it.
Now watching and learning from others is actually a good idea. But, it’s not about copying their system and tools, it means seeing how they overcome similar problems to you. Not all people talking about productivity and time management have the same issues as you. I remember four or five years ago, I liked how Thomas Frank did his videos, but what he was teaching was how to manage time as a student. I was not a student, however, there were some ideas Thomas gave me about managing information that I did incorporate into my own file management system.
I learned a lot of my time management concepts from people like Hyrum Smith, Stephen Covey, Brain Tracy, Jim Rohn, David Allen and Tony Robbins. These are the pioneers of modern day time management and productivity and you only need to look at the results they have achieved individually to see their systems and methods work.
A lot of what you see on YouTube, for example, are videos on how other people manage their work and they make it look slick, efficient and beautiful. But that’s not always a system. That’s video editing. With the power of video editing you can make anything look fantastic. It does not mean it works in the real world.
I saw a comment on one of my videos recently that made me smile because the person who wrote it has got it. The quote comes from the movie Maverick and it’s:
"It's not the plane, it's the pilot."
And when it comes to apps, it’s never the tool that causes the problem. It’s how you use the tool that does most of the damage. A hammer will put a nail into a hole very easily. Used incorrectly, though, the hammer can do a lot of damage—although a good beating on the cylinder head with a hammer did solve the problem my old Mitsubishi Colt used to have.
One the earliest lessons I learned about time management and productivity was that the work won’t get done if all I do is rearrange lists and organise my stuff. The only way work gets done is if I do the work.
All you need to know, when you begin the day, is what needs to be done today. Not, necessarily, what you would like to do today. Then, get on and do it.
Now there are different strategies for doing your work. For instance, you may be more focused in a morning. If that’s so, you can take Brian Tracy’s concept of beginning the day with the hardest, most difficult task—the Eat The Frog concept. But, if you find yourself more focused in the afternoons, then you could schedule time in the afternoon for a couple of hours focused work. Find the time you are at your best and do your best work then.
Let’s return to the heart of your question, Michael. How would I build better habits and routines to become more productive? I would first read three books. David Allen’s Getting Things Done because that will give you insights into task management and collecting your commitments and deciding what needs to be done. I would read James Clear’s Atomic Habits, because that will show you how to build habits that stick and also gives some fascinating insights into your own psychology. And finally, I would read Brian Tracy’s Eat The Frog as that will explain the importance of doing over everything else.
Armed with the knowledge you will gain from those three books, you can then set about building a system that works for the way you work.
The objective is to get the right things done each week and to eliminate the unnecessary. Rushing to do everything is not the best strategy because what you think may need doing now, often doesn’t need doing at all if you leave a couple of days—things have a habit of sorting themselves out (a lot more than you think)
Right now, with your twin daughters, I would say that family is your number one priority. The question then is how can you maximise your time with your family? As that involves your daughters and wife, you want to be working with them and making sure you are there when they need you. It may mean you have to be very strict about when you do your work and when you are not at work.
One thing I would not reject out of hand is working later in the evening. I remember reading about Michael Dell (of Dell computers). Back in the 1990s when he had a young family he would ensure he was home by 6pm every day to be with his family. His kids were usually in bed by 9:30pm and once they were asleep, he would spend an hour dealing with his emails and other matters before ending the day. It’s surprising how much work you can get done in the evening when things have settled down. I know I’ve done some of my best work later into the evening when everything quietens down.
That was a trick I learned from Winston Churchill. He was a prolific writer as well as a politician and he would retire to his study at 10pm every evening to do work for two hours. It must have worked because over his lifetime Churchill published over forty books and they were not small books. His book on the Duke of Marlborough, for example, was over a million words long!
However, if you are a morning person, perhaps getting a couple of hours in before your kids wake up would work. Tim Cook of Apple begins his work day at 4 AM and then goes to the gym at 6 AM.
This is why reading about successful people and how they manage their time will give you ideas and insights. Try them. Remember, you won’t see results immediately, you are building habits and that takes time. Be patient.
Much of what I do today is very different from what I did five years ago. For example, I didn’t journal. I have added that to my repertoire in the last four years. It’s habit I love doing now and I am still excited to start my day by writing in my journal. I learned about the importance of journaling by reading Ryan Holiday’s books on Stoicism and Robin Sharma’s 5 AM Club.
Ten years ago, I didn’t plan my day the night before, now it’s a habit and I cannot go to bed without knowing what two things I must get done the next day. (It took around six months to develop that habit). If I remember, I got that idea from reading about NLP—Neuro-linguistic Programming. That concept teaches you that you can get your subconscious brain to a lot of the hard work while you are sleeping by using something called “Intention Implementation”.
So, what I do recommend is you read the three books above, study successful people and how they managed their work. Charles Darwin is a great example of structuring days. You can Google Charles Darwin’s daily routine. His daily walks and time spent with his rock—his wife, had a huge impact on his output.
From these resources, you can develop your own habits and structures that may need modifying over time, but begin with what is important to you and build on that.
Thank you, Michael for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Do you feel overwhelmed by all the things you have to do? Well, this week’s podcast is just for you.
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Episode 286 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 286 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
The number one reason someone comes to me for help is because they feel stressed out and overwhelmed by everything they have to do. They have thousands of emails sitting in their inbox, hundreds of Slack or Teams messages asking for things and a long list of to-dos that never seems to shrink. It’s enough to make anyone scream out of sheer desperation.
The good news is it’s not impossible to regain some control. The bad news is you will need to stop and step back a little. And often it’s that stopping and stepping back that people find most difficult.
When you face an impossible situation, the temptation is to keep digging. The problem is what got into the situation you are trying to dig your way out of is precisely what you are continuing to do. Digging.
You need to stop digging so you can look up and see what you are trying to accomplish and restart with a clearer direction.
This week, I’m going to give you a roadmap you can follow to get yourself out of this hole so you are working towards a less overwhelming and clearer place.
And that means, it’s time for me now to h and you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Enrique. (엔리캐), Enrique asks, hi Carl, I really need your help. I feel so overwhelmed and stressed because my list of tasks keep getting longer and longer and I never seem to be making it smaller. It feels for every five tasks I do, fifteen new ones get added. My boss is always sending me messages and asking for updates so I never have time to do any focused work. How can I stop all this from happening?
Hi Enrique, thank you for your question.
Firstly, fear not, there is a solution to this for you but you will need to do something a little uncomfortable. I need you to stop for a day or two.
When anyone gets into a situation where far more is coming in than going out, continuing to do what you are currently doing is not going to solve the problem. The only way you will solve a problem like this is to stop and draw a line under it all, while you fix the underlying problem. If you don’t stop, you have no chance to break the vicious circle that has grown. You have to break the circle and to do that you need to press pause.
Now, once you have stopped, you need to first look at the foundations of your system. Tasks and emails are different things so let’s look at your tasks first.
How are you collecting, organising and doing your work—the principles of COD.
Collecting everything is important, but it does not necessarily mean everything you collect needs to be done immediately or at all. A lot of what you collect can be done later. Quite a few of the tasks you collect may even be deleted because on reflection you realise you either do not have the time or resources to complete them or they do not need doing at all. Do not be afraid to delete these. If they are important, they will come back.
The delete key is your friend.
Organising is how you organise all the things you have decided do need to be done. There are only two questions here: what exactly needs to be done and when are you going to do it?
When you do it will depend on a two factors. Deadlines and available time. Now, here you will come up again the time V Activity conundrum, where the time side of the equation is fixed and there is nothing you can do to change that—that’s the natural laws of time and physics. But, you do have complete control over the activity side. The activities you do in the time you have available.
Now as an aside here, how long does a task take? For quite a few tasks it’ll be likely you will not know before you begin the task. And therein lies the answer… “before you begin the task”. Let’s say your boss asks you to prepare a report on a recent sales campaign you delivered. If you write in your task manager “Write report on recent sales campaign”, it will stress you. Unless you regularly write sales campaign reports you won’t know how it will take you and your brain will tell you “It’s going to take a long time”.
That now means every time you see that task in your task list, you will convince yourself you have no time to write it today, so it gets rescheduled for tomorrow.
You will not know how long this task will take until you start it. So, rather than writing the task as “write sales campaign report” you add an extra word: “start writing sales campaign report”.
What you have now done is taken the emphasis away from completing the task, to just starting the task. How long does it take to start a task like this? A few minutes at most. You may only set up a Word document, give it a title and write the introduction, but it’s a start. Now, when you have finished, all you need do is change the task from “start writing sales campaign report” to “continue writing sales campaign report and schedule it for another day.
The benefit of writing tasks like this is as you start and continue to write the report, you will quickly be able to anticipate how long the whole task will take and that will take a lot of the pressure off. If you were to spend thirty-minutes each day for five days on the task, you will have spent two-and-a-half hours on it. That’s a lot better than doing nothing because you kept rescheduling it.
Let get back to the principles of COD.
The doing part is where your calendar comes in to play. Based on what you have decided needs to be done today, where do you have the time to do it?
It’s no good starting the day with thirty tasks you have convinced yourself need to be done today, yet have six hours of meetings. Your day’s destroyed before it starts. You need to be more strategic than that. In this situation you have two choices (and ONLY two choices). Either you cancel some of those meetings or you reschedule some of those tasks. I suppose you could do both as a third choice.
This is where things can become uncomfortable because sometimes we have to let people down and that’s hard to do. However, people are a lot more accommodating that we imagine. If we have promised someone to get a piece of work to them by the end of the week, yet, by Wednesday we know that’s not going to happen, it’s far better to reach out and renegotiate the deadline. In 90% of cases, people are perfectly happy with the renegotiated deadline.
What’s the worst that can happen if you do reach out? They could say no, I MUST have the work by Friday. Okay, now you have a hard deadline and you can renegotiate some of your other work instead. You may have to work an extra few hours that week to meet the deadline. As long as you are not working extra hours every day, that should not be a big issue.
Now, that brings me on to your email, and messages.
How much time do you need each day to stay on top of your email? When I ask people this question the reply is usually “it depends”. Yet, if you were to analyse it, you would find an average. For me, I need around forty-five minutes a day to respond to my actionable email. Some days, I only need twenty-five minutes, others I need an hour.
With that information, I can now block that time out on my calendar. I have one hour each day set aside for communications. I rarely need to full hour, but it’s there if I do need it.
Now with email, there’s a process for this. This process has worked for hundreds of years because it was devised when we received a lot of regular mail, and it’s only two steps.
The first is to process what you received. This is, in effect filtering out the actionable from the non-actionable. You can do this by asking two questions:
- What is it?
- Is it actionable?
If it’s actionable—ie you need to do something with it—it goes to an Action This Day folder. If it’s not actionable you only have two choices; delete or archive it and that will depend whether you may want to reference it later or not.
Now, with your actionable email, you reverse the way the folder shows you the mail. You want it to show the oldest at the top. This means when you sit down to deal with your email, you begin at the top—it’s the oldest email there so in theory it is the most urgent—and work your way down the list.
Because they are ordered oldest to newest, if you are unable to get to the bottom of your list for the day, it won’t be a problem because the ones you did not get to will be at the top of your list tomorrow.
When you become consistent with this, you will find email is no longer a problem.
In your case Enrique, one of the things you must do is to clear your inbox and that may take a morning or afternoon to do—it may even take you a whole day, but the only way you will ever get on top of it, is to stop, and clear that inbox.
This may involve declaring email bankruptcy. With that you have a choice you can choose to do a hard bankruptcy—that involves deleting all mail older than ten days. The other choice is to do a soft email bankruptcy, which involves taking all mail older than ten days and moving them into a folder called “Old Inbox”. You can then process that over time. (Although, I find most people end up deleting that folder after a few months)
If you want to earn more about managing email, you can join my Email Mastery course. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes for you.
Now there are other things you can do Enrique, you do need to know what your core work and areas of focus are so you can ensure you are working on these. But if you want to get back in control of everything the place to start is to stop. Step back and put in place COD and some better email management practices.
It will take time, but developing the processes and habits will soon have you in control and no longer feeling overwhelmed with everything you have to do.
I hope that has helped and than you for sending in you question. Thank you also to you too for listening. It just remains for now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 285
This week, it’s all about what should and should not go on your To-Do list.
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Episode 285 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 285 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Do you have too many tasks in your task manager? It’s one thing committing to using one, it’s an entirely different thing ensuring the right kind of tasks are on your list. Get this part wrong and you are going to soon find yourself overwhelmed.
I regularly see a common type of task on a to-do list that really should not be there, and I see quite a lot of tasks on a calendar that should be on a to-do list.
I know, it sounds confusing, but once you learn this strategy, you will soon find your task list reduces and you feel a lot less anxious and overwhelmed.
Now, before we get to the question and answer, let me just inform you that on Friday (that’s the 4th August for those of you in the US) My next Ultimate Productivity Workshop begins. That’s a 90 minute live workshop via Zoom where over the four Fridays of August, we cover how to get the most out of your calendar and task manager as well how to better manage your email and messages and finally in the fourth week, we cover planning.
As part of this workshop you have access to my Mini-Course set—that’s four of my most popular mini-courses—AND you get to download the workshop itself so you can keep it for later reference (and also if you are unable to attend one or more sessions)
Places are limited now, but there are a few still available. If you want to take your own time management and productivity to the next level, then get yourself signed up now and I’ll see you on Friday. More details on the workshop plus how to register are in the show notes.
Okay, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Grace. Grace asks, Hi Carl, I began using Microsoft’s ToDo app last March and at first it really helped. But now, I find it’s become so overwhelming. I hate going in there because it reminds me how much I still have to do. Do you have any tips on making my ToDo better?
Hi Grace, thank you for your question.
This is something that happens to so many people. There’s the initial excitement of being able to put all the things we feel we have to do into a simple app, and to add dates to when we will do these tasks. And because at first we rarely put too much in there, our daily lists are not too bad. They are doable and if we do reschedule something, it doesn’t feel too bad because we got at least 80% of what was on the list done.
It’s a great feeling, yes?
However, over time, we add more and more stuff. We start to add things we don’t want to forget about such as an upcoming event, anniversary or birthday. We then start to fiddle with the projects area and start adding more and more and more.
And eventually, we find ourself with an endless list of projects with a lot of unclear tasks telling to do something we cannot remember why we needed to do them in the first place.
We also begin adding random dates to tasks in a vain attempt to prevent us from forgetting something. Of course, when those task appear on our today list we just reschedule them again because we’re now trying to keep our heads above the water and as these tasks are not urgent or they don’t have a clear deadline, they can be sacrificed today. And that, just kicks the problem down the road.
Eventually, what most people do is blame the tool because that’s much easier than blaming the real culprit, and they go back to YouTube and watch their favourite YouTubers and see what they are reviewing now. And lo and behold, these people are talking about the latest new app that promises to make you more productive, more relaxed and do the work for you.
So, it’s switch time and the the cycle is complete and ready to be repeated.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
In my podcast from a couple of weeks ago, I talked about what David Allen taught me over a lunch we had back in 2016. That was the forget the tools and focus on developing your system.
You see the problem is never the tools. You could very easily create your own digital task manager using Google Sheets, Excel of Apple Numbers. Sure, there’d be a bit of setting up work and some fine tuning, but it’s certainly doable and I know a lot of people who have done this perfectly fine.
The problem is with your system and more specifically what you are collecting into your task manager.
Let’s look at the different types of tasks commonly found in a task manager. There are the obvious ones like; “send document to Jenny” or “buy bracelet for Claire’s birthday”. These are clear and very specific. Then you will likely have your routines in there such as take the garbage out, do the laundry or complete my expense report.
Hopefully, you will also have your areas of focus tasks in there. Tasks such as schedule this week’s exercise programme, send money to savings account and call parents.
Now, the other types of tasks are often where the problems begin. These are tasks that involving decisions or thought. If you see a task such as “think about where to go for our summer holiday”, you’re in trouble.
You see a task like this is not actionable. It’s not something you can actually do. It’s something you need to be away from your desk and in a place where you are better able to think. It’s also something that needs a bit of time to do.
For a task like this, you would be better off creating a task such as “create list of possible places to go for our summer holiday” and move over to your note app to create the list.
Similarly with your “decide” type tasks. Again, this is not really actionable. It’s something you need to contemplate and weigh the pros and cons of your options. Again, this should be in your notes app.
Now, I know why these kind of activities are in task managers. It’s because people are afraid they will forget about them. And that’s a valid fear. However, there are two options you have here. The first is to create a recurring task in your task manager to remind you to review you thinking or decision list. The second is to use the all day event space in your calendar and add them there.
In both cases you will not forget them. They will always be visible every time you open your notes or calendar.
Now, what about time specific tasks. Tasks such as pick up Tommy from swimming class? These are not tasks, they are events and should be in your calendar. Watch out for these. We often add them to our task managers because it’s easier than adding them to our calendar. Sure, use your inbox to collect the item, but when you process your inbox, move it over to your calendar.
Another way you can overwhelm your task manager is adding individual communication items in there. I frequently see people having ten to twenty tasks a day that begin reply to this email, or email that person. This is guaranteed way to overwhelm your system.
Email replies should not need to be in a task manager. You already have a great tool for managing emails, and messages for that matter. Whether you use Gmail, Outlook or Apple mail, there’s a built in inbox, the same goes for Slack, Teams and Twist. Transfer items from those inboxes to another inbox, is simply duplicating and adding additional steps you do not need.
Instead you can simply have a single task in your task manager reminding you to clear your email and messages. That will then trigger you to move over to your mail or message app and you can focus your attention there.
Now if you take all or some of these tips, Grace, you are going to reduce the number of tasks in your task list immediately.
However, there is one more tip. This tip will remove overwhelm and any anxiety you may have about the number of tasks you need to do each day. Sadly, 95% of you will not do it. Instead you will find an excuse.
This tip is, give yourself five to ten minutes at the end of the day to review you tasks for tomorrow and make sure it is not overwhelming. Now you need to be realistic. You should check your calendar to make sure you have the time to complete what you have on your list and if not, trim down the list to a more realistic one.
Like I said, most people will not do this, and so they begin the day overwhelmed and no idea where to start. When you do allow those five to ten minutes, when you start the day you know exactly what you will start with, you have a manageable list and you there’s no procrastination.
It’s brilliantly simple, works every time, yet, sadly, not sexy. So, few people ever do it. Instead, it’s far easier to blame the tool, or your boss for giving you too much work. That might be true in some cases, but you will be a lot more focused and productive if you can add those five to ten minutes.
So, Grace, I would recommend you go through your tasks in ToDo and look for tasks that require you to think or decide and move them to your notes app. I would also look for anything that is not clear. Tasks that say something like “call George”, that’s not an a task, it’s a statement that gives you no information. Call George about what? Make it clear.
Unclear tasks require you to think and try and remember what it is you need to do. Remove that thought process and make it clear. Call George about next month’s offsite meeting” will prevent any hesitation and give you a much clearer idea how long it will take.
And, remove all tasks that no longer need doing. It’s surprising how quickly these can accumulate. Clear them. Don’t worry about them because if they are important, they will come back and you can add them again.
I hope that helps, Grace. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Is what you want to get accomplished this week realistic, or are you setting yourself up for disappointment? That’s what we are looking at this week.
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Episode 284 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 284 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
What do you want to get accomplished this week? What are the “big rocks” you want to deal with so you end the week knowing you have got what needed to be done, done?
If you don’t know, your week is already destroyed. It’s destroyed because if you don’t know what you want to get completed that week, then someone else will tell you what to do. And that means you are working on other people’s agenda and benevolently helping them to achieve their goals.
But where does that leave you? When it comes to promotion opportunities who’s going to get the promotion? You who are running around dealing with everyone else’s issues and work and as a consequence not getting much done. Or the person who is getting their tasks completed on time and consistently moving things forward each week?
Ultimately, all this comes down to making a decision. Will you spend thirty minutes or so at the end of the week looking ahead and establishing some objectives for the following week or not? Only you can make that decision or find an excuse. Either way, on this issue, only you can make that choice.
And so, this naturally leads to me handing you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Julie. Julie asks, hi Carl, I know weekly planning is important, and I try to do it, but when I get to the end of the week, I am just so relieved the week is over and the last thing I want to do is think about the next week. I know this is impacting my career prospects and was wondering if there is something I can do that will motivate me to do something about planning the week.
Hi Julie, thank you for your question.
Firstly Julie, this is an area I know so many people struggle with. I think everyone knows the advantages and importance of having some kind of plan for the week, yet it can be hard to motivate ourselves to spend a little time looking ahead and deciding what needs to get done the following week.
However, before we can get to the planning stage there is something very important that needs addressing. That is asking yourself what can you realistically get done the following week. I suspect most people don’t do, or stop doing a weekly plan, because they very rarely, if ever, accomplish anything they plan anyway.
If you spent an hour or two (and yes, some people do waste that much time planning the week) and then never get close to completing that plan, what’s the point? Why bother in the first place?
This is why you do not want to be spending hours and hours on a weekly plan. It’s a waste of time. You see, there are far too many unknowns. You have no idea how many emails you will get on Tuesday morning, let alone what your boss with ask you to do via WhatsApp or Slack on Monday afternoon.
In a way, this is the missing piece of planning a week that almost everyone overlooks. All the unknowns that will be thrown at you throughout the week. It’s these that have an enormous impact on what you can and cannot get done in a week.
I recently learned that author Jeffrey Archer disappears to Marbella from 27th December to around the first week of February to completely focus on his writing. During those five to six weeks he does nothing else but write. He effectively removes himself from the possibility of distractions in order to get his work done. It’s this that allows him the confidence to know that he will complete his first draft in those few weeks.
It’s unlikely you have the luxury to be able to disappear and remove all possibility of distraction to focus on your work, which means you also lose the confidence to know with almost complete certainty what you will be able to accomplish in a given week.
But that’s okay because you don’t need to know with absolute confidence what you can accomplish in a week. All you need to know is what you want to get accomplished in a week.
Now, this begins with knowing what your core work is—that is the work you are employed to do—the absolute basics.
For me, that means writing a blog post, two newsletters. The script for this podcast and recording two YouTube videos.
I also have between fifteen and twenty hours of meetings each week and I need around an hour a day to deal with my communications. In total, I need around thirty three hours each week to complete my non-negotiable work.
Now, let’s say I want to work on some projects too, if I were to work a forty-hour week I still have seven hours to play with. That’s an hour a day on average for project work and to deal with the unexpected. I’ve found that’s more than enough to keep things moving forward.
Sure, from time I need more time to deal with an emergency or to unstick a project. But that doesn’t happen every week, so on average when I begin each week, I know as long as I have a plan to cover my core work and get that done, I have enough time.
However, if you do not have a plan, you introduce the biggest problem. Uncertainty.
How much time are you losing each day trying to decide what to do? Should you do this or should you do that? Perhaps you should make a start on that thing, but then you had better finish this thing off first. No wait! You’d better check your email—there might be something important in there!
How many times a day do you have that conversation with yourself?
It’s conversations like that that demonstrates clearly the disadvantages of not knowing what you want to get done that week.
When you know that Project A needs to be moved forward this week, that conversation does not happen. You know you need to move it forward, so you open up your project notes and get started. If you’ve done a plan for the week you know what you want to do. It could be you want to get the design proofs off to your boss for approval, or it might be to send out a tender to five contractors. If you’ve done a plan for the week you know precisely what you want to get done and there’s no uncertainty or hesitation. The only decision you need to make is when will you sit down and do the work. And making decision is considerably easier than trying to decide what to do in the first place.
Deicing what to do in the moment is hard. It’s what I would describe as a pressure decision. With no plan you are rushed into making a decision based on very limited information. It’s like trying to make a decision about which direction to go in the bottom of foggy valley.
When you do a weekly plan, that’s your chance to clamber up the highest peak of the valley and look ahead with clear blue skies. You can see all around you, where the dangers are, which direction to go and where you currently are. It’s a much clearer view than what you get at the bottom of the valley where the fog is settled.
The resistance to planning the week can be attributed to many things. The idea you don’t want to think about work at the end of the week, or the thought it’s going to take you two or three hours to do it properly. And that understandable. After all, if you’ve read David Allen’s book, Getting Things Done or read an article about the weekly review, it’s likely you think two or three hours is normal.
But it’s not. Sure the first time you do plan the week it could take you two or three hours (or more), but that’s just the first time you do it. You’re unsure, you’re don’t where to start to where to look. And of course, you will be slow.
Let’s be honest, when you took your first steps in from of your parents, I bet you didn’t walk across the room particularly fast did you? No. You stubbed, fell down and walked very steadily. It’s the same with weekly planning the first and second ones will be slow. But by the time you do your third one you will have cut the time down significantly and the more times you complete one, the faster you will get.
To give you a reference point. My weekly planning takes on average thirty minutes. I know were to look, I know what to look for and I know how to add dates to the things that need to be done the following week.
And now, when should you do the weekly planning.
Okay, so I did a lot of research into this a couple of years ago. I’ve also experimented on myself. What I’ve found is the best time to do your weekly planning is Saturday morning.
Now for those of you who have strict rules about work and personal life and have just spat out a mouthful of your coffee, hear me out.
Why Saturday morning? Well, the first thing is you’re not not going to be tired. That excuse is squashed. You can sleep an extra hour wake up slowly and gently—well, you can if you don’t have a young family.
More importantly, though, you get it done early so you can then enjoy the weekend without sudden anxiety attacks about what you think you must get done next week. You prevent that from happening because you will already have cleared your mind and can then relax and actually enjoy the weekend without worrying about what you may or may not need to get done the following week.
Saturday morning is also a time when the week just gone by is still fresh in your mind and you are not going to be disturbed.
Now, all you are asking for is thirty minutes. That’s a small sacrifice for a weekend free of anxiety and worry isn’t it?
This is why I don’t recommend doing your planning on a Sunday evening. That leaves you at the mercy of worrying thoughts about the week ahead all weekend. That’s not going to give you a pleasant weekend and it’s very difficult to pick yourself up off the sofa and go power up your computer and start planning the week after a lovely, relaxing weekend.
No, get it done early so you can relax and enjoy the weekend free from thoughts about work and horrors that may reveal themselves to you at 8:30am on Monday morning.
So there you go, Julie. I hope that helps and gives you a little motivation for doing a weekly planning session. Enjoy it, put on some of your favourite music, make yourself a lovely cup of tea and smile. You know you are doing the right thing.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is all about what is important in your time management and productivity system.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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The Planning Course
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Episode 283 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 283 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
With the constant influx of new productivity tools it can be difficult to settle on a set of tools because you are worried that you might be missing the boat or there could be something out there that is better than what you are using now and could, in theory, make you even better at managing your time and being more productive.
But wait, do all these new tools really offer you the opportunity to improve your time management or productivity? Have you considered the time cost penalty of switching and then learning the new way to find what you need and organise everything?
The truth is not what you may think and it’s something I learned several years ago. Once I did, my productivity shot through the roof. I was better organised and I quickly discovered I had more time to do the things I loved doing. Which was a bit of a shock.
So that brings me to this week’s question, it’s also a question I frequently get on YouTube comments, and I thought it would be a good idea to share my discoveries with you so you can make your own decision.
So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question come from Kevin. Kevin asks, Hi Carl, I’ve always wondered why you don’t use apps like Notion and Obsidian. I notice a lot productivity YouTubers use these apps, but you seem to stick with the same apps. Is there a reason you don’t check these apps out?
Hi Kevin, thank you for your question.
To answer your question directly, the reason I don’t switch my apps is because David Allen told me not to.
Now, for those of your who don’t know, David Allen wrote the “bible” of time management and productivity: Getting Things Done and he is considered the Godfather of today’s productivity systems.
Back in 2016, David visited Korea and I reached out to him and I got to meet him. We had lunch together, and we inevitably talked productivity. The conversation soon got onto tools and I asked him if he really does still use eProductivity—an app that was an offshoot of the old Lotus Notes. He confirmed he did.
Now at that time, I was still on my productivity tools journey. I don’t think I stuck with a task manager for longer than three of four months before I was searching around for a new one to “play with”.
I was curious, and asked him if he’d ever considered using something else—something that was available on his iPhone or iPad as as well as his computer. (eProductivity was only available on a computer) and he said: Why?
I was a bit stuck there, but he added why would he change something that works? Something that he’d learned to use inside out and could pretty much use with his eyes closed. He also pointed out that eProductivity was reliable, it didn’t rely on syncing (which back in 2016 was not particularly reliable for anything) and he couldn’t remember the last time it crashed.
As our conversation continued, David elaborated on his system. He carried with him a leather wallet that contained a little note pad and pen. If he thought of something he’d write it down on the notepad and when he got back to his office (or hotel room) he would tear out the notes and add them to his inbox (or traveling inbox if he was on a business trip).
Later when he had time he would transfer those notes to eProductivity. This gave him an opportunity to filter out the stuff that didn’t need any action and decide whether something was a note or a task.
That process wasn’t something he’d developed overnight. It took twenty years or more. Refining and developing the so called muscle memory to automatically add something to the note pad when anything came up isn’t something you will develop over a few weeks or months. It takes years.
But more importantly, the method David Allen had created for himself ensured he was always asking the right questions about something. If you’ve read the Getting things Done book, he writes about these questions. They are:
What is it? Is it actionable? If so, what needs to happen?
It was during our conversation, I told him of my dilemma at that time which was Todoist or OmniFocus? David answered, “pick one and stick with it.”
It was that that revolutionised my productivity. “Pick one and stick with it” has been my mantra since then. This is why I still use Todoist and Evernote to this day.
Everything David told me, happened. My productivity went through the roof. I was no longer searching around looking for something better, I was focused on, forgive the pun, getting things done.
Suddenly, I was able watch a little TV in evenings instead of reading about new productivity tools. I started having longer and better conversations with my wife because I wasn’t distracted playing around with another new toy.
I’m sure it’s no coincidence that from around late 2016 early 2017, I was able to run two businesses, produce two YouTube videos a week and write a blog post as well as start this podcast. None of that would have been possible if I were still searching and looking for new and better tools.
You the see the time cost involved in switching your tools every few months is ridiculous. There’s the searching around and watching countless YouTube videos. Then there’s the switch cost, where you move everything across and organise things how you want it (which ironically is rarely different from the way you organised it before) and finally, the biggest time suck of all, learning to use the new app. That can take weeks, if not months to get up to the speed you were at using your previous app.
Oh, and there’s all that researching trying to figure out how to do something you were able to do in your previous app, which you now discover is not available in your new app.
Do I want to go through all that again? No thank you.
Now, that’s not to say there are no reasons for changing your tools. Evernote is a classic example. A few years ago they changed their app considerably when Evernote changed to Evernote 10. The early versions were horrible and everything I’d learned in the previous eight years changed and I was faced with relearning how to use Evernote. I was very tempted to change to Apple Notes at that time. I didn’t because I know the penalties of changing and I’m glad I didn’t. Evernote 10 is now reliable and robust and I’ve had three years to learn how to use Evernote 10.
But, had Evernote not solved those initial problems, I would have changed. I need my tools to work so I can work. I don’t want to spend time in the day trying to figure out how to fix a broken app.
The more I research productive people, the more I see tools are not important. Recently, I researched author Jeffrey Archer. He began writing his books in the 1970s and wrote them by hand. He still does today. In interviews, he talks about having a system that works, so why change it.
John Grisham writes his books in Word—there are loads of new writing apps that are possibly better than Word, yet he knows Word, it works, so why change it? For him, Word is a part of his writing process, and over 50 books later, why change that system?
For me, Todoist and Evernote are all a part of my process. Todoist tells me what I need to work on, Evernote contains my notes on whatever I am working on, whether that is a YouTube video, this podcast, a blog post or a course. It’s seamless, it works and can all be done in less than two seconds. Why would I want to change that?
A client of mine is a screenwriter and he’s been using Final Draft for over twenty years. Can you imagine how quick he is getting down to writing his scripts?
I worked with a copywriter who had used Apple’s built in Text Edit app for fifteen years and would not contemplate using anything else to do her work because as a simple text file her work was transferable to any computer system or app. The brilliance was in the simplicity of her system.
I’ve worked with photographers who can do incredible magic with Adobe’s Lightroom at lighten speed because they’ve used it every day for over ten years.
It all comes down to what you want. Is it the thrill of playing with something new? There’s nothing wrong with that, but you need need to be honest about it. You do not want to be fooling yourself in to believing that the next new app will make you more productive. It won’t.
What will make you more productive is the system you put in place. Going back to Jeffrey Archer, his writing system is simple. He disappears on the 27th December to his house in Mallorca, where for the next five weeks he will follow the same process each day, By the 2nd or 3rd February, he has a completed first draft of his next book. All handwritten on a large bundle of paper.
That’s how you become more productive. Focus on your process for doing your work. Whether you are a salesperson, an interior designer, a doctor or a software developer. Pick tools that will work for you for many years to come and focus on doing your work not the tools. The simpler your system, the better and faster you will be.
All you need is a calendar, a task manager and notes app for your productivity tools. These days, I would advise these are all available on each of the devices you have, so you have everything you need with you at all times. Pick tools that work for you and stick with them. By sticking with them, your system will develop, grow and adjust and that pushes you towards focusing on your work—which is the secret to becoming more productive and better with managing your time.
Thank you Kevin for your question and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, what can you do when the demands of others prevent you from doing your work.
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Episode 282 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 282 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Do you have a boss or a customer that expects you to be available 24/7? Perhaps, your boss always wants to know where you are and what you are doing or they rely on you to get them information because they are too lazy, or unable, to look up the information themselves.
These demands and distractions are a common intrusion and do prevent you from getting on with your work. It could be you are being invited to meetings you have little to contribute to but feel you must attend because your boss sent the invitation.
And on the other side, there are clients and customers who expect you to drop everything in order to serve them.
It’s these interferences into our carefully curated schedules that cause a lot of our time management and productivity issues. You are willing, but outside forces prevent you from getting on with your most important work. What can you do? Well, that’s the issue in this week’s question.
Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice, I’d just like to mention that My Ultimate Productivity Workshop is returning in August. For the four Friday evenings in August I invite you to settle in for a ninety-minute intimate workshop with myself where we cover your calendar, task manager, communications and the daily and weekly planning sessions.
In all, this workshop will give you the know-how to build your own, personalised productivity system—a system that will grow with you over many years.
And not only that, when you register for the workshop, you get free access to my mini-course bundle as this will be important for getting the most out of the workshop.
I hope you can join me, and if you are unable to attend one or more of the sessions, do not fear, you can email me any questions and I will answer them in the session and you can get the recording of the session almost immediately after the session ends.
Anyway, back to this week’s podcast question and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from George. George asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried to implement a lot of what you teach but always come up with a problem. My manager expects me to answer her questions immediately and that stops me from being able to focus on my core work or use time blocking. How have you overcome managers like this in the past?
Hi George, thank you for your question.
You are not alone. This is a pernicious problem I see with a lot of companies these days. And it’s not just micro-managing bosses, but can also be caused by demanding customers and clients who expect you to be available whenever they have a question.
Fortunately, I have experienced these types before, and over the years developed a number of strategies to prevent the interruptions and demands.
I’m surprised this is still happening. I am frequently reminded that companies these days are more considerate about their employee needs and welfare, yet at the same time, old-fashioned managers who feel they need to know what each of their direct reports are doing and where they are are still employed.
If you are a manager who needs to know what their team are doing at all times, then you have a trust issue. Either you are unable to trust your team, or you are employing the wrong people. Either way, the problem is with you. If you want your team to flourish, grow and produce the results you employed them to produce, you need to let them free and get on with it. Trust they will do their part of the work.
Now, in your case, George, you have identified the problem, which is a great start. From that start, you can now begin to come up with some ideas that may reduce the interference from your boss.
The first step, and the one that has always worked for me, is to have a sit down conversation with your manager. Ask her what she expects of you, where she feels you are not performing and what you can do to change that. Never point the finger at your boss, let her tell you what she expects and where she would like to see improvements.
The first things she tells you will not be the real problem. The real problem will be the second and third issues. We all feel uncomfortable criticising other people, so we tend to begin with the gentler, less negative issues. Push her to continue, ask questions about why she feel that way and listen carefully to what she tells you.
This approach will be uncomfortable for you too. Nobody likes to hear criticism, particularly if you pride yourself on being organised and productive. You do not have to accept all the criticisms. A lot will not be fair or true. But it is important for you to listen.
The final few items will not be real issues. We add them to pad out our criticisms, and to make the list, if you like, appear bigger than it really is.
Once you know where your boss feels there are issues, suggest remedies. Think about how you can change things so these issues disappear. Use the If I… Will you.. Approach.
This means when you make a concession, (If I…) you ask for a concession in return (will you…)
For instance:
If I commit to updating the CRM system at the end of each day, will you allow me to focus on my work from 10:00am to 12:00pm without disturbing me?
Now you may find you have to negotiate a little. For example, if your boss does not want you to ’disappear’ for two hours each morning, try one hour.
Once your boss begins to see results, she will concede more trust to you. She will give you greater freedom to organise your own schedule. But, it takes time and the onus is on you as much as it is with your boss.
Now, to a related matter. What about clients and customers. How do you deal with their demands? This is an expectations issue and one that can be easily resolved through good, clear communication.
When I worked in law, the barristers we worked with (that’s legal counsel in the UK, not coffee brewers) made it very clear they were in court between 10:30am and 12:30pm and between 2:00pm and 4:30pm each day. We knew we could not contact them between those times. We were the client for these barristers, yet I never remember any barrister not telling us when they would be available. I suspect it was part of their legal training to make sure clients were informed when they were not available.
That has always appeared to be a common sense approach to me, it just made sense. Yet so many people when working with customers and clients cause themselves problems by promising the world knowing deep down they could never keep that promise.
It’s far better, when starting a new relationship with a client or anyone else related to your work, for that matter, to inform them of your availability up front. Tell them the best way to contact you and when. Explain there will be times you are unavailable and what you and they can do in those situations.
I live on the opposite side of the world to the majority of my clients, which means I am between 17 and 8 hours ahead. When it’s 10pm at night for me, it’s 9am in New York, 2pm in London and 6am in LA. To overcome any communication issues, I inform all my clients to email me any questions and promise to respond within 24 hours.
In order to comply with my own ‘rules’, I need to allocate an hour of my day to dealing with communications. That’s blocked off in my calendar and so I know when it’s 4:30pm, it’s time to sit down and respond to my messages. This means whenever a client wakes up, they will see my reply in their inbox waiting for them.
It’s not sustainable to be always available at a moment’s notice for your boss or customers. That’s how things get missed, backlogs build and ultimately your performance at your job will suffer. You need to find time to focus on your important work.
Abraham Lincoln is attributed as saying” Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” It makes sense, yes? You are going to be more productive chopping down trees if your axe is sharp. Well, I’ve noticed that the most successful people in business do something similar with their time.
Stella Rimington, the former head of the UK’s Security Service would arrive in her office at 7:00am each day in order to get two hours deep focused work done before the day began. She would read the overnight intelligence reports and use the time to prepare for her work day.
Time Cook at Apple, does something similar. He also arrives in the office early (some say 6:30am other claim it’s 7:30am) and uses the time before the work day begins to get a grip on the day and to ensure he has everything prepared.
Now, if you work purely for the financial compensation, this will not work. For you, working an extra two hours or ninety minutes each day would be sacrilege. But if you are developing a career, using your employment to learn and grow yourself, then this is something worth considering. Perhaps begin your day thirty or sixty minutes earlier and use that time for focused work.
It gets you ahead of the day, it means you have time to process all the information needed to make the most of your day and you are not going to be disturbed. It’s surprising how much you can get done in just a couple of hours early in the morning.
So there you go, George, a few ideas you can use to take control of your day. The most powerful one is to have that conversation with your boss. Reset expectations and use the “If I… Will you…” approach. Tell everyone when and when you are not available. You can even put that into your email signature.
Demanding bosses can be ‘controlled’, just like customers and clients can be controlled. I don’t mean control in a dark and evil way, I just mean in terms of their expectations. Don’t make promises you cannot keep, and be ruthless in the way you apply your rules.
It will be uncomfortable at first, but you will be surprised by the amount of respect you receive and the results you start to get.
Thank you for your question, George and than you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is all about breaking tasks down into manageable chunks and how to organise your academic studies.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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The Planning Course
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Episode 281 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 281 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
An area I find most people struggle with is breaking bigger tasks down into manageable chunks. How do you determine something like “write report on Quarter 1 Marketing campaign” when you may not know where to start? While it might be clear what needs to be done, it may not be clear how long something like this would take.
In many ways this comes about because we are not prioritising correctly. If your number one task for the day is to complete a report, or write a paper for your professor, why would an email or message become more important. You have no idea what or how many emails and messages you will get each day, you only know you will get some, but email and messages can never be your priority for the day. They don’t move things forward for you. They might help other people, but if your number one priority is the report, why change your plan?
Anyway, before we go any further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Meghan. Meghan asks, Hi Carl, thank you for your recent podcasts on core work. One area I struggle with is knowing how long a task will take. Should I be allocating time for each task or just doing what I can. Additionally, how would a Ph.D student define their core work?
Thank you Meghan for your question.
Let me begin with the second part of your question first. What is the core work of a Ph.D student?
This is going to relate to your chosen topic. What are you studying? The vast majority of your work here is going to be researching, taking notes and perhaps conducting studies. This is primarily likely to involve a lot of reading. So how much reading do you feel you need to do each week?
This needs time allocating to and that’s where you calendar comes in. Let’s imagine you want to spend four hours a day reading. How will you break that down? If you were an early bird—someone who likes to start their day early, you may choose 6am to 8am as your reading time. You could then perhaps set aside a further two hours later in the afternoon. That would still leave you with plenty of time for dealing with communications, socialising and meeting with your professor.
If you are not an early bird and prefer doing your reading later in the day you can schedule it for late evening,
Working on any studies you are conducting or papers you are writing should also be scheduled in your calendar.
With these two activities your calendar will tell you your writing and reading blocks and that’s all they say. You task manager and notes will indicate what you will read or write.
Now, onto establishing how long a task should take you. That’s going to be very different most of the time. However, it’s not really about how long you should spend doing a task, it’s more about how much time you have available to spend on that task.
Let me give you a personal example from this podcast. It takes me around two hours to write the script for this podcast. Some days I can write it faster, other days I may need more time. Every Tuesday morning, I have a two hour writing block in my calendar and for the most part I can get this script written. However, this week, I was only able to schedule an hour on Tuesday morning, which meant the script was only half done. I then needed to find another hour later in the week to finish it off.
When looking at my calendar, I discovered that the only time I had available was Saturday evening. Now that raises a question. Do I use time I generally protect for other things, or do I allocate an hour to writing the script? Well, as I need to record and publish the podcast on Sunday afternoon and Sunday morning I have a lot of meetings, the only time I had was Saturday. The decision was made.
I could of course have decided not to publish a podcast this week, but I see this podcast as part of my core work and therefore non-negotiable. So, the decision was easy, block an hour off on Saturday evening.
The truth is that doesn’t happen very often, so it’s not like I have to regularly write this script in my rest time, but if it must be done, it must be done.
Now, for the first part of your question, Meghan. How do you determine how long a task will take? For most of you a lot of what you do will be predictable. A simple example, would be doing a weekly grocery shop. I know, for instance, I need an hour for this. Similarly, taking my dog for a walk will be an hour.
You will also find a lot of the work you do is part of a process. If you were a graphic designer, perhaps much of your work would be sending concepts and ideas to your clients and awaiting their approval. If you been designing for a long time you will likely know how long a piece of work will take. I know, for instance, I need an hour to write my weekly blog post. It’s not an exact science, some days I can write it in forty minutes, other days I need ninety minutes. On average, though, it takes around an hour.
I watched an interesting talk by Jeffrey Archer. Jeffrey Archer is a prolific author having written over forty books in the last forty years. He has an interesting schedule for doing his work.
He will wake up at 5:30am, and begin writing at 6AM. He writes for two hours (by hand, not keyboard) and then take a two hour break. Then from 10am to 12pm he will write some more before taking another two hour break. He will do another two hour session from 2 til 4 and finally between 6pm and 8pm he will read through what he had written for that day.
The interesting thing here is he is not counting the amount of words he writes. That depends on the flow. Somedays he will write a lot, other days it will be a struggle. The key for him is he follows the process each day. He knows, after forty books, it will take him around 1,000 hours to write a book and see it on the bookshelves.
I know after nearly 800 blog posts that a blog post from first draft to publication takes two hours.
Notice that Jeffrey Archer gets six hours of writing in each day and has plenty of time in the breaks to make phone calls, write emails and deal with other administration tasks. He’s focused on the 1,000 hours over six months, not worrying about how many words he will write each day.
So, what about you, if you have a task to do when does it need to be finished by? Imagine you have a task to do and you need to deliver it by the end of the week. The best day to start is today. First task, look at what needs to be done. Do you need to do some research? If so, how much time can you dedicate to the research? Perhaps you can only do two hours. That’s fine, block research time off in your calendar. How much time will you need to prepare the finished task? If its a written piece or a presentation, how long do you need?
If you leave that to Thursday, you are going to find yourself in trouble. My advice is to start writing it no later than Wednesday. It’s likely you will only know how much time you need when you begin the work. I find if I am designing a workshop for a company, I only know how long it will take once I develop the outline. Once I have that I can anticipate how much time I need.
There’s always going to be something in the work you do that will give you an indication how long something will take. Let’s imagine you have a difficult customer. When you first learn of the problem, you will have no idea how long you will need to resolve the problem. You will not know that, until you speak to the customer. So, speak with the customer at the earliest opportunity. From that conversation, you will now have some idea about what needs to be done and how long it will take.
If you delay having that conversation, all you will be doing is guessing. And, worse, your brain will be warning you that you need a lot of time. It’s likely you won’t need a lot of time, but our brain is not logical, it panics until you can give it something solid to work with. So, make the call or open your notes and make a decision on what you will do first and when you will do it.
However, the only way you will learn how long something will take is to develop a process for doing your work. It’s through processes that you will learn how long something will take. When I was teaching English, I used to do seminars for companies in different aspects of English communication. The first time I put together a seminar, I didn’t know how long it would take. The first one took me around twenty hours, the second and subsequent ones took on average sixteen.
Once I knew that, I could plan out my preparation time and refine things. I also focused on the process for building the seminar, so I was able to break down the components parts and make those more streamlined and gave me a better understanding how long each part would take.
It also taught me I needed a minimum of two weeks to prepare the seminar. It was possible to do it in a week, but that would mean working longer hours than I wanted to. I ended up with a process that took sixteen hours spread out over two weeks.
And that’s what I would suggest you do with the work you are doing. Track what you do, how long each part takes and look for ways to naturally break it down. You an then use your calendar to spread out the different parts so they get done.
I hope that has helped, Meghan. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, how do you motivate yourself when you are just not in the mood to do any work?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Planning Course
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The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 280 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 280 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
How often do you wake up in the morning with a long list of to-dos and just want to crawl back under your duvet? Or come back from lunch, look at your desk and just go “naw, just not in the mood”?
If it’s more times that you would like, you are not alone. If you are a living human being, it’s going to happen. You are going to have good days and bad. It’s perfectly normal and not something you should beat yourself up about. However, sometimes that lack of motivation to do the work, can be untimely. You may have a deadline, an urgent matter to deal with or some preparation for a meeting to complete. What can you do in these circumstances? Well, that’s the topic of this week’s podcast.
And so, to get things started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Mohammed, Mohammed asks, Hi Carl, how do you stay so motivated each day? I really struggle with this. When I get up in the morning, I feel demotivated and just don’t want to get up. Do you have any suggestions on how to wake up feeling more motivated?
Hi Mohammed, thank you for your question.
There are a number ways you can wake up feeling more motivated and energised for the day. One simple trick is to make sure you get enough sleep. We all need between six and eight hours of sleep each night although we differ on the optimum number—for example, I discovered I needed seven hours, twenty minutes, not the six I thought I needed, I’ve learnt if I sleep less than seven hours, I will not have a very productive day and will likely need to take a nap sometime in the early afternoon.
You can discover your optimum daily sleep hours by doing a simple test. For one week, sleep with no alarm and track how many hours you sleep. At the end of the seven days, total up the number of hours you slept and divide it by seven. That will give you the number of hours you actually need, rather than guessing the number.
Once you know your optimum number of sleep hours, set yourself a going to bed time (thirty minutes before you need to be asleep) and stick to it.
I know this may require you to change a few things. If you are in the habit of scrolling social media or watching TV late at night, you may need to adjust the amount of time you spend doing these things. But I can assure you once you dial in your sleep patterns, you will soon find yourself waking up feeling a lot better than you likely do right now.
While sleep is not going to affect your motivation, it will ensure you have the energy to get through the day.
Now, what about motivation. This has everything to do with your mindset about the work you do. If you see your work purely in monetary terms, you are going to feel demotivated. Money as has been discovered is a poor long-term motivator. Sure if someone offered you a lot of money to do something, it’s probable you will do it as long as it does not conflict with your personal values—after all the saying “everyone has their price” is largely true. But is it the money that motivates you or what you think you could do with the money?
As Daniel Pink discovered several years ago, there’s an amount of money you need to earn to live and anything above that figure will not motivate you. Daniel Pink set that amount at around $70,000 per year. Beyond that, because it does not affect your ability to eat, have a roof over your head or the financial ability to take a holiday once or twice a year, money no longer provides an incentive. (Although we think it does) It might be nice to buy an expensive watch or to own a luxury beach-side villa in the Mediterranean, but your needs—food, and shelter are taken care of and material things are not going to motivate you when it comes to getting up in the morning to do your work.
I’m currently reading about Robert Maxwell. In case you do not know, Robert Maxwell was the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers in the 1980s and early 1990s. (If you are listening in the US, Maxwell also bought the New York Daily News) Maxwell, it turns out was a crook. He was stealing money from not only his public companies, he also stole his employees pension funds and owed multiple banks many millions of dollars when he died in 1991.
Maxwell didn’t steal all this money because he wanted more material things. He already had a helicopter, private jet, a yacht and multiple homes. He stole this money because he desperately wanted to maintain his identity and reputation. His self image prevented him from being able to cut back his excesses and it ultimately destroyed him and many thousands of Mirror Group employees’ pensions.
Maxwell’s motivation each day was his need to maintain his empire and his image as a high-flying successful business giant. It ultimately failed and he was soon exposed for the person he was.
However, beyond narcissism—which can be a very powerful motivator, What does motivate people is the sense we are doing something worthwhile. And that is controlled by what we want to accomplish in life.
My first job was cleaning the changing areas in a hotel health club. It was three hours a day six days a week and I loved it. It was not the work that I loved, that was hard, but I saw it as an education. I was given autonomy on what I cleaned and when and that allowed me to feel I was in control. I took pride in ensuring the showers were spotless when I had finished. That the floors were clean and the towels were neatly stacked in each changing room. I learned about systems and processes for getting my work done and it began my fascination with how to accomplish my work in the most efficient way.
All my early jobs taught me valuable lessons. I saw each one as an education and valuable experience. Working in hotels taught me the importance of standards. Selling cars taught me about the art of selling, working in law taught me about integrity and professionalism.
No matter what work you do, whether you love it or hate it, it is giving you an education. You don’t become the CEO directly out of university, you have to learn through experience, make mistakes and understand the intricacies and nuances of managing people. You don’t become a surgeon straight out of medical school. You have to do your shifts in the emergency rooms, do the rounds and learn from your peers.
When you begin the day, you have a new opportunity to learn something and move your career forward. You also have the choice to go into to work and complain about how much you hate it, come home, scroll through social media looking at people doing what you want to do and feeling jealous and thinking about how unfair life is.
You also have the choice to go into work and instead of hating what you do, look for ways to improve it. It wasn’t pleasant scrubbing walls in the showers, but I learned how to do it better and even today, I use what I learned when I clean my bathroom. Weirdly, I feel a sense of pride in my abilities to clean a bathroom and make a bed (another thing I learned working in hotels)
What else can you do to motivate yourself to get up in the morning? One trick that works is to have a morning routine you love doing. Something you look forward to doing. For instance, making my morning coffee, writing my journal and cleaning my email inbox is pure joy for me. I look forward to sitting down with my coffee and writing whatever’s in my mind into my journal. I also enjoy clearing my email inbox. I have no idea what will be in there. There could be problems, kind comments, newsletters and spam. Each day is different. I also gamify it by timing how fast I can clear my inbox. I especially enjoy the days where I have 100+ emails to process. Learning those in less than 25 minutes always makes me smile.
What would you love doing in a morning that will take less than forty-five minutes? Experiment, and see what excites you.
Another way to avoid that dread of a new day is to ensure you have a plan for the day before you go to bed. This is a psychological trick you can use that will motivate you in a morning called “implementation intention”. Your plan for the day gives you the intention to get it done. Writing these out in a journal in a morning reinforces it. For instance, I could have begun today by planning to write this podcast script. I would have make sure that was flagged in my task manger before I finished the previous day and when I wrote my journal I would write it out again.
Be careful here, if you write more than two or three things you will fail. There are too many unknowns that could come at you in the day, so limiting it to two tasks makes it doable no matter what is thrown at you.
Finally, what are your long term goals. Where do you want to be in five, ten or twenty years time? If you don’t know what’s the point of getting up in a morning? You don’t have to have lofty expansive goals, it could be you want to learn something new such as photography, or graphic design. Perhaps you would like to learn to swim or play golf. Having something to aim for gives you purpose and purpose gives you motivation and motivation gives you energy.
So there you go, Mohammed. Make sure you are getting enough sleep, you have the right mindset for your work or studies, that you have a plan for the day and you have something long-term to aim for. It surprising how these can transform your life and make getting up in the morning something you are excited about.
Thank you for your question and than you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 279
In this week’s episode, I share with you what happens when everything begins to work as it should. Be prepared; this episode is scary.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Episode 279 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 279 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week’s question comes from a coaching client of mine who has worked with me for a few months and has developed a system and a way of working that has enabled him to get on top of his work, but has also left him feeling anxious and uncomfortable. He told me there’s a sense of missing something, that he should be doing more.
So, to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Gary. Gary asks, Hi Carl, my system is working perfectly, but I feel there’s something missing. It’s like I have this feeling I am not doing enough. Is this normal?
Hi Gary, thank you for allowing my to share this on my podcast.
So why is Gary feeling as if he should be doing more? Well, it’s likely he’s become addicted to the stress caused by feeling overwhelmed and busy. That sense of not being in control, which means each day he felt he was being pulled from one crisis deadline to another without ever feeling he had time to work on what was important or even a chance to take a break.
If you think about it for a moment, when you’ve spend a large part of your working life reacting to events, when you finally reverse that and start to anticipate events so they do not overwhelm you, it is going to feel weird at first. It may even frighten you. You stress levels drop—often suddenly—and that can cause anxiety. If your body has become used to dealing with a lot of stress, not having that around is going to be strange and that is why we often feel something’s missing. There is, it’s called stress. It’s gone.
In many ways, as you become better organised and more productive, you need to prepare yourself for the withdrawal effects of a reduced amount of cortisol (the stress hormone) surging through your bloodstream. These withdrawal effects are often the reason why so many people unconsciously self-sabotage their efforts. They will do things like change their task manager or notes app. Not because the new app is any better than the ones they used before, but because it gives them a sense of doing something constructive—yet, transferring all your notes and tasks to a new app is not a constructive use of your time.
The real question to ask yourself is what can you do with all the extra time you will have once the way you do your work becomes more efficient?
This is where you can look at your areas of focus. Only one part is related to your work, yet, depending where you are in life it’s likely that will be the area that is taking up a disproportionate amount of your time. But what else is there in your areas of focus that is not getting the attention it deserves? For example, a lot of people would like to spend more time with their friends and family. Is there anything you can do to be able to spend more time there?
Perhaps you could pick your kids up from school or call round to see your parents more often.
What about hobbies? I know we don’t talk about these a lot these days, but hobbies are a great way to reduce stress, relax and take your mind off things.
Now if you are working in an office environment, how about doing some mentoring? One of the roles leadership involves is mentoring the next generation. Even if you are not a leader, yet, helping your colleagues develop their skills is a great way you can make use of your extra time. The great thing about mentoring is not just what you teach, but also what you learn. Coaching, has not only given me a way to help others, I have also learned an incredible amount from the people I talk to every day.
Something you could consider is to work on your education. Now, I am not talking about formal education, but more unusual fields. For instance, advertising and marketing company, Ogilvy’s vice-chairman, Rory Sutherland has spent the last twenty-years or so learning about behavioural psychology. This is the study of why we do what we do and it has not only been a fascination for him, it’s helped him in his work and given him an avenue to develop a side business public speaking and entertaining people with his observations. If you haven’t already watched his TED talk from 2009, I highly recommend you do so.
He’s also written a book, called Alchemy, which I would also recommend.
The point is, you have the ability to take control of what you do with your time. And, with the way we work changing at a rapid rate—whether we like it or not—and the potential for artificial Intelligence causing some radical changes to the types of jobs available, the people who will succeed are the ones who have the time to look ahead and make choices based on analysis rather than being forced to change.
So, how do you get to this point?
Well, this podcast has given a lot of advice over the last five years on how to get control over your time but the one thing that I live by is to eliminate not accumulate. This insight came from my project a few years ago when I decided to try out minimalism. I read the books, watched the videos and I followed a lot of the advice and paired down my wardrobe and possessions. I also adopted a one in one out policy. So, if I buy a new pair of jeans, I will throw out an old pair. Or, if I buy a new computer, iPad or phone, then the old one goes out.
The temptation when you become better organised is to add more and more stuff to your task manager and notes app. After all, you have a system that will take all that stuff in, but do you really want it to? The more you put in, the more you have to deal with at some point.
I am always looking at ways to reduce the time it take to do things. For instance, I love it when I wake up to an inbox of 100 plus emails. I set a timer and see how fast I can clear them from my inbox. I see this as training, because being fast at making decisions about whether something is important and needs a response or not will help with other areas of my life. The same goes with my daily and weekly planning, I’m always looking at ways to speed it up. Do I really need to go through and review every project? (No you don’t, by the way).
Daily planning can be done in less than five minutes if you have a process for doing it. Mine is simple, Calendar to see where my appointments are for tomorrow and Todoist to review my task list and to ask myself is this realistic.
But one of the greatest benefits of adopting an eliminate not accumulate philosophy is a lot of the stuff you may be collecting today is likely to sort itself out it you leave it alone. I learned this with my online course learning centre. Occasionally, someone will have difficulty logging in to their account—they may have forgotten their password or are using the wrong email address. They send me an email asking to help.
In the past I would rush to respond. Now I wait an hour. I’ve discovered nine times out of ten I soon get a follow up email saying they’ve figured out the problem themselves.
Best advice here is slow down. A lot of what you are asked to do is a reflex and if you slow down, people will often find the solution themselves.
Another tip for you is to make yourself less available. I learned this from reading about the routines of successful people. Authors such as Stephen King and John Grisham lock themselves away when they are writing. No internet or phone. Just a quiet room so they can spend three or four hours focused on their writing.
How much work could you get done if you had just two hours each day where you knew no one can disturb you? Being less available is scary at first, but you soon become used to it and the best thing you boss and colleagues will begin to respect your focus time because they see the results you are producing.
Don’t ever accept the thinking you have to be available all the time for your colleagues and customers. You don’t. Set some boundaries. Experiment and see what people will accept or not. You might be surprised how accepting people are.
So there you, when you make the decision to become better organised and more productive you are setting yourself on a course where some big changes will happen. You will have more time, be a lot less stressed and it will feel uncomfortable at first. However, don’t let that stop you and certainly don’t self-sabotage your hard work. The anxiety and feeling uncomfortable is just your brain’s way of adjusting to the new you. A person in control of their time and not stressed.
Thank you Gary and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Are you the master or slave of your task manager? In this week’s episode, I’m going to show you how to take control of your tasks.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Planning Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 278 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 278 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In the late 1990s and early 2000s, people were busy, much as we are today, yet we never began the day with to-do lists of twenty-plus tasks. That wasn’t the way we used to-do lists. To-do lists were for the essential, must not forget to do tasks.
Most desk diaries at that time only had space for around six tasks at the bottom of each day’s column. Ironically, six tasks was the number Ivy Lee recommended when he devised the Ivy Lee method for Bethlehem Steel in 1918. That method worked then and it still works today.
So what has happened over the last fifteen years or so? Have our brains diminished somehow? I don’t think so. I suspect the reason why we are struggling now is because we believe everything that must be done should be added to the to-do list, yet does it? How effective would you be if the only things you saw on your list each day were the things that really mattered? I know you would be a lot more focused.
That’s what we’ll be looking at this week, so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Michelle. Michelle asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried so many times to use a to-do list and it always begins well, but after a few days, it becomes overwhelming. I know how helpful they are and I wondered if you could break down what should and should not be in a to-do list.
Hi Michelle, thank you for your question.
Let’s go back to Ivy Lee. While we don’t know why Ivy Lee chose six tasks to add to a to-do list, what we do know is anyone who has used this method almost always complete the six tasks and has enough time at the end of the day to plan the next six.
Ivy Lee’s method is simple. At the end of the day, write down, in order of priority, the six tasks you want to complete tomorrow. Leave that piece of paper on your desk so when you arrive back at work in the morning, the first thing you see are those six tasks. Then, you begin at the top and work your way down the list until you have all six crossed out.
Think about that for a moment. How confident are you at being able to consistently complete six tasks each day?
Let’s imagine for a moment you are a university professor. Today, you have two ninety minute lectures to give from 9:00am. Your lectures will finish at 12:15pm and then you have to arrange some meetings with your Ph.D students, mark some papers, spend a little time writing your own paper, respond to your email, prepare for your lectures tomorrow and exercise. That’s six tasks. Do you have time for anything else? If you work a typical eight or nine hour day, three hours have already gone lecturing, which leaves you with five to six hours to do everything else.
Exercise can be done after you finish for the day, but marking papers, writing your own paper and responding to email are not five minute tasks. I would say, if you try and cram anything else into your day, you’ve already lost the day.
The key to this Michelle is to understand that time is limited. We do not have an infinite amount of time each day. Sure, you can work eighteen hours a day trying to do everything, but that is not sustainable. You might be able to that for a couple of days, but eventually you will break. You are not a machine and there needs to be balance between work and rest. (Whether you like that or not).
But look at the professor’s day, if she were to do the tasks she had set for herself, she would be moving important things forward. She might not be able to finish everything, that’s fine as long as she’s consistently working on the important things.
In many ways, we are our own worst enemies. Thinking that everything has to be finished in one day will always lead to overwhelm and in the worst case scenario, burnout. It’s not possible to complete everything at the first try. Sometimes you need to continue with a task on another day.
Now, there is something else at play here. How are you writing your tasks? You are not going to do very well at the supermarket if all that was on your list was: food, drink toiletries. Sure you would pick up something, but more than likely you would pick up all the wrong things. Instead, we need to be smarter than that and be more specific. Apple, bananas, chicken, salmon, broccoli, sprouts, red wine and shampoo would give you a better (and faster) experience at the supermarket.
The same applies to your to-do list. Writing things like; Ph.D curriculum, Bathroom and Board meeting, on your to-do list is not going to help you. What do you need to do related to the Ph.D curriculum? What does the “bathroom” mean? Perhaps what you mean is you want to redecorate the bathroom. Great, what does that mean at a task level? Pick up some paint swatches? Buy paint and brushes? What?
Another thing about writing vague words down on your task list is you will have no idea how long it will take you. Ph.D curriculum, how long will that take you? How about if instead of writing a statement, you wrote something like: continue writing Ph.D curriculum”? Now you can decide how long you will spend writing the curriculum. Using the word “continue” (or begin) here puts you in control of the time you spend on the work. A simple change, but one with a huge benefit when it comes to reducing an overwhelming to-do list.
Now, let’s go back to the number of tasks you are putting on your to-do list. Many to-dos have what I would describe as a natural trigger. For instance, your garbage can needs taking out when it is full. I know I see my garbage can every day, so I can tell when it needs taking out. Similarly, I know when my car needs washing every time I drive it. It would be pointless add these as tasks to my task manager.
How about email? Do you send all your actionable email to you to-do list? Why? You already have the mail in your email app, why do you need to duplicate it in your to-do list? All you need is a folder in your email app, called something like “Action This Day”. Any email that requires action can be placed in there and if you dedicate a given amount of time each day for dealing with your actionable emails, you can simply go to that folder and work from there.
Now, I know there can be an issue with emails that contain a bigger task. For instance if your boss emails you and asks you to prepare a report for this month’s board meeting. That’s not going to be a five minute task. However, rather than sending the email to your to-do list, add the task itself and archive the original email. You can then make a decision about when you will write the report. Once the report is finished, you can retrieve the original email from your achieve (it’s simple to do with search) and send the report.
Now, I know I may have made this sound easy, the trouble is it’s not. To reduce your to-do list requires a change in approach. If you’ve been told to capture everything, it will seem counterintuitive to not do so.
I advise to look at all your tools. For instance, if you need around an hour a day to respond to your email and messages, then schedule that hour in your calendar. There’s no point in saying you cannot find an hour for emails and messages, when you still need an hour. That’s fighting against time itself, you will never win that battle. To give you an example, generally, I set aside 4:30 to 5:30pm each day for responding to messages and emails. For the most part I can be consistent, but occasionally, I have to move the time around. That’s fine. The objective is to do it, not necessarily do at 4:30pm.
Exercise can also be put on your calendar. I’ve found if you put exercise on a to-do list, you will find an excuse not to do it. On your calendar, and it’s unlikely you will find an excuse.
Project notes are a great place to put your dependent tasks. A dependent task is a task that cannot be done until something else has been done. For example, you cannot complete a sales report until all the sales data has been collected. Or you cannot redecorate the bathroom until you have bought the paint.
Another tip I would give is to keep your grocery list separate from your task list. For example, I use Todoist as my to-do list, but my grocery list is in Apple Reminders. I wear an Apple Watch and to add an item to the list is as simple as raising my wrist and asking Siri to add something to the list. You can also keep a shopping list in your notes app if you prefer.
If you are struggling with your to-do list, remember the only list that matters today is your today list. Nothing else is important. If you are planning the week and giving yourself ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day to review your tasks for tomorrow you can make sure you have not over-committed yourself before the day starts. You should not be working from your folders. That’s a sign you have not planned the week. Weekly planning gives you time away from the noise to calming decide what needs to be done next week. That will go a long way towards reducing your daily list.
I hope that helps, Michelle. That you for your question. And thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, how do your task manager, calendar and notes fit together in a time management and productivity system?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Planning Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 277 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 277 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
A frequently asked question is how does everything fit together? By that what is meant, is having three separate productivity tools too much for something as simple as being guided toward what needs to happen next?
On the surface it might well look like that. After all, why use three tools when one tool could do it all. Your calendar, could easily manage your appointments and tasks and quite a few task managers have tried this by integrating with the mainstream calendar apps.
However, what is missed is the ability to compartmentalise. To be able to quickly see the big picture of your day and then to drill down deeper to the micro level and make decisions about what you can or should be doing with your time at that moment.
So, that is what we will be looking at today and to get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Andy. Andy asks, Hi Carl, I’m struggling to understand why I need to use a to-do list and a calendar. Everyone seems to talk about this but why not keep everything you need to do on your calendar and dispense with using a task manager?
Hi Andy, thank you for your question.
The truth is you do not need a task manager at all. When I began my time management journey, I used an A4 desk diary that showed a week over two pages. When open on my desk, that diary showed me the whole week at a glance.
At the bottom of each day, there was sufficient room to add a few tasks and that is exactly how I used it. Appointments in their allotted time and to-dos written out at the bottom of each day. It worked brilliantly for over fifteen years.
However, with that said, digital tools have made somethings a lot easier. For instance the digital to-do list allows us to create recurring tasks—tasks we would frequently forget to do. This way we can off load a lot from our brains into a digital system without feeling anxious about whether we will remember to do something or not.
However, why do we need three productivity apps when in theory one could do everything for us?
The biggest problem with having everything contained within one app is the overwhelm it will produce. Seeing everything on one page (and I mean everything) will prevent you from quickly seeing what is important and what is not. Generally, in the hierarchy of tools the calendar gives you the overview of your day. It tells you where you need to be at a given time. For example, if you need to collect your kids up from school at 4pm, that would be on your calendar. Similarly, if you have a meeting with an important customer at 1pm, you need to know about that and you need to see it in the context of your whole day.
With tasks, you likely have ten to twenty tasks to perform each day. These will include big important tasks, such as preparing for an important meeting with your boss, to smaller, less important tasks such as refuelling your car before an early morning start the next day. Preparing for the meeting and refuelling your car can be done at anytime in the day and in terms of priority, will be less important than being outside your kids’ school gates at the correct time. (I hope)
If you were looking at a list of all your appointments and tasks for the day, it’s going to look overwhelming—even on the easiest of days. You will have important and not important tasks all mixed up together and being able to quickly distinguish what you should be doing will be challenging.
Instead you can look at your calendar as showing you the big picture of your day. It tells you where you need to be with who and when. It’s a quick reference tool in that you can glance at your calendar and see instantly where you should be next and when. It’s not overwhelming because it only shows you your events and blocks of time where you can do the smaller tasks.
Your task manager is the micro-level of your day. It shows you, at a micro-level, what needs to be done. For instance, today, I have a task reminding me to call into my dog’s vet to pick up some anti-tic tablets (it the tic season here in Korea). This task can be done at anytime as the vet’s clinic is a twenty-minute walk from my home. I’m not going to schedule that as I can do it anytime up to 6pm and I know I will need a break at some point in the day and I can do it then.
My task manager also shows me all the little routines I should do today. From clearing my actionable email and updating my business tracking spreadsheets to scheduling my social media. I do these everyday throughout the day and it’s helpful to see what I have and have not done when it comes to closing down my day.
Your notes is something different. This is a tool that has always been used, whether keeping these in notebooks or on bits of paper, we’ve always kept notes and they have been separated from our productivity tools. As far back as Leonardo Di Vinci or Isaac Newton, notebooks have always been where we kept thoughts and ideas.
In our productivity toolbox, notes are the support for your projects and ideas. You only need these when working on a particular piece of work. The great thing about digital notes is they are searchable and that is where they have a huge advantage over paper notes. It means less time filing and searching.
The key to having all these tools working effectively is in how you use them. I recently looked at replicating my old paper-based desk diary system in my digital calendar and it works exceptionally well—which really shouldn’t have surprised me as it’s simple. The only issue I had was not being able to cross completed tasks out. It was either the task stayed at the top of my calendar or they disappeared, which meant I did not have a record of what had been completed. However, in theory the system would work.
However, the issue of overwhelm raised its head again. Seeing all my appointments and tasks in one view is just not a pleasant experience. It dilutes your attention and will cause you to cherry pick easy tasks just to clear some space. That’s not the more effective way to do your work.
Instead, what I have found works best, is to use tags (or labels) to correspond with my focus work time blocks. Let me give you an example of how this works. On a Monday I have a two hour block on my calendar for writing between 9:30 and 11:30am. In my task manager, I have a label for writing. When I plan my day, all I need do look at my writing tasks for that day and decide which one I will do.
I am not being distracted by emails I may need to respond to—I will do that in my communications hour later in the day—or if I need to do any project work. My calendar tells me I am writing for two hours between 9:30 and 11:30 and as long as I respect my calendar—and after all, I was the one who decided I would be writing at that time—then I know each day I will be working on the right things and not being pulled off onto less important, but perhaps louder tasks.
And that’s an important point. Your calendar is your creation—or at least should be. When you get a calendar invite, you don’t have to accept it. You have a choice: accept, decline or maybe. If the invite clashes with a focus block time, you need to have the courage to stand your ground and request an alternative time. A quick tip here, when suggesting an alternative time, always offer two times. You increase the chances the other person will accept your offer of another time with that technique.
Now if your calendar is “compulsory”—at least once you have finalised your calendar for the day it should be, your task manager is discretionary. Never get upset if you do not complete all you tasks for the day, but hold a full blown investigation if you ignore your calendar.
The reality is, there are too many unknowns that could happen in the day—particularly if you are working with other people—you may begin the day expecting a meeting with an important client, only to find they had to cancel and ask for another day and time. Suddenly the meeting you were going to have this afternoon in another part of the city is cancelled. Now you have three hours, you didn’t expect. What are you going to do? That’s where being able to open up your task manager and bring a few tasks forward is helpful.
It’s quick, and you can quickly rearrange the appointment knowing the important things you had planned for that week will not be interrupted if you have to rearrange a meeting.
Now, I should point out, none of this will work if you are not doing any weekly planning. If you’re not planning you will always be working on the latest and loudest. You will never look at the big picture, and you will always feel overwhelmed. The weekly planning sessions are all about giving you some breathing room to look ahead, see what’s heading towards you and making decisions about what you should be working on.
Not everything is important and a lot of what we think we should be doing will, given time, sort themselves out. But, you will never know what those are without doing a plan for the week.
So, there you go, Andy. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and than you to you too for listening. It just remain s for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, we’re looking at how to define your core work and how that translates into what you do each day.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Planning Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 276 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 276 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
In the Time Sector Course, I introduce the concept of “core work”. The work you are employed to do or perhaps another way to look at it, the things you are responsible for at work. It’s your core work that you will be evaluated on by your employer, and if you are self-employed it is the work that generates your income.
If you were never to define what this part of your work is, you would find yourself caught up in trivialities masquerading as important work. Those petty disagreements between colleagues, most emails and messages and water cooler gossip.
However, defining what your core work is one part of the process. There is another, more important part to understanding your core work, which is what this week’s question is all about. This question also came up in a recent workshop I did. Defining your core work is quite different from knowing how that definition operates at a task level. Today, I hope to illuminate this important step for you.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Linda. Linda asks, Hi Carl, I am a Senior Vice President for a small pharmaceutical company. I took your Time Sector Course and have got stuck with my core work. I think I know what that is, but I don’t know how that works day to day. Could you help me with this?
Hi Linda, Thank you for your question.
Let’s start with why it’s important to identify your core work. Most of our time management and productivity issues evolve from having too much to do and not enough time to do it. This creates backlogs and that leads to you feeling overwhelmed and anxious about how much to feel you have to do.
Yet, there are different types of tasks we need to do. There are the absolute, the discretionary, and the time wasters. If we do not identify what our absolutes are we end up spending too much time on the discretionary and time wasting tasks.
Spending some time identifying your absolute must do tasks means you can then allocate sufficient time to get these done each week. However, in order to identify what these tasks are, we need to know what we are specifically employed to do.
For example, if you are a salesperson, you primary roll is to sell your company’s products or services. This means your core work is any activity that will potentially lead to a sale. This could be calling prospects, meeting with existing customers and asking for referrals.
Once you know this, you can define what these activities mean at a task level. Calling prospects, for instance, could mean you dedicate one hour each morning to call potential customers and try to arrange appointments. You could also, set aside a hour on a Friday afternoon to contact your existing customers to make appointments to meet with them the following week.
A salesperson core work is not filling out activity reports for their sales manager or sitting in sales meetings. None of these activities risk leading to a sale. However, these might be important, to your sales manager, and you will need time to do them, but they should not take priority over your sales related tasks.
It’s as Brian Tracy and Jim Rohn preached—majors and minors. Major time is being in front of your customer. Minor time is sitting in an office chatting with your colleagues.
Now for you Linda, your roll is a leadership roll. Your core work is likely to be centred around supporting your team so they can do their jobs with as little interruption as possible. Your roll is not to micro-manage your team, your roll is to clear obstacles so they can get on and do their jobs. This will inevitably involve meetings with your team—although not too many so as not to interrupt their work.
I’m reminded of how Red Bull Racing’s Team Principle, Christian Horner, organises his work. Christina Horner is not only the Team Principle, he’s also the CEO of the company. In a recent video Red Bull put out we were given an insight into how he divides his time. During a race weekend, he is the Team Principle and will be track-side with the rest of his team. He’s dealing with media responsibilities, leading team briefings and managing race strategy.
When he returns to the team’s base on a Monday or Tuesday, he’s the CEO. His role and core work has changed. Here he will have meetings with his key people to make sure everything is running as it should be and if it isn’t he will discuss strategies to get things moving in the right direction. Christian Horner’s role as the CEO is to keep a focus on the company’s goals and to be guide his team towards achieving their goals.
Christian Horner’s core work as a CEO is to listen to his team, ask question and help to remove blocks to successfully completing projects and goals. His tasks will come from these meetings. He may need to discuss with the board to increase funding for different areas, or he may need to call a key supplier to speed up the delivery of a key component. His core work is to assist his team in solving problems so they can achieve their goals and targets.
A leader’s core work is generally two-fold. To support their team and to report to the board of directors. To support their team, that will involve talking with the key people. So arranging regular meetings with these people is a task. Similarly, serving the board is a core work task. What does the board want? Quite often, information for the board is consistent. Reports, for instance may need to be sent to the board each month. Collecting the information and delivering these reports will be core work tasks. When and how will you do that?
Now an issue I frequently come across is a person identifying their core work, but then not distilling that down to a task level. For instance, I create content. I consider that to be a part of my core work. Yet, just saying I create content is not enough. What does that look like at a task level? For me, that means writing a blog post, two newsletters, recording this podcast and filming two YouTube videos each week. The tasks here are writing, recording and filming. Now I know that, the only question remaining is when will I do that each week.
Now I’ve been creating this content for a long time, I know how long each piece takes, so all I need do now is block time out on my calendar for creating content and make sure the tasks are in my task manager.
So, to give you an example of how this looks, I have two hours blocked out Monday and Tuesday morning for writing. That is sufficient time to get my writing commitments completed. I have three hours blocked out on Friday morning for recording and filming. That takes care of my podcast and YouTube videos.
Core work is non-negotiable, it must be done. This is why once you know how long you need (and you will soon learn how long your core work will take) you make sure you have sufficient time blocked out on your calendar each week for doing it.
If I include all the writing, recording and editing, I need around twelve hours each week to do my core work. When you distil your work down to its core level, you will find to complete it requires considerably less time than you think. You soon realise you have plenty of time left over for meetings and other work. By blocking out time each week for your core work, you know before the week begins you always have sufficient time for this important work.
Architects and designers need time to do their creative work and discuss projects with clients. Architects may also need to discuss materials with suppliers. However, the core work—the work that ultimately pays their income—will be the design work. If they have not set aside enough time for doing that work, everything else will be irrelevant.
If we look an example of a hotel general manager, their core work is to ensure the hotel is profitable, and the highest standards are maintained. Describing core work like that is not helpful at a task level. What does ensuring the hotel is profitable look like at a task level? That could be to regularly meet with the hotel’s sales and marketing team to discuss strategy. What about maintaining the hotel’s standards? That would involve walking around the hotel each day inspecting rooms, food service and cleanliness.
I once worked with a general manager who did this every morning before his management meeting. If he spotted anything below standard he would discuss this with the relevant departmental manager in the management meeting. This was not done as a telling off session. It was about highlighting issues with the relevant manager. This method ensured the management team were all focused on the same thing. No manager wanted to be called out in the meeting.
This particular manager went on to have a highly successful career rising to becoming Operations Director of the hotel group.
While leadership roles are different from managerial roles in many ways, the key with leadership is to empower and trust your team will do their jobs to the best of their abilities. As a leader, your job is serve your team and help them do that. It’s not to get in their way or do their jobs for them—if you need to do that, why are you employing them in the first place. I always think of leadership core work as communicating with their team and guiding them to successfully completing their projects. Meetings helps, but can often get in the way of doing the work. Perhaps you could learn from my former general manager and make it a core work principle to do a walk round of your department each morning virtually or in person.
So there you go, Linda. I hope that has helped. It’s likely you have identified the abstract part of your ore work. All you need do is answer the question; what does that look like at a task level?
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s podcast, I answer a question about setting some rules of engagement for yourself.
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Episode 275 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 275 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Have you ever stopped to establish some rules by which you do your work and live your life? If not, you could be missing out on something very powerful that helps you to automate what you do and reduce a lot of decision making.
A lot of the issues around productivity and better managing our time comes around because everything we do is treated as unique or new. Yet, a lot of what we do each day is not unique. In fact, we are likely repeating the same steps each day, but because we have not established a routine or process for doing these tasks, they feel cumbersome and that leaves us finding excuses for not doing them.
That then kicks off a cycle of pain. Take email for example, we let it pile up until eventually we are forced to do something about it, and then we waste a whole day (or in some cases a week) just trying to get on top of it and deal with the backlog. That’s not a very productive way of managing your email.
This week’s question is all about how and where to establish some rules of engagement with your work.
So, before we get to the answer, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Matty. Matty asks, Hi Carl, do you have any suggestions for simplifying tasks and work? I find as soon as the week starts, any plans I may have soon so complicated I never know where I should be starting.
Thank you, Matty for your question.
Interesting you use the words “simplifying tasks and work”, that’s what it’s all about. If we can find a way to simplify the work we do, we become faster at it and it requires a lot less thought—and that’s always a good good thing.
So what can we do to make doing our work easier and more automated?
Let’s begin with email and other messages we receive at work. This is an area that screams out for a process and some rules. Email is coming at us all the time. It never seems to stop. For many of you, you likely get emails through the night as well. If we were to let it pile up it would become a tedious task trying to find the important mails and messages. So, a process here would help you to automate it.
I’ve talked before about setting up an Action this Day folder in your mail for any email that requires some action from you. That could be replying or reading. If you need to take any kind of action, drop it in your action this day folder.
Now the process you follow is at some point in the morning you clear your inbox. And that is clear it, not scan it. Delete emails you don’t need and archive emails you think you may need in the future. Anything you need to act on goes into your action this day folder.
Then at some point towards the end of the day, you set aside an hour for clearing your action this day folder.
Now here’s the thing, email is still an important part of our work communication. I know a lot of companies are using internal messaging systems such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, and because of that you want to include any responses to these messages in this time you have set aside. There may be some messages that need responding to more urgently, and you will likely need to deal with these sooner, but for the most part try to push off responding until your dedicated communication time.
If you were to skip your communication time one day, you will find yourself having to double the time you set aside the next day. This is why, it needs to become a rule. No matter what, you will dedicate one hour of your work day for dealing with your communications. If your work involves a lot of email and message interaction, you may need to extend this time, but try it out with one hour first and see how you get on.
Now when it comes to setting rules for communicating here’s something that will help your reputation at work. Set some rules for your response time. Now, it’s important not to be overly ambitious. If you regularly have client meetings that take two or three hours, telling everyone you will reply to your messages within an hour is unrealistic. Here’s my set of communication rules:
For email I will respond within twenty-four hours. Now if anyone it trying to engage me to use email as a form of instant messaging I will deliberately slow them down, no matter how important they are. Email should never be used for anything urgent. If your neighbour’s house was on fire you would never email them. You’d call them. There is a hierarchy of urgency. If something’s urgent, make a phone call. If it needs doing today, use instant messaging. Everything else can go by email.
For instant messages, my rule is within four hours and phone calls, I will try to answer immediately, but if I need to get back to someone it will be within an hour.
Whatever rules you apply, tell everyone. You can add your rules as an email signature to reinforce this. Once you’ve set your rules, the first step if for you to begin living them. You’re not likely to be perfect straight away, but just because you missed something, doesn’t mean you’ve failed. Stick with it. You’ll become comfortable with it and as long as you are dealing with your actionable mail each day, you won’t have backlogs building up and that will be one area of your work you now have under control.
Now where else can you apply rules?
How about doing focused work in a morning? This is when your brain is at its freshest—after a night’s sleep (even if it wasn’t a good night’s sleep). Take advantage of that and try to block one or two hours a couple of days each week where you will not be available for other people. You will need to be smart about this. Look through your calendar and see where the peak time for your meetings are. If most of your meetings happen in the middle part of your work day, you can make sure your blocked out focus times, are at either side of those peak times.
You know your schedule, so find some blocks of time where you can get some quiet focus time. You do not need to do this every day, although you can try to get there over time.
As an example, I block Monday and Tuesday morning for writing. It blocked out on my calendar and even my wife knows I am busy at those times. Thursdays and Sundays I keep free for meetings and Wednesday is blocked for family commitments—I don’t have weekends off. This is fixed and now it just feels automatic. All I need to know is what day it is. If it’s Monday, I know I’ll be writing. No thinking, no negotiating. It’s Monday. I write.
If you were in sales, you could block 9:00 to 9:30am for calling customers and prospects to set up appointments. If you were to do this every day, that would be two-and-a-half hours a week. If you were to call five people on average each time, that would be twenty-five people. That’s likely to convert into plenty of appointments. And I know from my own experience in sales, appointments lead to sales and sales lead to better bonuses. You’re doing something simple every day that will have an impact on your income. And all you have done is set a rule.
Now, if your calendar doesn’t have a lot of structure, you could just set the daily rule that would call five people each day to set up appointments. When you do this, you get five calls each day to improve your sales calls skills. When you first begin doing this, you may not convert many calls. But over time, you will refine your skills and you will see significant improvement. You can also measure this by calculating your conversion ratio. How many appointments you get from the calls you make.
Other areas where you can set rules is with planning sessions. Make it a rule where you cannot finish your work until you have spent ten minutes planning what your must-do tasks for tomorrow will be. Writing these out or saying saying these out loud has been scientifically proven to increase your chances of carrying out the tasks. It’s called “implementation intention”—where you plan out what you will do and when.
You can also use implementation intention for your personal life. Let’s say you’ve neglected to do exercise for a while. You could, as part of your daily planning, say to yourself, “tomorrow I will go for a thirty minute walk immediately after eating lunch”. You can then add that to your calendar, so the time is protected and watch what happens.
Setting standards for yourself is also a way to implement some rules into your life. I was always fascinated when a new coffee shop opened up near where I live. I would watch to see their standards. Usually for the first few weeks or months, you will see the owners wiping down the windows and tables outside every day. The Coffee shops that ultimately failed were the ones where the owners (or employees) stopped doing these little tasks after a few weeks.
If you were lucky enough to be invited to Rolls Royce Motor Cars head office in Goodwood, UK, you could measure the grass outside reception every day and it would be the same length. That’s because Rolls Royce employs a front of house manager, whose job is to measure the length of not only the grass, but also the trees outside over hanging branches. That’s all about ensuring the highest possible standards.
What are your standards?
So there you go, Matty. Simplifying your system is really all about setting yourself some rules and ensuring that each day you live by your own standards. It’s repeating these tasks day in day out that will mean you will have les thinking to do and your work will just run that little smoother.
Than you for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s episode is all about getting on top of your calendar so you remain in control of your most valuable asset.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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The Planning Course
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Episode 274 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 274 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Of all the productivity tools you have, your calendar is the one tool that will bring you the biggest benefits. It does this by only telling you the truth.
While your task manager and notes are likely to be feature rich and new innovative ways to manipulate your tasks and notes are being launched every week, the humble calendar has remained much the same for hundreds of years. Today, we may be using digital calendars, but the layout and functionality of these digital calendars work the same way as a paper-based calendar.
And your calendar is a true leveller. No matter who you are, where you live, your educational background or job title, you still get the same number of hours as everyone else.
Theoretically, each day gives you a blank canvas to choose how you will paint it, and your calendar acts very much like your sketchbook. It’s a place where you can design your day, experiment and plan.
Your calendar can take care of the basics by reminding you of upcoming birthdays and anniversaries. It can also be used to remind you of bill payment dates, concerts you may wish to go to and your kids’ school terms and holidays. But those are the basics. What else can your calendar do for you? Well, that is the topic of this week’s episode.
So, with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Rob. Rob asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you talk about the calendar being the most important part of a time management system, but I’ve always struggled to organise my calendar well. Do you have any tips or tricks to help me get more out of my calendar?
Hi Rob, thank you for your question.
Your calendar should be the foundation of your whole time management and productivity system. It is only your calendar, yet, of all the potential tools you may use, it is the only one that shows you how much time you have.
You can fill up a task manager with hundreds of tasks and if you date them for the same day, your task manager will assume that on that day you want to complete hundreds of tasks. It’s not going to warn you that you don’t have enough time or there are important meetings to attend. It just shows you what you tell it to show you. It has no way to inform you that you are being over-ambitious about what you want to get done on any given day.
Your notes is where you store information you may want or need later. It does not have any time management functionality within your system.
The only tool you have that will indicate how much time you have is your calendar. It never lies to you. You get twenty-four hours each day and you get to choose where you spend those hours.
And that’s the power and beauty of the calendar. Because it gives you a blank canvas, you can use it to design your day. Which means, if you delegate responsibility for your calendar management to other people, you are giving away responsibility of your most valuable asset. Time.
So, with that said, how do we take control of our calendar and use it to design our day and week?
When I am working with an individual who has no productivity system in place, the first area I encourage them to work on is their calendar. What we aim to do is to get the basics in first.
Now, I recommend that you first do an exercise and create a new calendar with your calendar app. I like to call this my “Perfect Day” or Perfect Week” calendar. It is here where you can create a week that covers everything you want time for. Try to do this on a larger screen than your phone—your computer or tablet—because you want to be able t clearly see the whole week in one view.
Now, begin with how much sleep you would you like to get? This is not about how much sleep you are currently getting, rather, ho much sleep you want to get. Remember, this is your “perfect week”, so what would be the “perfect” amount of sleep for you.
Why would you start with sleep? Well, ask yourself, how do you feel when you don’t get enough sleep? How effective are you through the day? On day’s when you have not got enough sleep, how productive were you?
If you want to be at your most effective each day, you need the right amount of sleep. That could be six, seven or eight hours. Whatever number of hours you need block your sleep time out on your “perfect week” calendar.
The reason for beginning with your sleep is once you have your sleep schedule in your calendar, you now know how much time you have available for everything else.
Next, what would you like time for in your personal life? Why start with your personal life? Well, this is the area of our lives we often neglect at the expense of our work. Yet, if you want to live an active, balanced life, we need to proactively create that life for ourselves. Nobody else will do it for us.
So, if you want time to go to the gym three time a week, then schedule that on your calendar. This is reminiscent of when I was a teenager and doing track and field. Every Tuesday and Thursday evening was training nights, and I would never let anything get in the way of that. The only way to ensure that happened was to block out those days.
What about your hobbies? How much time would you like to spend on your pastimes and, more importantly, when would you like to do it? Again, schedule out time each week for these activities.
Then there are your family responsibilities. Things like taking your kids to and from school and walking your dog. Our dog, for example, likes an hour’s walk each day. This should be blocked out too.
Only when you have everything you would like time for each week on your calendar on a personal level, do you switch your attention to your work.
For your work calendar, the place to start is with your fixed appointments. I know a lot of companies have weekly team meetings. If these are fixed, get them in your calendar. I would also suggest, if you get a break for lunch, you get that on your calendar too.
What we are looking for is to see where the gaps are once all the fixed work commitments are in your calendar. It is these gaps that will inform you where you have time to do your important, core work—the work you are employed to do.
Let’s imagine one of your core work responsibilities is to produce a sales report for your CEO each week. This report’s deadline is every Friday at 12pm. If your CEO requires the sales figures for Thursday, this leaves you will two options. You will either do it after business hours on a Thursday evening—probably not the best option as you will be preparing the report after you finish work. Or Friday morning.
If you know you need forty-five minutes to collate the data and get it into the correct format, then you would block an hour for this work on a Friday morning. Ideally, you would fix this in your calendar, so there was no risk someone else can come along and “steal” that time away from you.
This exercise is about designing your “perfect” week. A week where you have time for everything you would like to do. It will be unlikely you will be able to immediately start living this perfect week, although some of you may be lucky enough to be able to do that, for most of us, it will become an aspiration.
If when you have finished and you look at the calendar and feel, yes, this is the kind of week that would leave me feeling accomplished and fulfilled, the next step is to begin the process of merging your real calendar with this “perfect week” calendar.
Because you have already set this up as a separate calendar, you can periodically turn it on and off and compare it with your real calendar.
A tip I can share with you here, Rob, is pick one part of your perfect week calendar and focus on bringing your real life into alignment with that. For example, if, on your perfect week, you have your going to bed time at 11pm and wake up time at 6:30am, yet at the moment, you are going to bed after midnight and struggling to get out of bed at 7:00am, this would be a good place to start.
In my experience, readjusting your sleep schedule takes around two weeks. So, you can begin by committing to going to bed at 11pm every night for the next fourteen days.
I have also found you can build a work item into your real week as well. If you have a block of time on your perfect week calendar for focused work each Tuesday and Wednesday morning, try aligning that with your real week. Again, make sure you block it out on your calendar and see how you go.
Much of this will be a trial and error. However, if you work at it, over time you will find you are beginning to adjust things in your life so you have the time do the things you want to do.
A lot of the stress associated with work comes from a feeling we don’t have enough time to do all the things other people are demanding of us. It’s not just our work commitments, but commitments to our family, friends and partners. It can also be voluntary commitments we have made in the past that perhaps are not bringing us the sense of accomplishment we thought they would.
It maybe you will need to make some difficult decisions and have awkward conversations about the demands others are making on your time. While these will be uncomfortable in the moment, the sense of release you will get when you do it will be huge and the benefits to you, your mental wellbeing and ultimately your accomplishments in life will make those brief moments of discomfort worth it.
To finish, here are some quick fire tips to help you with your calendar management.
Try at all possible to have one master calendar where both your personal and work commitments can be seen together. If you work in a company that restricts access to your work calendar, you can copy your appointments over, although you won’t need to copy over your focus time blocks.
When planning your week, begin with your calendar. That will show you how committed you are before you start deciding what tasks you will do. This way, you will be able to better see where you can add more or less tasks. If you have a day of meetings, you can reduce the number of tasks you do, when you have days with fewer meetings you decide to add more tasks.
Don’t allow yourself feel wedded to your calendar commitments. If you feel tired, sick or just want to have an easy day, move your commitments around if you can. Your calendar is there to serve you, not the other way round. The only thing I would advise against is ignoring your calendar completely. Your calendar is there to guide you, but if you start to ignore it, its usefulness will disappear.
So there you go, Rob. I hope that has helped and given you some motivation to begin using your calendar.
Thank you for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is all about managing your communications and ensuring you have enough time to deal with it every day.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Planning Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 273 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 273 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Last week, I talked about how by turning everything into a project was a sure fire way to become overwhelmed and overstretched. Instead, I suggested you look for the processes for doing your work.
If you write articles, create marketing campaigns, deal with clients on a frequent basis, then these are not projects. They are just a part of a process for doing your work.
However, there are some parts of our work that are difficult to develop processes for and one of those is handling all the communications you get each day.
Prior to 2000—before the current digital age, most communications largely came from mail, telephone or fax. That meant things were relatively easy to manage—there were only three channels of communication and each one gave us a logical timeline for a response. A letter could be responded to within a week or two, a telephone call was instant—if we were near a phone—and a fax could be sat on for a couple of days. There was not sense we had to respond immediately.
Today, thing are quite different. Almost all the messages we receive today could be responded to immediately.
I remember reading the book: The Man With The Golden Typewriter, a book of letters written by Ian Fleming, and awed by the number of letters beginning with the words: “Please accept my apologies for the delay in my reply. I have just returned from an eight week sabbatical in Jamaica”.
That’s two months to reply and nobody would have been angry. It was just the way life was back then. Not necessarily slower, just there were conventions in place and acceptable reasons for not responding in a timely manner.
Back to today, how do we manage our communications so they do not become overwhelming and out of control. Well, before we get to that answer, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Annie. Annie asks: Hi Carl, I was hoping you have some advice for organising all the messages and emails I get each day. My company uses Microsoft Teams and it’s always alerting me to new messages. And Emails are a joke. It takes me all afternoon just to stay on top of these. Do you have any ideas for handling these?
Hi Annie, thank you for sending in your question.
It’s a timely question too as I covered communications last week in my productivity workshop and there were a lot of questions about getting on top of these.
Let’s deal with email first as this is the easiest to manage. With email we can create a simple process that if followed each day, will get you on top of it and keep you on top of it.
There are two parts to managing email: processing and doing. The key is not to mix the two. Processing is about clearing your inbox as fast as you can. This means when you open your inbox, the goal is to get to zero. This means you do not want to be stopping to reply to those emails you think will take two minutes or less (they rarely take two minutes—more like five or six minutes)
Any actionable email get sent to an Action This Day folder and everything else is either deleted or archived. Now that’s a quick summary, but the essence is get that inbox cleared.
The second part of the email management process is to “do email”. This means as late in the day as you feel comfortable with, you go into your actionable email and begin with the oldest one and work your way through the list. Now, you may not be able to clear them all each day, but as long as you begin with the oldest one, you will not have emails hanging around.
The key to this method or process is to decide how much time you need on average to clear your action this day folder.
To give you a benchmark, I need around forty to forty-five minutes each day to stay on top of my actionable email. What I do is schedule an hour each day for dealing with my communications. I have this scheduled and blocked off in my calendar for between 4:30 and 5:30pm each day.
If you want to learn more about this process, I have a free download available on my website under the downloads section where you can get the workflow in its entirety. If you want to go deeper with this, I also have a comprehensive course called “Email Mastery” which will show you how to set everything up and turn you into a master of email.
The key this is consistency. If you do this sporadically, it will not work.
The way I look at it is if I skip a day, that means I now need two hours the next day to get on top of email. I don’t have two hours spare in the middle of the week to deal with email—there’s a lot more important things to do.
So, that one hour a day is non-negotiable. It gets done.
Last week in my Productivity workshop, one of the participants asked me how to handle email when it takes more than two hours just to reply to a single email? Here’s a unique problem—most email does not take more than two hours to respond. However, if you do get an email that requires two hours or more work, that becomes a task in your task manager.
The question is: where will you find the two hours to work on that email response? If you leave an email like that in your Action This Day folder, it will list there for a long time and no work will get done on it. It needs pulling out and putting into your task manager and you can then decide when you will work on it.
Now, what about all those messages?
Here’s the thing about messages. You don’t have to respond immediately. Let me repeat that: You do not need to respond immediately.
Now let that sink in for a minute.
Let’s look at this logically, if you were working on something important that required all your concentration, why would you allow a message to interrupt your chain of thought?
A doctor performing open heart surgery is not going to stop in the middle of the operation to read and respond to a text message. A pilot in the process of taking off or landing their plane is not going to look at her messages. And a lawyer defending you in court is not going to allow themselves to be distracted by messages coming in. How would you feel if they were always pausing their arguments to read and reply to their messages? I’m sure you’d be wanting to fire your lawyer.
So why do you allow it to happen to you?
To me, this is about professional standards. But then I get annoyed when I stand in line at the bank for ten minutes only to get to the counter and the bank clerk answers his phone while I am talking to him. Ooh that really annoys me. The most annoying thing is that phone call likely came from his boss. Why is his boss more important than a customer?
For the less urgent messages, you can deal with these as part of your communication hour, however, if they are urgent don’t feel obligated to respond immediately. Finish what you are doing before replying.
There’s a reason for this. You want to be slowing down the response time. You see, if you set an expectation with your boss, clients or customers and colleagues that you respond immediately, then you’ve just caused yourself a lot of problems later down the line.
The goal is to slow things down. A good tip here is to add your response times to your email signature. For example:
Email: 24 hours
Messages: within 6 hours
Telephone call: within 2 hours.
This way you are telling people that you know the importance of your work. And constantly being distracted by messages is going to destroy your effectiveness at doing the work you are employed to do.
Look at it this way, nobody gets promoted because they answer their messages immediately. They get promoted for the quality of their work. People remember you for the work you produce. Always remember that.
Now, I understand this can be a bit scary when you first begin to do it—particularly if you have a boss that expects instant responses—but you can do this gradually. Perhaps for one week, leave each message for fifteen minutes before responding. Then the following week, extend that to thirty minutes.
Keep doing that until you get someone complaining. This way you will find the balance.
You phone and computer have a do not disturb function. You can turn this on when you need to focus. There’s a reason why so many productivity and time management specialists harp on about this. It works. And you do not need to turn this on all day. You turn it on when you need some distraction free time to do your work—the work you are employed to do.
I find, I can respond to instant messages in between sessions of work. As I am writing this script, I will likely have received four or five emails and a few messages. I don’t know exactly because I haven’t looked.
However, it takes me around ninety minutes to write this script, so nobody will be waiting long for my response. When I finish the script, I will stand up and use my phone to check messages and email. I can do that while walking around and then make a decision about which ones I will respond to.
Finally, reduce your communication channels. If you have every social media messaging service, Teams and Slack as well as several email accounts, is it any wonder you are inundated with messages? Reduce these channels.
The great thing about reducing your communications channels is you reduce the number of time wasters. You force people to communicate with you on your terms. For instance, my wife and mother know the best way to get in touch with me is through iMessage. I only give that out to family and very close friends.
Everyone else I advise to contact me though email because I have a process for handling email and it means I can work on my timeline.
There have been occasions where I was asked to use WhatsApp or Telegram for a particular event I was speaking at. I will install the app for the duration of the event, and as soon as it’s over, I delete the app.
If someone really wants to get in touch with you, they will. They will find a way.
So there you go, Annie. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week we’re exploring the need for projects and why the way a project has been defined is causing most of your task management problems.
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Episode 272 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 272 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
How many projects do you have? 50? 75? More than a hundred? Well, if you are defining a project as “anything you want to do that requires more than one action step”, as many people do, you are going to have a lot of projects. And all those projects need looking at to decide what needs to happen next.
When I was researching the reasons why so many people resist doing a weekly planning session, one thing I kept coming up against was the large number of “projects” people told me they had to review, which made doing a weekly review or planning session too long.
I began to realise that if our resistance was down to the sheer number of projects we had to review each week, that was something fixable because we have control over the number of projects we have. More interestingly, we also have control over how we define what a project is.
If we change the way we define a project to something that fits better with the work we do, we can reduce the number of projects we have and that in turn will reduce the time it takes to complete a planning session.
So, before we dive a little deeper into this, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Christian. Christian asks: Hi Carl, I’ve always struggled with managing my projects. When I look at my task Manager, I have over 80 projects. These take a very long time to go through each week and I hate doing it. (Which is why I don’t do a weekly planning session) My question is; is it normal to have so many projects?
Hi Christian, thank you for your question.
I’ve found those who have read and tried to implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done, do tend to have a lot of projects. This is a consequence of how David Allen defines a project. That being anything that requires two or more steps.
This means, in theory, making an appointment to see your dentist, take your car in for a service or arranging your annual medical check up will all be projects. Yet, if you stop and think about this, if you dedicated thirty minutes on a given day, you could easily make all these arrangements. They certainly don’t need to be projects.
Over my working life, I’ve worked in a number of different industries. From hotel management, to car sales, law and teaching. When I look back over these jobs, I cannot remember treating everything as a project. I came into work, and got on with the work.
For instance, when I was working in a law office, we had around 150 cases ongoing at any one time. We never treated these cases as projects. They were our work. And our work had a process. When a new case came in, we needed to collect information and there was a checklist on the inside of the case file that we checked off as the information came in. The first step, once the new case was entered into the firms computer system was to request the information we needed.
Each day, we were receiving information for many of these cases and we simply printed off the file or, if it came in my regular mail, check the information, put the documents in the case file and checked off the information that had come on the checklist.
It was a part of my core work to ensure that the cases due to be completed that month, were monitored and any reasons why a case might not complete on time, were communicated to the client. To manage this, we had a spreadsheet, which either myself or my colleague updated every Friday afternoon and sent it to our client.
I remember when I worked for a famous marketing company here in Korea, the copy writers and designers never considered individual campaigns as a project. It was just a part of their daily work. They would come into work, make coffee and then get on with the work they were currently working on. It was almost like a conveyor belt. Once the current piece of work was completed, it was handed on to the next person in the chain and they did their bit.
It seems to me, that perhaps what we are doing is confusing our core work with project work.
So, what is a project? For me a project is something unique that has a clearly defined deadline that is going to take a reasonably long time to complete. For example, moving house, would be a project. There are a lot of interconnected things here. Putting your current house on the market, finding a new home and arranging for furniture to be moved.
Moving house is not going to to happen over a weekend and will only happen if you have a plan to make it happen.
Theoretically, producing this podcast would be a project. There are multiple steps from deciding which question to answer, to writing the script, organising the Mystery Podcast voice to record the question and recording and editing the audio track. But it’s not a project. It just a part of my core work.
I produce a podcast every week so I have a process for doing it. I also consider producing this podcast as part of my core work, which means I have a process for doing it.
Each week, I write the script on Tuesday, I send the question to the Mystery Podcast Voice on Thursday and record the podcast on Friday during my audio visual time block on a Friday morning.
I don’t need project folders, I don’t have anything to review. It’s just a part of my work that I do every week. The only thing I have is a list in my notes app of all the questions I have collected and on a Tuesday morning I will pick a question to answer.
So, Christian, what I would suggest is first look at the work you do and identify your core work—the work you are employed to do. What are you responsible for? What results does the company you work for expect of you? That will give you a clear set of activities to perform each week and month. Once you know what these are, you can distribute those activities throughout the week to ensure they get done.
For example, if I take working for the law firm as an example. Each morning we would receive around five to ten new cases. The first job with any new case was to get the case into the firm’s system. So, I would have a daily recurring task on my task list that says “Input new cases into the case management system”.
Every Friday, I would have a task that says: “Update case spreadsheet and send to client”. That task may mean I need two hours to collect the information, which likely means I need to block two hours out on my calendar every Friday to do the work.
If I were to treat each new case as a project, it would be overwhelming trying to keep everything up to date. But my core work was not to micromanage individual cases, it was to ensure that all cases were up to date and in the system and to report updates to the client each week. That’s not a project, that’s a process.
For many of you listening, your company will have some form of work management system. That could be a CRM system if you work in a sales related job, or it could be a central file folder where the work you do on a daily basis can be shared with your colleagues—as there was for the designers and copywriters in the marketing company.
One of my clients is a screenwriter and while he will have two to four scripts to work on at any one time, and theoretically each script could be considered a project, each day, his focus is on writing. When he does his weekly planning, he will identify the most important scripts and decide which ones to work on the following week. This will be determined by script deadlines.
Then, on Monday morning, he will open his script writing software, sit down and write. His core work is to write scripts, deal with any re-writes the producer requests and meet his deadlines. The only way that will happen is if, when he begins his day he focuses his attention on writing scripts.
I’ve never heard my client talk about projects. He knows his core work. He knows what his responsibilities as a script writer are and he’s developed a process for getting his work done. All he needs to do is follow that process.
Another way to look at this would be if Toyota decided to create a new car. If, to build this new car, they have to build a factory then building a factory is a project. It’s a one off unique task with a deadline. Making the cars, that’s a process. If Toyota treated each new car as a project, it would be the most inefficient way to make a car. Instead, they follow a process. That way they can monitor productivity, costs and resources.
Last week, I answered a question about analogue v digital systems. I was lucky, I began my working life when the world of work was transitioning from a paper based one to a digital one. One of the advantages of the paper-based world was we could put the work we need to do into a physical in-tray. We would then begin at the top and work our way through the in-tray. As we completed work, we move it to an out-tray. At the end of the day we would then transfer what was in our out-tray to the filing cabinet and close out our day.
Being able to see our work in a physical form meant we could instantly see how much work we had to do. The digital world hides our work, we have emails with documents attached to them hidden inside Outlook. Presentations, spreadsheets and reports are hidden inside folders deep within our computers. We cannot see the work we need to do.
However, if you build processes for doing you work rather than creating projects, you are going to find life a lot easier. Following processes ensure you get your important work done. The work you are responsible for. Hiding everything inside self-contained projects not only risks things being missed, it also wastes time when have to go looking for things you think you may have missed.
So, Christian, rather than turning every multi-step task into a project, look for the processes. And if there are no processes for doing your work, create some. It’s how surgeons and pilots do their work every day. They follow processes. It’s how Formula 1 racing teams can move a whole team and two cars from one country to another week after week. It’s not projects, it’s about following a tried and tested process.
I hope that helps, Christian. Thank you for your question. And thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Are the old ways still the best ways? That’s what I explore in this week’s podcast.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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The Planning Course
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 271 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 271 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Have you ever wondered how people managed their work before we had computers on every desk and a smartphone in every pocket? I mean, how was it possible to manage our email when the only place we could read and respond to email was at our desks in our place of work? How did we know when we had a meeting when the only way to add a meeting to our calendar was to pull out our diaries and handwrite the meeting into it?
Well, it may come as a surprise to many of you, but people did manage. In fact, I would go as far as to say people managed a lot better than they do today. Not using a digital system meant that it was far easier to compartmentalise our work. For instance, responding to letters—the things we used to communicate before email—meant we needed to be in the office. If we were not in the office, we could not respond to the letter.
This meant if an important, so called urgent, letter arrived on a Saturday morning, it would not be read until Monday morning and a response would not be going out until, at the earliest, Monday evening. So, in theory, if an urgent letter was sent on Friday afternoon, you would not be getting your reply until Tuesday morning, at the earliest. And, there was absolutely nothing you could do about it.
Yet, things got done. Deadlines were met and there was just as much stress around as there is today.
I was lucky, I began my working life just as the workplace was transitioning to the digital systems we use today. This meant I had the opportunity to see both sides. The analogue, the midway (where it was half analogue, half digital) and digital.
What I’ve learned is that there are advantages in both types of system and when you combine the best of the analogue systems with the best of the digital systems you can build yourself a robust, reliable time management and productivity system.
So, before we continue, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from David. Hi Carl, When I was working in the mid-1990s, we did not have computers or smartphones but we did have a system for managing our appointments and tasks. Do you think technology today has helped us or made managing our time harder?
Hi David, thank you for your question.
You are right in observing that people managed just fine before computers, smartphones and iPads came onto the scene. In fact, while people still became overwhelmed, there was a better sense of time than there is today. Because we had to manually write out the things we had to do, rather than enter them into an app, we were much more conscious about what we were committing ourselves to.
Today, your task manager will take thousands, if not millions of tasks, and while that may sound fantastic, it does create a problem. The problem being: when will do do all these tasks?
The reality is, we cannot and never will be able to do everything. There is just too much we would like to do and a limited amount of time to do it in.
When I was teaching English, I enjoyed the session where we looked at the words time and money. The two nouns share the exact same verbs. For instance, spend time on something, spend money on something. Or we can save money or save time.
But not only do these two words share the same verbs, they can also be thought of as the same thing. If we choose to spend money on a new iPad, that means we have less money to spend on other things. So, if you have $3,000 in your bank account and you choose to spend $1,000 on an iPad Pro with a keyboard and Apple Pencil, then you are going to have $2,000 left to spend on other things.
Let’s say your rent to mortgage is $1,000 and household expenses come to $800.00, then you only have $200 to spend on other things.
With time, we all get 166 hours a week. We are usually committed to spending 40 hours at work, perhaps we need to spend 2 hours a day commuting to and from work (that’s ten hours) and there’s sleeping, eating and keeping ourselves clean.
If you decide to pay less rent or mortgage pretty soon you will have a debt that needs to be paid and if you don’t pay it, you’ll lose your home. If you choose to skip your sleep for a few days, you’ll make yourself sick and won’t be able to do your work and you’ll likely lose your job.
Just like with bank account, there is a finite amount you can use and you get to choose how you spend your money or time on your commitments
Technology has not changed that. Just because we can manage our to-do list digitally, doesn’t mean we automatically become more productive. And just because we can schedule repeating events on our calendar, doesn’t mean we have more time.
Most companies and individuals go bankrupt because they have over-committed themselves with debt. Likewise, you will burn yourself out if you over-commit yourself with time.
Now, one of the downsides of the digital systems is, the ease with which we can commit ourselves. We can throw an unlimited amount of tasks into our task managers without necessarily seeing what we have committed ourselves to. The more you throw in there, the less time you have for other things.
Conversely, with an analogue system—one written out on paper, you can see exactly what you are committing yourself to. Either you are writing your tasks out on a piece of paper or you are adding them into the notes section of a diary.
The act of writing them out, triggers your brain to resist adding too much. You become very aware of what you are committing to and how little time you have.
Recently, I was talking with a tech loving friend of mine who is always trying out the latest productivity apps—he understands it’s a bad habit of his. However, he did confess to me recently that whenever he feels overwhelmed he pulls out an old fashioned notebook and writes out all the things that he thinks he needs to do.
Once he’s done this “brain dump”, he will cross out all the tasks he either doesn’t want to do or knows deep down he’s never going to get round to doing.
This act of pruning his list leaves him feeling better and a lot less overwhelmed.
And that is where good old fashioned pen and paper still holds an advantage over the digital tools we now have access to. The awareness of what you are committing yourself to is far greater than when you use digital tools.
I love my Apple Calendar, it allows me to add recurring events, subscribe to my rugby team’s calendar so I can see when they are playing and I can share a calendar with my wife so I know when our family commitments are. The downsides to modern digital calendars is you can allow other people to schedule events for you. For me, that’s not good. That’s like giving people access to your bank account and letting them withdraw money without asking you. You’re never likely to do that are you? So why are we allowing people to do that with our time.
With a digital calendar, I would recommend you make sure you have, at the very least, the option to “accept”, “decline” or “maybe” a meeting request. I would also suggest if you need time to work on a piece of work, to block that time out. You do not need to worry, the other person cannot see what you have blocked out. All they see is that you are unavailable at that time. This will safeguard you against time thieves filling up your calendar with their priorities.
One area where I feel digital tools are better than analogue tools is the notes app. Traditionally the issue people had keeping all their notes in a notebook is finding their notes later. There was also the issue of scribbling down an idea on a scrap of paper only to lose that scrap paper.
With digital notes, you don’t lose them and finding notes you wrote years ago is as simple as doing a keyword or date search within your notes app.
There is a danger if you in the habit of switching your digital notes app every few months that you will lose something. But if you stick with one notes app, over the years you are going to build, as Tiago Forte called it a “second Brain”.
I’ve been using Evernote for nearly 13 years and when I do a keyword search for something I am often pleasantly surprised when I get a note I wrote sever years ago. It’s a great way to reminisce and also can trigger me to build on the ideas I had back then. That isn’t as easy with paper-based notes unless you spend a lot of time carefully indexing and organising your notebooks—which can look incredibly impressive in a bookcase, but does take up an enormous amount of time just keeping organised.
Digital notes apps do a lot of that hard work for you.
So, David, to answer your question, I have found that when it comes to my calendar and notes, digital tools have made life much easier. There are dangers with your calendar, but if you are vigilant, your digital calendar can serve you better than having to carry around a diary everywhere you go.
And with your notes, you now have access to a library of ideas and thoughts on your phone—a digital device you carry with you everywhere you go. That again, is far better than carrying around a notebook—or series of notebooks so you have access to everything.
The only digital tool I feel is better in an analogue system is the to-do list. A paper based to-do list worked for centuries. The digital to-do list, or as we call it now task manager, can cause a lot of overwhelm and stress. It doesn’t help you to prioritise what’s important unless you keep it well organised and curated—which I find most people don’t do—and a lot of things we add to our task managers disappear, never to be seen again until it’s too late.
Thank you, David for you question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 270
Do you feel you have balance in your day? If not, this episode is for you.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Planning Course
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The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 270 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 270 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
So, if you’re listening to this podcast, the chances are you have an interest in managing your time and being more productive. And that’s a great interest to have, but the real question is why? Why do you want to better manage your time? Is it because you feel you have too much to do or it seems all you ever do is work work work?
The real reason why anyone would want to better manage their time is because they want more balance in their lives. After all, we have a lot of lives to manage. At a basic level, we have our professional and personal lives, but inside those, we may have different roles. We could be a mother, a daughter, a sister. We may have interests such as painting or sketching.
At a professional level, we could be a manager of people, an accountant, a salesperson or a project manager—it’s likely you are all of these. You need to manage your team, allocate your department’s budget and make sure your projects are moving forward.
The realities of life today is that there will always be something you have to do. It can be difficult to bring any kind of balance into our lives. Yet, it may be difficult, but it’s certainly not impossible if you focus on what’s important to you.
That, nicely leads me to this week's question, which means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.
This week’s question comes from Mary-Anne. Mary Anne asks: Hi Carl, I know you and many other people in the time management world talk a lot about planning the day and week, but I find it’s impossible. I have two teenage daughters, a full-time career, and I have to take care of my father, who needs full-time care. I find it impossible to get any balance. There are just too many demands on me. What would you say to someone who is really struggling to find some kind of balance in their day?
Hi Mary Anne, thank you for your question.
That’s a great question, and I know it can be very hard to organise everything when other people are involved. The good news is, somehow you are managing everything. It might feel like you are juggling a lot of balls each day, but it does appear from your question that you are not dropping any.
Now, we must return to the fact that time is fixed. You only have 24 hours a day. What that means is the only control you have is what you do in those twenty-four hours.
Before we can move on, though, we need to look at out areas of focus. The eight areas that are important to all us. These range from our family and relationships to our career and self development. Now these eight areas will change in importance as we go through life.
When we are in our twenties, it’s likely our education (self development) and career are near the top of our list. As we settle down into adulthood, finances and lifestyle become more important. As we age, family and friends become more and more of a priority and our career drops down the list. Your areas of focus are dynamic. As we go through the different stages of life they change in importance.
Now, looking at what you wrote, Mary-Anne, it seems your family and relationships and career are at the top of your list. Knowing that, means when you sit down to plan your week, you begin with these two areas. If you need to attend to your father two or three times a day, then that’s what you need to do. It becomes a non-negotiable part of your day.
Your teenage daughters may be able to help you here, or maybe not, either way, as teenagers, they will likely have some independence—may even demand some independence. Encouraging them to take on more responsibility for their lives, will not only help you it will also help them.
With you career, you need to establish what your core work is. The work you are employed to do. This does not mean the results; for example, if you have to make $20,000 in sales each week, that’s the outcome, the result you want. Your core work is the activity that will produce that result. That could be you need to make ten calls to prospective customers and have three appointments on your calendar each day. Making those calls and setting up those appointments are your core work activities.
These need to be your priority each day you are at work. You do not want to confuse results with activity. To get the results you want, you need to identify the activities that will give you those results.
You can also bring this to your family. What are the results you want, and then determine what the activities are that will bring those results. Those activities are your priorities each day.
So, to give the care you want to give to your father, what do you need to do? That needs to be your priority.
Now, once you know what activities you need to perform each day to bring the results you want, you can make sure they are embedded in your day.
To give you a simple example. Louis, my dog, needs to go for a walk every day and I like to spend an hour exercising. In total two hours, that means two hours of my day have already been taken up before each day begins. The only question I need answer is when? When will I do these activities? For me, I like to break up my day. So, I take Louis out for his walk around 2pm, then when we get back home, I will exercise. My calendar is blocked from 2pm until 4pm each.
I don’t work a typical nine til five job. I work mornings and evenings and do my personal activities in the afternoon. That works for me.
You will likely have work commitments through the day leaving you with the early morning and evening for your family activities.
Now, what about you, Mary-Anne? What do you want to do for yourself?
Balance is all about balancing our commitments to others with the commitments to ourselves. If we spend all our time on the commitments to others, we will feel out of balance and lost. Our lives will be directed by other people and that is never going to be good for you.
You may want some time to yourself for reading, pursuing a hobby or exercise. We all need some “alone time”. It’s what recharges us and help keep us mentally balanced.
Too often we feel guilty about spending time on ourselves, but you should not. It’s healthy and vital if you want the energy to take care of others—which is something we naturally want to do. The problem is you cannot do that if you are exhausted from giving too much of yourself to others.
Time for yourself does not need to be a lot. We’re talking an evening or two a week or an afternoon on a weekend where you can step away and do your own thing.
Whatever time you do set aside for yourself you want to put that on your calendar. It gives you something to look forward to and every time you look at your calendar you’re going to see it. And, once it’s on your calendar, it becomes non-negotiable. You do not sacrifice that time for anyone or anything. Tell everyone that this time is for you. You need to protect it.
I do this with my Saturday nights. Saturday night is the only night each week I have to myself. It begins with a family dinner and once finished, the rest of the evening is my time. To do with whatever I want. I usually settle down to some TV and just wallow in doing absolutely nothing at all.
The key, Mary-Anne, is to step back a little. Prioritise what is important to you and make sure that whatever time you want for the important things in your life are scheduled on your calendar.
While I was away on my quarterly “Strategy week” last week, I undertook to watch all episodes of the early 70s action comedy, The Persuaders! Starring Roger Moore and Tony Curtis. The show was set in the early 70s (perhaps late 60s) and well before the mobile phone or home computer. What I noticed was how less stressed people were. The beauty of paper is it slows everything down. If you needed to send a document you only had one way to do it—the mail (and not email). So there was always around 48 hours to wait before things got completed.
But because everything was slower, we had time for ourselves. Mornings were never rushed, we ate a proper breakfast—bacon and eggs (all natural ingredients) and as there was fewer cars on the road, there were no traffic jams.
I wouldn’t necessarily say it was a better time—but it was a lot slower. Many of the words we use today were not used—burnt out, stressed out and overwhelmed—nobody used those words. There were fewer distractions and finding out the news meant you either watched the 9 O’clock news or sat and read the newspaper.
What we can do is learn from that. Slow down and have fixed times when you do things. What do you do after dinner? Could you not find an hour for yourself and either go read a book or out for walk? Where are the pockets of time that you can use to do the things you want to do to add balance to your own life—rather than serving others?
Ultimately, Mary-Anne, it’s about taking control of your calendar and making sure you have the things you need to do and want to do on there. Task managers and notes apps don’t help here. All these do is tell you what you still have to do. Not helpful if you want to take control of your day and have a more balanced life.
Where possible try to make your activities routine. Routines require a lot less energy because you can do them without thinking. You’re not wasting time thinking about what to do next. You know and you automatically do it. For instance, I go downstairs to cook dinner at 6pm every evening. It’s automatic.
This also means I have some markers in my day. As I mentioned before, I break between 2 and 4pm, then come back to some work until 6pm when I go down to make dinner. These markers mean I can balance my work between these natural breaks in my day.
I should also mention that if you are struggling with doing a weekly plan, then I just launched a new mini course that covers just that. If you hurry, you can get that course for the early-bird discount of $25.00. This course will help you to create plan for the week which will not take you two or three hours to do—forty minutes tops. I’ve put the details of this course in the show notes for you.
I hope that has helped, Mary-Anne. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Why bother with a weekly plan when a single crisis can destroy the whole week? That’s what I’ll be answering this week.
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Episode 269 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 269 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I’m sure you’ve heard the saying “No plan ever survives contact with the enemy.” There are numerous variations to this quote, one of my favourites is allegedly by Mike Tyson; “Everyone Has a Plan Until They Get Punched in the Mouth”.
Now, it would be easy to take these quotes at face value and decide that there’s no point in planning the week when the chances are some crisis or another will come up on Monday morning rendering any plan you may have useless. Well, that’s not strictly true.
A plan’s purpose is to guide you through the week. It’s designed to keep you focused on what’s important and prevent you from being pulled off track by these crises that will inevitably crop up. There’s always something unexpected. That could be your colleague calling in sick, an important meeting being cancelled or postponed or a catastrophic problem with one of your customers.
However, having a plan means no matter what is thrown at you, you still have a road map that will guide you through the week. There’s still an objective and it’s that that ensures that while you may not be able to get everything done that you set out to accomplish, you at least get some of it done.
So, today I will outline why, despite the chances of you being pulled away from your plan, it’s still important to have a plan. And so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Matthew, Matthew asks; Hi Carl, I know you always stress how important it is to do the weekly planning, but I find every time I do one, by Tuesday afternoon that plan is useless because so many issues and problems come up and I have to deal with them and forget my plan. Do you have any insights why and how planning can stop this from happening?
Hi Matthew, thank you for your question.
Sometimes when we talk about doing a weekly plan or weekly review many people miss its main purpose. A plan for the week is not to give you a step by step micromanaged plan for the week. It’s to give you a set of objectives to achieve that will take you from what you are today to where you want to be at the end of the week.
Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say I need to get a 5,000 word report written next week. Now, logically, I would divide that work up into writing 1,000 words each day next week. That’s a plan. It’s a project broken down into smaller a steps.
But what happens if something comes up on Tuesday afternoon at 4pm that requires all my time and attention. I may even have to go off site and visit an important customer on Wednesday to fix the problem. Now, my carefully laid plan of writing 1,000 words each day has been destroyed. I’m not going to be able to write anything on Wednesday and Tuesday, because of the crisis, I was only able to write 500 words.
Now, the week is only half way done and I’m 1,500 words behind. Now, here’s the thing, the objective was not to write 1,000 words per day. The objective was to complete the 5,000 word report by the end of the week. The plan was to write 1,000 words, that’s now gone, but the objective still remains the same.
All I need do now, when I get back on Wednesday after resolving the issue, is to readjust my plan. Okay, I cannot finish it by writing 1,000 words on Thursday and Friday, but I can if I write 1,750 words per day.
I will still accomplish my objective and all I needed to do was to adjust my plan.
Now, it’s likely you will need to also adjust your timings. Perhaps you allocated an hour each day to writing the report, you now need to increase that time to ninety minutes per day, but finding an extra thirty minutes each day for two days is not a huge dilemma.
Making adjustments to your plan is far better than giving up altogether and getting stressed out. That’s not going to solve anything. Work the problem in front of you, don’t make things worse by worrying about things you cannot do anything about right now.
This why we need to build two things into our days. The first is some buffer time. For me, I like to give myself at least thirty minutes between sessions of work where possible. Sometimes, that’s not always going to be possible, say when I have back to back meetings, but for the most part I will have at least two thirty minute buffer slots in my day—even on the busiest of days.
Secondly, doing a daily planning session. Now, your daily planning session is not about creating a new plan. Its purpose is to make sure you are still on track with your weekly plan. It’s here where you have an opportunity to make adjustments to your weekly plan that will help you to reach your objectives for the week, or if necessary, adjusting your weekly objective.
I like to think of my weekly plan as like a flight plan for a commercial flight. Let’s say I am flying between Seoul and Paris. This is a flight that leaves Seoul at around 11:30am (Seoul time) and arrives in Paris around 4:00pm (Paris Time). It’s a fifteen hour flight.
The flight is scheduled every day, yet each day the pilots will have a briefing meeting to review the weather, the flying time, the anticipated weight and calculate how much fuel they will need. They will also confirm their flight plan based on conditions in countries they are flying over both in terms of weather and geopolitical developments.
For example, This flight previously took around eleven hours. Yet, in February 2022, it was no longer possible to fly over Russia and Ukraine. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not known to Air France before the day they entered Ukraine. Yet, the pilots will have adjusted their flight plan to fly around Russia and Ukraine thus avoiding any potential danger to the flight.
The objective of the pilots was not to fight between Seoul and Paris in eleven hours. The objective was to get the passengers, crew and plane to Paris safely. On that day in February last year, the pilots achieved their objective. Nobody complained that the flight arrived four hours late.
So, Matthew, the purpose of planning the week is to give you a set of objectives and a framework in which to achieve those objectives.
The purpose of planning the day is to confirm you are on track and to make any adjustments if necessary.
When I begin a typical week, I will have twenty coaching calls booked in. That’s twenty hours of calls and a further seven hours of writing feedback on those calls. However, each week, I will likely have two or three calls cancel and reschedule for another day. That means I will have a few extra hours in which to catch up or work on something else.
I know most of you may begin the week with a set number of meetings planned, but some of those will cancel or reschedule for another week, so while it’s likely additional work will come in as the week progresses—work you did not anticipate having to do, you are also going to pick up some extra time too with work that either no longer needs doing or cancelled meetings.
Over the course of a week, things generally balance out. Throwing your plan out because Monday or Tuesday didn’t go to plan is not a good strategy. Work the problem in front of you and get back to your plan. Then at the end of the day, give yourself ten to fifteen minutes to make any adjustments to your weekly plan based on your objectives for the week.
Now how to stop problems and issues arising in the first place. That comes down to anticipating future problems. This will generally only come from experience. But, doing the weekly planning also gives you an opportunity to plan ahead and to anticipate what could go wrong.
One the biggest benefits of getting yourself organised and being consistent with your weekly and daily planning is you are moving from being reactive—reacting to events, to being proactive—being prepared for events. It’s not something you even need to learn. It’s a natural coincidence of having some time at the end of the week and looking forward and seeing the bigger picture of what you are trying to accomplish.
Now, something else that works well is to what I call “front load” the week. What this means is you try to get as much of your fixed work done early in the week. If you have a number of tasks that require a lot of focus or time, try to schedule these for early in the week. This will help you later in the week because either they are done, or if they need finishing, the biggest part of the task has been completed—you only then need to find a small amount of time to fin ish them.
I do this with my writing. I try to get as much of my writing done on Monday and Tuesday. If you have an important meeting to prepare for later in the week, do the hard work on Monday and Tuesday. It takes the pressure off you and leaves you free to fine tune things.
However, the most powerful thing you can do is to make sure you are doing the daily planning session. Think of this as a debriefing meeting with yourself to review your plan and consider new tasks that have come in and to revise your plan if necessary.
Becoming better with your time management and being more productive is not going to stop additional work from coming in. However, what it does do is train you to quickly decide what is important. You become better at making decisions, and it’s that speed with your decision making that improves your overall productivity.
If something needs to be done, then it meeds to be done. All you need do is decide when you will do it.
Thank you, Matthew for your question. I hope this has helped.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
How confident are you setting up a project and delivering it on time every time? If you struggle in this areas, then this podcast is for you.
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Episode 268 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 268 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Completing our personal projects is something we all frequently find difficult. This is largely because there’s usually nobody holding us accountable and we don’r have access to the same resources our companies will have. However, it does not have to be difficult if we follow a simple formula.
I’ve spent many years studying how NASA went from a seemingly impossible challenge to successfully landing Neil Armstrong on the Moon in 1969.
When that project was first floated by President Kennedy in May 1961, NASA lacked the knowledge of whether humans could survive in space, they were struggling to get a rocket off the ground, and the nobody had left the confines of Earth’s orbit. Yet, eight years later, Neil Armstrong spoke those infamous words: “That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind”.
Now it’s true that NASA did not have to worry about resources, Congress gave them the money to make this happen. But it was not all about the money. Sure, that helped, but the technology still needed to be invented, scientists had to work out how to get a spaceship out of Earths orbit and into the Moon’s orbit and they needed to know if humans could survive in space and if so, how.
I’ve always been a believer in finding the success stories and then breaking them down to their component parts to understand how the success happened. It’s why I know there is no such things as an overnight success, there’s much more to completing a project than being in the right place at the right time.
And with the Moon landings, everything is there to show you the roadmap towards completing a project—or a goal for that matter—all we need to do is break it down. And that is what we will do in this episode.
So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jonathan. Jonathan asks, Hi Carl, one thing I really struggle with is working on my personal projects. I have some home improvement projects that I’ve had on my list for years and I just never seem to get around to doing them. Do you have any tips on getting these projects done?
Hi Jonathan, thank you for your question.
Firstly I must start by saying this is something very common and you shouldn’t beat yourself up over this, Jonathan. The good news this is an opportunity to develop skills.
Now, let’s begin with what I talked about a moment ago with the clarifying sentence. I used to talk about this as the clarifying statement, but somehow the word “statement” invited people to write line after line of words defining what the project was. No. That’s not what you are trying to achieve here. What you are looking for is a simple sentence that gives clarity on what you want to accomplish with the project.
Going back to the John F Kennedy sentence setting the parameters of the Moon landing project when he stood before Congress and announced that the US;
"should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth."
Twenty-six words that set NASA on a course that captivated the world. Those words were clear, contained a deadline and left no-one in doubt about what was to be achieved.
Now, Kennedy was no scientist. He was a student of government and international affairs. Certainly nothing that gave him a deep knowledge of the science and engineering feats required to land and walk on the moon.
But that didn’t matter, Kennedy was the leader, not the implementer. There was a reservoir of talented, motivated scientists and engineers ready to take up the “challenge” and turn Kennedy’s project outcome into a reality.
Now, depending on the size of the project you are attempting to do, Jonathan, you may need to reach out for the skills you do not process. For instance, one of your home improvement projects could be to build a conservatory onto the side of your house. Now, unless you are a builder, you are not going to have the know-how or skills to build the conservatory—you are going to need to hire outside help. A builder and an electrician are likely to be your first requirements.
Plus, you may need to hire an architect to draw up the plans for you.
So, this means you will need to “secure the funding” for the project. Now, Kennedy assigned this part of the project to his Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, who pushed Congress for the necessary funding.
Now, if I were to undertake building an extension to the side of our house, I would need to “Secure” the funding somehow. That could come from my savings or I may need to talk to the bank for a loan. Either way, because I would need to hire experts to do the work, I would need funds, so before anything started on the project I would need to get some estimates on how much the project would likely cost.
One area where I find people waste time with project planning is to sit down and plan out the whole project step by step. In my experience, I find there’s always time to plan the next steps, but planning can and often does become the source of procrastination. There’s too many unknowns and if you really want to get the project off the ground take the first logical step.
To write a book, start writing the first draft. Don’t worry about publishers, writing applications, chapter headings or book cover designs. Until you have a first draft you are not going to have anything to work with anyway.
Similarly with your home improvement projects, you will need a budget, so get the quotes and estimates together. That will give you the right information to proceed to the next step.
With the Moon landings, NASA broke the project down into three parts. There was Mercury, where they wanted to learn what was required in order to get humans into space. Then came Gemini, where they learned all about rendezvousing with other spacecraft and doing space walks, and finally Apollo, which was the part of the project that took humans to the Moon.
Each part of the lunar landing project had its own set of objectives. Whatever project you are working on, will be the same. The first part could be to secure the funding. The second part may involve hiring the right people to do the work, and finally the construction part. Each part will have its own outcome, but ultimately, the overall project sentence will guide you.
For example, if you want to have the conservatory built by the summer, and you have three months until the summer begins, each part of your project will need to be broken down to meet that deadline. If, when you get the estimates, you are told the builders will require eight weeks to complete the work, then that leaves you with four weeks for the other parts of the project.
When we moved to the East Coast of Korea, my wife and I first sat down to decide how we were would do it. Our initial plan was to spend three months living in a guest house in the area we wanted to move to. These three months confirmed we definitely wanted to proceed with the project and we extended our stay in the guest house until the end of the year.
During that time, we began looking at properties and working on our budget. We decided on our new home in October and as it was still being built, we were given a moving in date on the 20th December.
That gave us almost three months to put into action the second phase of our project—which was the interior design and furniture. And then the final part of the project was to move in.
Looking back at my original notes for that project, very little went according to that initial plan. But one thing did not change. The deadline (by the end of the year) and the move itself. The initial action was to move to the area we wanted to live in for three months and we did that within two weeks of making the decision to proceed. After that plans changed, but the outcome did not.
There’s always going to be delays, issues to resolve and changing plans. That’s to be expected. However, if you have been clear with your project sentence, and you stick to your overall deadline for the project, you will push yourself to get things moving.
And problems and issues will always arise. That’s part of life. With the moon landing project, tragedy struck on the 27th January 1967 when during a test on the new Apollo programme (the third phase) a fire broke out in the astronauts cockpit instantly killing the three astronauts. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffy were killed in the tragic accident and all manned flights were stopped, just three years before the project deadline while a full investigation took place.
NASA, continued developing the programme, as information from the tragedy came through, changes were implemented and by the time the final investigation report came through, almost all its recommendations had been implemented.
Hopefully, nothing as tragic will happen with your projects, but problems and issues will inevitably arise. While you are dealing with those issues, what could you be doing to make sure they the issue does not delay you from your final deadline?
For instance, there could be a materials shortage and there may be a two week delay to receiving some of the materials needed to build your conservatory. What could you do so that when the material is available and delivered you minimise any further delays?
And finally, you need a competitor or villain. For NASA and the United States, the villain and competitor was the Soviet Union. When NASA began the project to land on the Moon, The Soviet Union had already been the first to put a man in space and had launched the first satellite, Sputnik. NASA was still struggling to get a rocket to lift off without exploding.
The introduction of a villain or competitor brings energy to the project. Now, of course, with our personal projects it’s unlikely you will have a competitor. However, the reality is you do. The competitor is you.
The reason most of us fail with our personal projects is because of us. We are our own worst enemies. If you want to go deeper, it’s comfort that stops you from completing your projects. We naturally don’t like change and we always default to our comfort zone. But if you really want to complete these personal projects, whether they are home improvements or buying a new house, you will have to get uncomfortable.
The way I deal with this is, it to turn whatever comfort I am defaulting to into the enemy. At its simplest level that comfort could be the sofa. I never let the sofa beat me. No matter how inviting and seductive the sofa tries to be, I will still go out for a run when it’s raining. The sofa will never beat me. That’s my mindset.
And it’s an easy mindset to develop. First identify the comfort, then look at it and tell it that it will never beat you. You will always win.
If you find yourself procrastinating, externalise it by writing Procrastination in big words on a piece of paper and stare at it as if it was your worst enemy and tell it it will never ever beat you.
Steve Jobs invoked this strategy. First it was Microsoft and IBM, then it was Intel. With Steve, there was always an enemy to galvanise his employees. Today, Tim Cook does it with Samsung and Android.
Interestingly, because there was a clear competitor and enemy for NASA in the 1960s, their staff were highly motivated and focused on winning. They were making history and that was enough for them to succeed. NASA never needed table football tables (Fuzzball), nap pods, massage rooms or any of the other crazy benefits for their employees. Having a clear outcome, a strategy and a defined enemy was all that was needed to keep their employees focused, happy and engaged.
So there you go, Jonathan. I hope that has helped. I strongly recommend the documentary film Unsung Heroes, The Story Of Mission Control and Tom Hanks film Apollo 13. Both of these films will inspire you and give you everything you need to finally complete all those projects that you are stalling on.
Thank you for your question and thank you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, I have a very special guest. Former UK Special Forces soldier Simon Jeffries. Simon talks about mindset, self, discipline, goal setting and project planning.
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This week, are you being realistic about what you can get done each day? Most people are not.
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Episode 266 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 266 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Most people'ss problems with time management and productivity are not actually problems with time management and productivity. The problem lies with being over-ambitious about what you can get done each day.
I’m reminded of common phrases such as “biting off more than you can chew”, and my favourite “your eyes being bigger than your stomach”. It seems to be almost human nature to think we can do a lot more than we really can.
Let’s get realistic here.You are not going to be able to attend seven hours of meetings, respond to 120 emails and complete fifty tasks from your task manager today. If that’s what your calendar, task manager and email is telling you, you’ve just deluded yourself and it means your system is broken—even before you’ve started the day.
It’s time to get real about what you are capable of doing each day. We can do a surprising amount of work in a day, but we need to be strategic and, more importantly, aware of our human qualities. Work to our strengths, rather trying to slog it out.
So, without any further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Kirsten. Kirsten asks, Hi Carl, than you for all that you do. It has been a huge help in my life. I was wondering how you cope with all the work you have to do each day. I don’t just mean work work, but all the personal tasks that need to be done as well. I find I never have enough time to finish everything I’m supposed to do. How do you keep your workload manageable?
Hi Kirsten, than you for your question.
This is an issue I’ve spent many years struggling with. I used to believe I’d wake up each morning feeling refreshed, energetic and focused on what needed to be done. I’d get straight onto my tasks, be ready for my appointments and end the day with plenty of energy to attack my personal tasks.
The reality is very different. There are days I wake up feeling refreshed and energetic, there are also days when I wake up feeling tired.
And focused?—hahaha, that’s a very rare occurrence. It’s that old belief we have where we say, I don’t feel great today so I’ll skip exercise today and do it tomorrow instead.
Sure, it gives you an adequate excuse for today, but tomorrow comes and you’re desperately searching for another excuse not to exercise. We generally have very unrealistic ideas about how tomorrow will be different. It won’t be, unless you get real about what is required to get the things done that you want to get done.
And this is where we need to know what our limitations are. How much can you do each day, realistically?
To give you an example from my own experience. I know I can do three fifty-minute coaching calls in one session. I learned that the hard way. In the beginning I would schedule four or five calls one after another (with a ten minute gap between calls).
After the third call, my voice was beginning to go and I was getting mentally and physically tired. I could do four, but the fourth one was a struggle. Now, I limit my call sessions to no more than three calls.
That leaves me with sufficient energy to make sure my notes on each call are correct, and I am still capable of doing the other work I need to do that day.
I would love to be able to do four or five calls straight, but realistically, doing so would leave me exhausted and unable to do the rest of the work that needed to be done that day.
Often we don’t have much control over the meetings we are expected to attend each day, yet I strongly advise that you find a way to be less available. You can do this by scheduling meetings with yourself on your calendar. Other people cannot see what you have scheduled, all they see is you are not available at that time.
This means you can schedule focused work sessions if you wish, or just block the time out so you can get away from your desk for twenty minutes or so and get some movement in. That movement will give your brain a rest and leave you feeling ready for the next session.
And that’s another tip I would give you. Break your day down into sessions of work. While it might seem counter-intuitive to step away from doing work for twenty minutes or so between sessions, but it recharges your brain ready for the the next session. It’s as if you close down one session, get a break and then start the next session.
For example, set aside two hours or so in the morning for doing your most important work for the day. You are much more focused in a morning—even if you are a night owl. Your brain has its most energy in a morning. That energy is gradually depleted throughout the day.
After two hours, step away from your desk and move. Get some sunlight, a drink of water or tea or coffee and then begin your next session of work. Make that session an hour. Then break for lunch.
After lunch try to schedule your meetings. Human interaction helps to avoid that ‘afternoon slump’, and gives you a different environment to work in.
The way I break down my day is early morning calls—no more than two hours. Then I take a fifteen minute break, and then I settle down to a two hour creative work session. That’s followed by breakfast (I do intermittent fasting so my eating window is between 11am and 7pm) Then it’s back to my desk for around ninety minutes to do my smaller tasks for the day.
The afternoon, for me, is all about activity. I’ll take my dog for a walk, do my personal errands and exercise, before coming back to my desk around 5pm for an hour of communications—dealing with email and other messages. 6pm is dinner and from 7:30pm until 9pm I do my admin. 9:00pm to 11:00pm is call time. And then I close down my day and, all being well, be in bed for 11:30pm.
That structure has evolved over the years. It works for me. I need to work in the mornings and evenings because of the time zone I live in. Being in the far east, I am 8 hours ahead of Europe, 14 hours ahead of eastern US and 17 hours ahead of the west coast of America.
So, my afternoons, both Europe and the US are asleep. I’m never likely to have any meetings or “urgent” messages coming in at that time.
I’ve tried all sorts of different structures, but trial and error has helped me to develop this structure.
However, that means, I have five and a half hours each day to do non-meeting related work. That’s more than enough time if… And the if is important here.
If you plan out the day.
You see if you are not planning the day, your brain will plan it for you and your brain has no concept of time. Remember, the clock—hours and minutes—was developed by human beings. It’s not nature. Nature works a much simpler day. Daylight and night. Your internal clock recognises only day and night. This is why we will over-estimate or under-estimate how long something will take to do.
It’s why so many people think a quick follow up call with take less than two minutes, when in reality you are often still on the phone fifteen minutes later. And why you think that presentation for tomorrow’s meeting will only take an hour, and four hours later you’re still struggling to finish it.
I have a little analogue clock on my desk, and when I begin my session of work, I will look at the clock and tell myself when I will stop. For instance, when I began preparing this script, I looked at the clock and told myself I would finish at 1:30pm.
Now, aside from my little dog telling me it’s walkie time, I also have my little clock telling me how long I have left. That clock adds a little pressure and prevents me from being distracted by something else. I am here, sat at my desk and my focus needs to be on this script.
Now when it comes to planning your day, it’s all about knowing where you have time for sessions of work. If today were a Thursday, when I have three calls in the morning and three calls in the evening—I call Thursday my calls day—I would not have scheduled many tasks. In fact, I try not to have any tasks except for my routines and small catch up tasks on a Thursday. I know I will be tired from those calls and it would be pointless trying to get any creative work done.
The problem with over-scheduling your day is when are you going to do those tasks you could not do? If tomorrow is already busy, when will you find the time to do them? You’re only adding to your backlog.
Now, this means we have to be very protective of our time. I know it’s much easier to say “yes” than “no”, but if your default position is yes, you are going to be overwhelmed.
In the past, senior executives had secretaries—some still do but they are now called “assistants”. These secretaries were not just there to type letters and documents. Their primary role was to act as gatekeepers. To prevent their boss from being interrupted. The best secretaries were exceptional at this part of their work.
They made it incredibly difficult to make appointments with their boss. They protected their diaries so their boss had time to do their work and think.
Today, most of these secretarial skills have gone with the secretaries, they are very rare today. This means we need to act as our own gatekeepers. To make it difficult to make appointments with you.
This does not mean you have to “disappear” or be rude. It means you need to know when to be available and to whom and when not to be available.
It’s a an art form to “disappear” at times in the day, but it’s an art worth learning and developing. It take practice and a fair amount of courage to become unavailable—particularly if you have a demanding boss. But, the trick is to begin slowing. Perhaps try thirty minutes in the morning and thirty minutes in the afternoon. Then as you gain the courage, increase that time.
You’ll be surprised how much work you get done when you know for the next thirty to sixty minutes nobody can find you.
Ultimately, Kirsten, it comes down to knowing what your limitations are and planning the day ahead. It will take time to learn how much you can realistically get done each day, but if you stick with planning the day you will soon find it becomes much more manageable.
To give you a benchmark, I know if my task manager is showing more than twenty tasks for today, some of them are not getting done. If you are using Todoist you can go into the karma points area and see your average number of tasks completed each day. Add those up and divide it by seven. That will give you your average and will be a realistic number of tasks per day.
When you do the daily planning, you want to be looking at this number. If it’s too high, reduce it—look for tasks that do not really need to be done tomorrow and can be pushed off to another day.
I hope that helps, Kristen. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 265
This week, why not consistently doing a weekly planning session is destroying your productivity.
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Episode 265 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 265 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This episode is for the 95% or so of you who are using a task manager and a calendar and not doing a weekly planning session.
The truth is, if you’re collecting all this stuff and then not planning out when you will do anything about it, you’re heading for a catastrophic failure. It’s why so many people are constantly switching apps—it forces you to actually do some planning and organising, but it also stops you from doing any work.
All this stuff we are collecting is information. Information we want to be reminded of, perhaps do something with or delegate it. Yet, if you are not doing any kind of planning, most of this information will get lost inside your task manager or notes app and you’ve just created a horrendous list of stuff you’ve made no decisions about.
They often say information is power. This is not strictly true. Information is only powerful if you act on it. We all know how to lose weight, and we also know it is dangerous to be overweight for your long-term health. Yet statistics show that 60% of the US adult population is dangerously overweight. So there’s clearly a large number of people not acting on the information they have.
However, once you do become consistent with your weekly planning (and daily planning to an extent), you will see some incredible results. The first thing you will notice is how relaxed you’ve become. Knowing you have the week planned, that nothing has fallen through the cracks and you’re ready to get started leaves you without any worries or anxieties. You’ll wonder how you ever survived without it.
Anyway, enough of me going on about weekly planning, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Amy. Amy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve taken your Time Sector course and it’s completely changed my life. I feel so much more in control of what I am doing each day. The one area I really struggle with, though, is the reviews. I try so hard to sit down at the weekend for an hour to go through everything but keep avoiding it. Do you have any tips or tricks to help me become better at these?
Hi Ally, thank you for your question.
I suspect a lot of the difficulties with motivating ourselves to do the weekly planning sessions is because we’ve come to think it’s going to take at least an hour. The truth is, if you are consistently doing these sessions, you will soon find it takes you less than thirty minutes. Mine, for instance, takes around twenty minutes for the most part, although I do often do a longer one on the last Saturday of the month.
Let’s first look at the timing of your weekly planning session. I did quite a bit of experimenting with the best time to do this.
Turned out, Sunday nights was the worst time to do it. You spent all weekend worrying about all the things you think you needed to do next week and it felt like Sunday night was the beginning of your working week. Plus, it can be very hard to motivate yourself to get up and go to a quiet room to do some planning when you are fully relaxed.
Friday afternoons looked promising, but I found I was tired and just wanted to get home.
I found the best time to do the weekly planning session was actually Saturday morning. The reason for this was I had no excuses. It’s the first thing you do on Saturday morning and generally, you can wake up a little later and you feel well rested. Plus, the week is still fresh in your mind so it’s less likely you will forget anything.
The biggest benefit, though, is once you’ve done it, you can relax and enjoy your weekend. Your brain isn’t going to throw up anything that you may have forgotten and you feel a lot less stressed and in control.
So the first tip I would suggest is do your weekly planning first thing Saturday morning.
Next what do you include in your weekly planning?
Well, the first thing to do is to clear your inboxes. Hopefully, your email inbox is relatively clear already, but here I mean your task manager’s and notes’ inbox. What you are doing is organising everything you’ve collected and deciding when you are going to do the tasks.
Once your inboxes are clear, you look at your This Week folder to see what’s left over and decide a) if you still need to do it and b) if you do, decide when you will reschedule it to.
Then move to your Next Week folder and move any tasks in there that need pulling forward to This Week.
Once you have done that, open your calendar, and add dates to those tasks for the days you have the time to do them. Your calendar will guide you towards the best days to do the longer tasks.
The goal here is not about what you get done on an individual day, it’s more about what you get done in the week. So if you don’t complete all your tasks on Monday, all you need do is move any unfinished tasks to later in the week.
Another quick tip here, always keep in mind new tasks will be coming in that need to be done that week. This is why you do not want to be filling your days up. It’s okay to have one or two days where you may stack the tasks up, but do keep a few days relatively easy for those additional tasks you will inevitably collect.
Now, this week, I introduced a new concept for helping people be more consistent with their weekly planning. I call it the Weekly Planning Matrix and it’s made of of four squares. These are:
Core work, Projects/issues, Personal/ areas of focus and the radar.
This matrix should be used t get you started once your inboxes are clear.
The first box, your core work, will be fixed. It will be the same each week. These are the tasks that get your primary work done. Your core work is the work you are paid to do, not the ancillary work we’ve added. For instance, if you are a salesperson, your job is to sell. It is not to sit in meetings with your colleagues and boss talking about sales. Your core work happens when you are in front of your customers making sales. Admin is not core work unless you are an administrator. It might be necessary, but it is not core work.
When you set up your weekly planning matrix, you write out your core work and there is remains until your job changes. The reason it’s in the matrix is you need to know you must find time for doing this work each week.
Next up in the top right, is your projects and issues area. This is where you list out the projects you want to, or need to, work on that week. It also includes any issues that need resolving related to your work. Just getting these off your mind will ease the anxiety.
Be careful here, you do not want to overloading this area. Remember you will only have around forty hours available for all your work. Overloading this area and either you will have to steal time from your personal life—which should only ever be used in extreme circumstances—or you will find important things will be sacrificed for the loud less important things.
Next, in the bottom left of your matrix is the personal and areas of focus area. This is where you will list out the important personal things you need to get done that week. It’s also where you would highlight any areas of focus that may have been neglected over recent weeks or months. What can you do to get them back on track.
Finally, there is my favourite area. The radar. This is in the bottom right of your matrix and it’s for all those things you want to keep an eye on.
It’s quite hard to explain what the radar is in word, but imagine you are sat in front of a radar screen with everything going on in your life represented as little dots on the radar screen. You cannot focus on all of them at once, you have to decide which ones to look at. It’s these you will list down in this box.
I use this for things I might be waiting for, issues or projects that, while don’t need my personal input, maybe something I want to keep an eye on. I also use it for projects or appointments that are coming up that I want to be thinking about that week.
And that’s it. Once I’ve written things out in this matrix, I can transfer tasks to my task manager if they are not already there, schedule time on my calendar to work on things if I need blocks of time for them and to make sure that what I am asking of myself that week is realistic and balanced.
If you keep your matrix in your notes app, you have a reference point to start from the following week and you see how you did again your plan. You also have a working document you can use each evening for when you plan the next day.
Oh… Did I not mention the daily planning? Well, this is a simple task you should perform each evening before you finish the day. All you are doing is confirming that you upcoming day is realistic—that you haven’t overloaded it with things you know you will not have time to do.
It’s also a good time to look at your task manager’s inbox to make sure there are no fires in there and to clear it if you have time. You should also look at your calendar to make sure you know when your appointments are and look for gaps in between commitments where you can decide when you will do your tasks.
It’s amazing how often you will find you have say six or seven hours of meetings and twenty plus tasks scheduled for the same day. I mean, who are you kidding? You’re not going to get all that done. You need to go into your task manager and reduce the number of tasks or cancel some appointments.
And that’s the fine art of prioritisation. Which is another subject altogether.
So, in total, Amy, your weekly planning will take no more than thirty to forty minutes, and the daily planning should take around ten minutes.
It will take longer initially, you’re learning new habits and developing new processes. It’s worth sticking with because over time you will find you can shortcut the process and make it even faster when the need arises. For instance, I have a quick closing down planning session I can do in two or three minutes if I need to. I don’t like t odd that everyday, but on my rare days off, if we are out for a trip somewhere and I get home late, I will do the 2 minute planning session.
SO, there you go. That’s how to perform the daily and weekly planning sessions. I hope that helps, Amy. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 264
This week, The question is all about implementing the Time Sector System using a paper-based method.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Episode 264 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 264 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
There’s something special about pen and paper. The feel of the pen moving on paper and the simplicity of collecting notes, ideas and even marking off tasks feels better than tapping your mouse or trackpad on a task.
Sadly, technology has made task and appointment management extremely convenient. It’s fast and easy to add and check off tasks and it’s far easier to carry a phone than to always having to make sure you carry a notebook with you.
While I love technology and the convenience it brings with it, I do miss being able to slow things down and handwrite notes, ideas and lists of things I want to do and it seems many other people also prefer the more naturalness of using pen and paper to manage their lives.
So, wit that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Max. Max asks; Hi Carl, The problem for me lies in the tools. Before coming across your work, I used a paper notebook and generally followed the Bullet Journal methodology. I have found that I do not enjoy using digital tools for organising, note-taking and general brainstorming. Something about moving a pen across paper just works for me. How would you implement your Time Sector system with a paper notebook and a pen?
Hi Max, thank you for your question.
One of the benefits of using a digital system is that all your repeatable routines and areas of focus tasks automatically show up in your list of tasks to do today. These will need to be manually transferred to your today list when you do your planning with a paper based system.
The good news here is, if you do a daily planning session, you can pull your recurring tasks from your routines and areas of focus lists and add them to your list of tasks for tomorrow. This gives you the opportunity to decide whether you can do those tasks for tomorrow. This would likely mean you will be copying five or six tasks each day from a master list to your daily list.
Personally, I like this as it forces you to deliberately consider what you will do today.
However, to make this more concrete, so you don’t miss anything, I would create a page divided into seven boxes. Each box represents a day of the week, and you can add your recurring tasks in there.
For monthly and yearly recurring tasks, I would put them on your calendar. As you are only doing this with your monthly and yearly recurring tasks, it won’t overwhelm your calendar.
Okay, aside from that, the Time Sector System works very well through a paper based system.
In all task management systems whether they are digital or not, the most important list is your today list. The key with this list is it is curated, relevant and up to date will all the excess removed.
This is one of the disadvantages of the digital system. Because it is so easy to add a date to a task and then “forget” about it—the date and forget problem—we add random dates to tasks and then our daily lists become swamped before we even start the day. The paper based system avoids this because for you to create a daily list you manually need to add tasks to it.
So, what about the folders? Well here I would create a This Week list every eight pages in your notebook. (Or 14 pages if you have two pages representing a day) You can then add tasks you want to do that week to those pages.
These lists would take care of your Next Week lists so you would not need to create a Next Week list.
For the This Month list, That I would add to the beginning of each month. These are tasks you know need to be done sometime this month, but are not entirely sure when you will do them. This is a list you can review each week and bring forward any tasks to the appropriate list.
Long-term and on hold lists would be kept either at the beginning of your notebook or at the end. You can decide where that list is best kept in your notebook.
One of the downsides to running an analogue system is you need to set up each notebook you use. This is the same with a bullet journal as well as a non-digital GTD system—something I did when I first began using the GTD method years ago. You will need to set up the pages each time you start a new notebook.
The good news here, is this process does get faster with each new notebook and each new notebook gives you an opportunity to refine your system.
The focus with the Time Sector System is on “when” you will do the task, rather than “what” the task is. This means the most important page in your notebook is today. Nothing else matters today when you are doing your work and relaxing in the evening. Tomorrow comes in to play when you do the ten minutes planning the evening before.
That’s the set up, what about collecting stuff? Where would you put the inbox? When I ran an analogue system, my inbox was the daily page. I would add new tasks and reminders to the bottom right hand corner of the page for processing later in the day. Once I had transferred the new tasks to their relevant week, I would cross them out. This way, when I did the weekly planning, I could do a quick check to make sure I had caught everything and I wasn’t looking all over the page for tasks I may have missed.
Your project notes want to be kept at the back of your notebook. When you transfer to a new notebook, you want to only put in your current, active projects. If you have projects not due to start over the next three months, you can add these to a master projects list on a separate page.
However, here comes another issue with analogue systems. Email and digital documents such as Google Docs and shared Office files. You will need a digital system to run along side your notebook.
Managing your actionable email would be fairly easy as you can put a single recurring task reminding you to clear your actionable emails. Adding links to documents in the cloud will obviously be difficult. For this you will need some form of digital system to run alongside your paper-based system.
However, there is another way you can do this which is more of a hybrid system. You notebook can be used as your collection, and planning tool. It can also contain your list of tasks for today. You can also use your notebook for all your meeting notes.
However, you maintain a master list in a digital format. For instance, keep all your recurring routines and areas of focus in a digital app. You can also transfer all your collected tasks into your task manager and move things around your time sectors there. Then each evening, when you do your daily planning you can transfer you daily list for tomorrow to your notebook.
This method has the advantage of overcoming any issues with the digital world. While we may want to maintain everything manually, the world doesn’t operate like that and we do need access to shared documents, emails and text messages.
It will also save you a lot of time when you fill a notebook. You won’t have to set up a new notebook as the backend information will always be maintained digitally and all you are doing is transferring information to your notebook on a daily basis—a great way to force you do to a daily planning session.
I’ve experimented a lot over the last few years with different methods, and my love of fountain pens and quality notebooks has had me try a paper-based system. Sadly, I’ve struggled to run a 100% analogue system because the people I work with operate digitally. That said, many people I know still take notes in meetings with pen and paper and keep that notebook on their desks while they are working and takes notes directly into it through the day.
So, it is possible to run the Time Sector System via notebook. It’s a bit fiddly, but certainly doable. Analogue systems do assist the planning sessions, because if you are not planning regularly your notebook will rapidly be out of date. However, the best approach would be to run a hybrid system where all your project details, regular recurring tasks and areas of focus are kept digitally and on a daily basis when you do your daily planning you can transfer everything over.
And planning out goals and projects will always be better on paper. AS you said in your email, “there’s something about moving a pen across paper just works for me.” And if it works for you, then don’t change it.
I hope that helps, Max. Than you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 263.
This week, we are looking at the humble task manager and at how to get the most out of it by getting back to basics.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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The Time Blocking Course
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The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 263 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 263 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Since even before the Ivy Lee Method was first used in 1918, listing out your tasks for the day has been a common way to manage all the things you have to do. Externalising what needs to be done, is a tried and tested method for managing what we do each day. When you combine a well managed task manager with a calendar, you have a very powerful way to get your work done and to have time for rest each day.
Now, as usual we humans are incredibly destructive. For some weird reason we seem to hate simplicity and love to over complicate things until they are destroyed.
A classic apocryphal story that illustrates this is during the space race, both NASA and the Russians were having difficulty finding a writing implement that worked in a zero gravity environment. The traditional pen needs gravity to work and when you take gravity out, the pen will no longer work.
NASA spent millions of dollars researching this. Yet the Russians spent nothing and solved the problem. The Russian space agency gave their astronauts pencils. Pencils don’t need gravity.
This week’s question touches on this problem of over-complexity and I will give you some ways to get things back to a more simple footing so you can focus more on doing your work and spend less time organising your work.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Thomas. Thomas asks; Hi Carl, I’ve recently been watching a lot of YouTube videos on using task managers. I like the idea of keeping all my tasks in one place, but it’s so confusing. There’s so many different ways to use a to-do list I just cannot figure out which is the best one. Do you have any recommendations?
Hi Thomas, thank you for your question and yes, you are right; it is very confusing.
The problem here is everyone will have a different way to manage their work. This is in part because we are all different (which is a good thing), and we all do different types of work. While you might have a generic job title such as a doctor or dentist within those generic titles there are a multitude of different disciplines.
Another problem is we now have many more options than using a piece of paper and a pen to write out what needs to be done today. Now the task manager has been digitalised, developers can add features to differentiate themselves from other developers building task managers.
It a combination of these two factor that has inevitably led to things becoming overly complicated.
But let’s just push back the complexity and look at what a task manager needs to do.
A task manager needs three areas: An area to collect things, an area to store things and an area that tells you what needs to be done today.
Anything else that adds to that is just adding complexity. Now task manager developers can easily create something with those three areas that works well. Unfortunately, for us, that would be boring and so we now have flags, tags and filters (and a whole lot more in many cases)
Now these can be useful, but they are definitely not essential.
So, how can you make a task manager work effectively?
Well, understanding the three areas would be a good start. Let’s look at these individually.
First you need to be collecting all your commitments, tasks and anything else you need to do in your inbox. It’s no good collecting some and leaving others in your head. This is not something you can do half-heartedly. Either you go all in or don’t bother at all.
Your head is the worst place to remember what needs to be done. It’s not designed to store information. It’s designed to recognise patterns. We use all our senses to do that. Sight, taste, smell, touch and sound are our primary pattern recognition senses and the ones used every day. We would immediately think something is wrong if we go outside when there’s a blue sky and the sun is shining, but when we do step outside we get wet. There’s an interrupt in the pattern and our brain alerts us to something not being right and our fight or flight reaction will engage.
That’s where our brains work incredibly well.
If someone gives us a random series of numbers that do not fit a pattern (such as giving us a telephone number) we will struggle to remember them. Give us a series of numbers such as 1,2,3,4,5,6,7, and we will remember—we recognise the pattern.
So the first thing to do if you want a task manager to work is to collect everything and not trust your brain to remember to do the task.
The second area of a task manager is the storage area. I like to think of this as a holding pen for tasks I have not yet decided when I will do them or are not due today.
If we were not organising tasks into holding pens, our inbox—the place you collect your tasks—would soon be swamped. Once that happens you stop looking at it and it becomes a waste of time.
This means every 24 hours or so, you want to be clearing out your inbox, making decisions about when you will do a task and storing them in appropriate holding pens.
Now, there’s a lot of variability in how you organise your tasks. For instance, I organise my collected tasks into time sectors—ie when I am going to do the task. For me, all I want know is whether I will do the task this week, next week, this month, next month or sometime in the distant future.
Other ways to organise your tasks would be by context. This is more commonly known as the GTD method (Getting Things Done) Here you would organise tasks by what you need to do the task—such as a computer, or where you would do the task—in your office or at home, or person, such as your boss, partner or colleague.
The truth is you can organise your tasks in whatever way you want. The important thing is; the way you organise your holding pens needs to work for you.
The thing about these holding pens is you do not work directly from them. They are simply storage areas. They are for planning purposes only.
In my coaching programme, I can quickly tell if a client does any planning by where they choose their next task. If they are in and out of their holding pens looking for tasks to do, that’s a clear indicator that no planning is being done. Essentially, you are planning every time you complete a task and move on to the next one.
This means instead of spending thirty minutes or so on at the end of the week doing a weekly plan, you are doing micro planning between tasks and that adds up to a lot more time than thirty minutes over the course of a week. It’s a very inefficient way of managing your tasks.
It’s a little like working in a shop. If you do your planning, the stock you need is right there in the shop on a shelf where the customer can pick it up, bring it to the counter and pay for it. It’s a seamless, efficient way to conduct your business.
If you don’t do your stock planning, a customer would come in, ask you for a particular product and you would need to walk into the warehouse, find the box the product is in and bring it to the counter. It’s incredibly inefficient and will leave you exhausted. And yet, according to statistics, 93% of people are doing no weekly planning. No wonder there are so many exhausted people.
The final part of your task manager is your today list. It’s this list that needs to be kept clean and tight. It must show you only the tasks that need to be completed today and not anything you might like to do. This is what I like to refer to as the business end of your task manager. If you do have extra time at the end of of your list, by all means go into your holding pens and look for a few tasks you can clear before the next day—or better still, take some well deserved rest.
If you are collecting everything and doing your weekly and daily planning, when you start your day and open your today list, you can be confident that the tasks on this list are the only ones that need concern you today.
When you have your task manager working in this manner, where you collect everything, process what you collected into their appropriate holding pens, (or delete the things that are no longer relevant) and you work primarily from your today list, you will find getting through the day Is easy.
You won’t feel as mentally exhausted because you are not doing mini-planning sessions between tasks,—which is a real drain on your mental resources—and you find you flow from one task to another.
There are other strategies for managing your today list. For example, group similar tasks together so you are not switching your focus. This means if you have five or six calls to make, block an hour or so out and sit down and do them all together. Respond to your actionable emails all at once—as late in the day as you can as that prevents email ping-pong.
Now the problem we all face today is in the competitive world of productivity apps the only way for developers to distinguish themselves from their competition is to keep adding features. We now have flags, which to be honest is quite useful, tags and labels, filters and multiple different views.
While all these extra features may seem nice, none of them actually help you to do your work. We cannot do multiple tasks at the same time. I cannot make two phone calls at the same time nor can I write three articles. I can only do one task at a time. This means for me to be at my most focused, all I need to know is what to work on now, and then get on and do it without being distracted by what I need t todo next.
If I have a lot of random tasks on my list, I’ve just slowed myself down because now I have to decide what to do. And human nature being what it is, I’m likely to pick the easiest task—just to complete a task and get the dopamine hit.
This is a terrible way to do your work. You are at your best in the morning and that is the time to tackle the hardest tasks, leaving your easiest tasks to later in the day when you are not going to be at your best.
So, Thomas, if you want to remove all the complexity, focus on the three areas of your task manager and make sure you get those parts working well for you. Ignore al the extra features—they may become useful later, but if you are starting out, focus your attention on collecting everything—make that a habit. Don’t overthink how you structure your lists, folders etc. These are holding pens for when you do your planning, and make sure you spend enough time dong the work to clear your tasks each day.
I hope that has helped, Thomas. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listen.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is all about building success into your life and why to do it, you need to become boring.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Episode 262 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 262 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
It’s strange how themes crop up and then suddenly I see the theme everywhere. This week, that theme has been all about how to turn something into a success and why so many people fail.
It’s sad that the media only show the fruits of success—showcasing expensive houses, exotic holidays and flashy cars. That may be the results of living a successful life, but it is not how you become successful. The way success is trailed would make anyone feel that only a lucky few can ever be successful, yet that is simply not true at all.
Success has nothing to do with where you were born, what school or university you went to, whether you have wealthy parents or were lucky enough to win the lottery. Success has nothing to do with genetics or background.
Whether you succeed or not depends entirely on the choices you make and how you define success. When I see so called instagram influencers living it up on expensive looking yachts or standing at the steps of a private jet, I turn off. I do not see that as success—that’s showing off. Success should be measured by you and what you achieve and ultimately what you contribute to this amazing world.
So, before we get to this week’s question, just pause for a minute an ask yourself what you would have to achieve in order for you to consider yourself a success?
That could be to complete a full course marathon, to raise your children to be respectful of others or it could be to solve a global problem. However you define success, that needs to be your starting point. If you don’t know what that is, you will have no information on which to build a strategy.
Okay, enough of my rambling introduction, let me know hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Roger. Roger asks: Hi Carl, I recently took your PACT course, and was curious to know if you still follow those ideas and whether you would add anything to the cours e today.
Hi Roger, than you for your question.
Okay, before we start, I should explain to those who don’t know, I have a free course in my Learning Centre called PACT. PACT stands for; Patience, Action, Consistency and Time. It’s a course that gives you a framework to achieving success at anything. In the course, I used building a blog, podcast or YouTube channel as examples, but you could apply to principles to anything and you will be successful. I’m willing to guarantee that.
However, one thing I know is 95% of the people who set out to succeed at something will fail. Why is that? It’s because to become successful at anything you need to become boring. You will also likely have to ditch quite a few of your friends and stop seeing some of your family members as well.
It’s this sacrifice that most people are unwilling to make.
Now, if you have read Napoleon Hill’s brilliant book Think And Grow Rich, you will know about “Burning Desire”. It’s this burning desire that Napoleon Hill discovered was the common denominator among the thousands of highly successful people he interviewed for the book. They knew exactly what they wanted to achieve and set about single-mindedly to achieve it. The excluded everything from their lives that distracted them from achieving that success.
One example, Napoleon Hill gave was Edwin Barns’ single-minded determination to work with (not for) Thomas Edison. Edwin Barns’ gave up everything he had, boarded a freight train and traveled to see Thomas Edison.
He started out cleaning Edison’s offices. Never complained and just worked his way up. Never forgetting his desire to work with Thomas Edison.
After five years of hard work, he got his chance and took it. Barns promised Edison he could sell the Edison Dictating Machine, a machine Edison was having difficulty in selling.
Barns never lost that burning desire and became a fabled rags to riches story.
Barns’ story epitomises how to become successful at whatever you want to be successful at. The problem, for most people, is you need to make sacrifices and sadly, most people are not willing to do that today and instead will reach for all the excuses they can find—the excuses that successful people abandoned years ago.
In many ways, becoming successful is all about shifting your mindset from one that will happily accept any excuse to one where you no longer accept them. A trick I use is if ever I catch myself saying words like “I can’t” or “I don’t have time” I stop myself and ask “why?”
Interestingly, almost always the answer is: I don’t have a desire to do it. To me that’s not an excuse. That’s being honest with myself. I’m fascinated with NASA’s 1950s and 1960s space programme. I will read articles and books and watch documentaries on the amazing things those pioneers at NASA achieved. Yet, I have no desire to go to the moon.
To me PACT is all about becoming successful. You need patience because success in not going to come overnight. No matter what the media tells you. You have to start somewhere, and more often than not that start will be at the bottom. You don’t walk out of university and become the CEO of Google, Apple or Coke a Cola on your first day. You have to start at the bottom and work you way up.
But more than just having patience you need to take action. You need a plan or a strategy from which you will take action that will lead you towards becoming successful. It’s likely you will need to change your plan—adjust course from time to time—but the overall objective is never lost.
It’s here where goal planning comes into the mix. The overall desire to achieve something is going to be far off into the distant future. The college graduate with the desire to become the CEO is likely to have a twenty to twenty-five year apprenticeship. This means the long-term desire needs to be broken down into bite sized chunks. Chunks you can focus on each year. From being a fresh recruit, you might set the goal to become a supervisor in two years, a manager after a further two years etc. This helps you to stay focused.
And then you need consistency. The quality of your work needs to be consistent, your approach to your work needs to be consistent and your daily actions needs to be consistent.
It’s this consistently doing the right things day after day where you develop mastery.
I mentioned in a previous episode one of my favourite TV shows, BBC’s The Repair Shop, those skilled craftspeople have repeated their skills day after day. Susie Fletcher, the leather specialist, sews leather every day. She began her passion for leather crafting when she was thirteen years old. Forty years later, she’s still passionate about working with leather and repairing leather goods. Consistently using the skills she learned many years ago day in day out.
And it’s being consistent with the simple things. I’m still shocked at the number of people who do not consistently do a weekly planning session. How will you ever be successful at what you do if you are always reacting instead of giving yourself thirty-minutes each week to step back look at what you are doing and to plan out the week ahead. It’s that weekly planning that will keep you on the right path. It will stop you from being distracted by the unimportant and keep you focused on what’s really important to you.
And finally, you need to take your time. To be successful at anything you need time. Time to develop your skills and knowledge and time to build experience. You cannot short circuit this. Sure, you can go out and buy subscribers on YouTube or Instagram, but you will know they are fake and these subscribers will not be engaging in your community. It doesn’t take long for others to see through your charade anyway.
I’ve noticed that for a blog, podcast or YouTube channel to really start to grow it will take on average four years. Four years of consistently taking action every week. It’s the same with most businesses. You will not likely be earning a consistently good income for the first four years. It will be hard, difficult and often painful. But if you apply the PACT principles, you will more than likely get there.
Your journey to success is a personal journey. The sacrifices you will need to make will be different from other peoples sacrifices. Some of you will achieve the success you want quickly, others will take a lot longer. That’s absolutely fine because ultimately, it’s not really about whether you become successful or not. It all about becoming a better person each day.
It’s that sense of continuous improvement that leaves you feeling fulfilled and feeling a lot less stressed and worried. It’s as if you know you are on a mission and some days won’t be great, but others will be and as long as there are more great days than bad, you will be making progress.
So to answer your question more directly, Roger, no I wouldn’t change anything about the course. PACT still works. Its formula has helped many people, including myself, to build a business, blog, YouTube channel or podcast. Or all of them.
I recently wrote a blog post on three keys to success. These three keys are research, experiment and practice. They fit into the PACT model in a way. The first step is to decide what you want to accomplish, but after that you need to do research. Find the people who have already achieved what you want to achieve or something similar. That will give you the blueprint to success (or the strategy you need if you like)
After that, you need to experiment. The blueprint you found worked for someone else, it’s not likely to work for you exactly—that would be copying anyway. Instead you take the blueprint and modify it to better fit you. That where you need to experiment.
After that, you need to practice and keep practicing. You’re developing your craft, your expertise and there you need to be patient. You need to accept that it will be boring because you’re following the same process day after day. However, following that process is something you will love doing because eventually you will see the results. It also makes your day a lot easier. You’re not trying to reinvent anything, you already know what you do will result in something at the end of the day. Just keep following the process.
And every once in a while look up, review what you are doing and modify where necessary. That will keep you on track.
And finally, the best advice I can give you is to enjoy the journey. Embrace the good and bad and learn. That’s where the fun is.
Thank you Roger, for you question and than you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Carl.
This week’s question is all about getting the most out of your calendar. The most powerful tool in your productivity toolbox, yet surprisingly the least spoken about.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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The Ultimate Productivity Workshop
Email Mastery Course
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The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 261 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 261 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
The humble calendar has been around for a very long time. And there are many iterations too. There are seasonal calendars still used by many farmers to the little electronic calendars on our phones. It always strikes me as odd that when you do a search for productivity apps, all you get are task managers and notes apps.
Yet, if you don’t take control of your calendar, you will always be running out of time, missing meetings and chasing the elusive goal of being “finished”.
It’s your calendar that will never lie to you. It gives you the twenty-four hours you have each day and you get to design how you use those twenty-four hours.
In my opinion, your calendar beats all other productivity tools and apps because it’s the only tool you have that will tell you where you need to be, when and with whom.
Now, just before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice, I just want to give you a heads up that there are still a few places left for February’s Ultimate Productivity Workshop.
Beginning on Friday 3rd February, and for the following three Fridays, I will be doing a ninety minute workshop that takes you through the process of building your very own productivity system—a system that works for you. We will start with the calendar, then go on your task manager and managing your communications—email and messages and end by bringing everything together.
This is a wonderful opportunity to join a group of likeminded people who together will help you to overcome any obstacles you may have and to bring in some solid practices that will serve you over the years to come.
The focus of this workshop is on you. I want you to bring your productivity and time management issues so we get real life experiences and to develop methods and processes to ease these issues so they no longer create a bottleneck or obstacle to taking control of your time and you life.
I hope you can join me. I’m so excited to being able to help you and others build their Ultimate Productivity System.
Full details for this event are in the show notes.
Okay, now it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Lisa. Lisa asks, Hi Carl, I’ve see a few of your videos on how you use your calendar, and was wondering if you have any tips for someone who works in a typical office and struggles to find time to get on and do my regular work in between a lot of meetings and interruptions.
Hi Lisa, than you for your question.
I think we need to address the elephant in the room first. Allowing your calendar to show you are more available than you really are.
For many of you working in an office environment where your boss and colleagues can see your calendar—or at least when you have availability—it can be hell trying to organise your day. When your boss or colleague is attempting to set up a meeting, they are not concerned with how much work you have to do, they just want to schedule a meeting and ultimately the day and time will be set according to when everyone is available.
This means if your calendar is showing you free at 9:30 am or 1:30pm (a common free time for most people) that’s when meetings are likely to be arranged.
Now the problem here is 9:30am is the best time to get down to some focused work. You’re much more likely to be fresh and alert at that time and less susceptible to distractions. My advice to anyone who wants to get better at their time management is to block 9:00am to 11:00am for their most important work of the day.
Equally, if you get outside at lunchtime for twenty to thirty minutes, you are going be fresh again when you return—well perhaps not if you’ve had a high carbohydrate lunch—but for most people, the early afternoon can result in another good focused session.
These times should be protected at all costs.
Of course, you may not always have control here—some departmental meetings are set for early Monday morning and later Friday afternoons, but you can still block time out on a Tuesday to Thursday for focused work.
Just giving yourself a few hours each week for focused work time will often give you enough time each week to get the bulk of your work done. It doesn’t have to be every day. And all you need to do is block the time on your calendar. I call these session by what I will do in them. For instance, I have a two hour writing time block on a Monday morning I also have a three hour audio/visual time block on a Friday morning where I record and edit my videos.
Now, If you are a boss, I beg you to implement a no meeting day each week. It might not be convenient, but the amount of work your team gets done on the no meetings days will astound you. There’s something about knowing you are not going to be disturbed that will allow your team to plan what work needs doing and they will be a lot more focused.
Another tip on calendars is to have a master calendar. By this I mean have at least one calendar that shows everything going on in your life; both personal and professional.
Now, in an ideal world you will be able to subscribe to your work calendar on your phone or personal computer (not work computer) and you can then add this to your personal calendar. This way you will see everything going on in your life.
This is important because your dental, doctor and physical therapy appointments, for example, are not going to happen before or after work. You need to see these with your work calendar. Equally, you may need to pick up your kids earlier some days or there might be an event in the evening you need to leave work a little earlier for. If you separate your work and personal calendars, you are inevitably going to miss these when you do your daily and weekly planning.
Now, I subscribe to the belief that we live one life and our work is just a part of that one life. And if you think about it, we work on average 40 hours a week. Well, that’s only 24% of your total week. When you separate your work and personal calendars—ie you have them on different devices, because your work calendar is the most dynamic—the one that changes the most—it will be this one that dominates your life and that isn’t good.
Balance is created when you see you life as a whole. Where you can see, on one screen, your work and personal commitments. This is how you avoid overwhelming yourself and being constantly late for meetings and appointments. You can see quite clearly how much discretionary time you have and how much of your day you have committed to meetings, appointments and other commitments.
Now this might be a good time to remind you of the time -v- activity equation. Of the two sides to this equation, only one is flexible. Time, is fixed. You cannot change that. Now within those twenty-four hours, you need to eat and sleep—that’s going to eat up more of your 24 hours that your work. You will likely need around ten hours for sleeping and eating. Throw in showering, brushing your teeth and you are looking at 11 hours of you day taken up already.
It’s up to you to decide what activities you will do each day. That’s the only part of the equation you can control. Delegating that control to other people is going to leave you miserable and you will feel your life is out of control. It’s not a pleasant feeling and is often a cause of all sorts of mental health issues.
Now how do you take control?
Well, the first thing to do is to create a new calendar and call it your “perfect week”. This is your ideal week. You want to go into as much detail as possible here. Don’t just block out your work hours, for instance. Instead, block out focus time blocks, commuting time (you’re idea commuting time) and other work related items you would like to do each week such as project days, catch up days and prospecting time or creative time. Whatever time you need for doing your work.
You also want to scheduling in your exercise, family and relationship time as well as time for working on your hobbies, reading and anything else you would like time for in your personal life.
When you do this exercise, you will be surprised how much time you actually have. You have a lot more time than you think. It’s this exercise—putting everything together as you would like it on one calendar that you get to see this.
Now, it’s unlikely you will be able to start living this perfect week immediately, that’s not really the point of the exercise. The goal is to merge you real life calendar with this calendar over time. To give you a benchmark, it took me nearly two years to merge my real life calendar with my perfect week calendar. It was a fantastic exercise (and project, in a way). It was also fantastic to initiate a change and see how my life changed and how much more balance I was able to bring into my life.
For me, I started with my morning routines. I put them into my calendar. Seven days a week and scheduled that in. It’s 45 minutes every morning and one of my favourite times of the day.
I then fixed in my exercise times and then rearranged my appointment availably that around the things I wanted to or needed to do .
I should point out your “perfect week” calendar will always be a work in progress. Things change, and we change with them. I revisit my perfect week every six months or so to see how I am doing and look for ways that will improve it.
It doesn’t matter if you are a content creator, coach, admin staff or nurse. We all have the ability to take control of our lives and build the kind of week that empowers us, keeps us healthy—physically and mentally—and leaves us feeling in control of our destination. All you need to do is to decide where you want to spend your time.
Now, finally, for those of you who work in a company that is obsessive about security and will not allow you to subscribe to your work calendar on your personal devices. This means you have some extra work to do.
My advice is to use twenty minutes of your weekly planning time to copy out your meetings and appointments into your master calendar. I know this is extra work, but there isn’t another way round it. You could live with two calendars if you wish, but in my experience you are inviting trouble with that approach.
Hopefully, there will be a few recurring meetings that can be fixed anyway. I know it’s extra work ,but the effort will be rewarded.
Well, I hope that helps you, Lisa. Than you for your question and thank you to you too for listening.
Don’t forget my Ultimate Productivity Workshop starts on the 3rd of February. Get yourself signed up today—you won’t regret it.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is about all those little secrets I’ve discovered over the years that make getting work done on time, every time, easy.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 259 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 260 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Over the years, I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks that have adopted have helped me to fine-tune my system and greatly improve my overall effectiveness and productivity. This week’s question asked me directly about some of my lesser-known secrets.
It was an interesting question because many of the things I do each day I’ve absorbed into my system and never really think about it anymore. It’s a little like learning to drive a car. At first, you have to consciously remember to put the key in the ignition, or to put your foot on the brake and press the start button; after a while, those steps are done unconsciously. And BOOM! I’ve just given you the first tip, and I haven’t even revealed the question.
The secret to mastering productivity or anything else is repetition. However, before I explain that a little more, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Craig. Craig asks, Hi Carl, I’ve followed you for a while now, and I have always wondered, beyond what you share through your YouTube and blog if there are any other little nuggets you use every day that you haven’t revealed in some form or another?
Hi Craig, good question. I’ve never thought of that before. I’m sure there are things I do do every day that I do unconsciously that help my overall productivity. You set me quite a challenge here.
Well, let me return to what I was saying in the introduction. “The mother of mastery is repetition”. The more you do something, the better and faster you will get at it.
Take, for example, the humble weekly planning session. When you first do one, it will take you a long time. There are a lot of things you need to go through for the first time, and you will have to consciously think about what you are looking at and will likely read through everything.
Over time though, you learn what needs looking at and what can be skipped. If you come from a GTD background, you will feel you must go through all your open projects. And again, if you are a GTDer, pretty much everything you want to do will be a project—the anything involving two or more steps being a project idea.
That means you are going to have to go through hundreds of projects each and every week. Good luck with that one, my friends.
Now a more pragmatic way of doing your weekly planning session is to look through only your active projects. And here, you really only need to ask yourself what needs to happen next and when do I need to do it.
This dramatically reduces the amount of time you need for a weekly planning session, and as you get consistent with it, i.e. you do one every week, you know exactly what needs looking at. It just becomes natural. You know where to start, and that triggers everything else.
Incidentally linked to your weekly planning session is timing. When should you do yours? Now, over the years, I’ve tried all sorts of different times. I discovered the worst time to do your weekly planning is Sunday night. Yes, I know many of will be shouting at whatever device you are listening to this on. But bear with me.
Doing your weekly planning on a Sunday night is akin to leaving your exercise until the evening. You are going to be inconsistent. Your willpower is at its lowest in the evening, and worse, you will have pretty much forgotten a lot of what happened in the week just gone by.
The best time for a weekly planning session is first thing Saturday morning. Hear me out. Firstly, you’re doing it in the morning and therefore, your willpower is at its highest. It’s also a time where you likely do not have wake up early for work and you can wake up refreshed.
Next, no matter what you are doing on a Saturday morning, there’s no excuses. If you need to set off early for an adventure day, you can wake up thirty or forty minutes earlier and get it done. AND… The icing on the cake… getting your weekly planning done first thing Saturday morning, leaves you worry free for the rest of weekend knowing that you’ve got the week ahead planned and you can now relax and enjoy the weekend.
Next tip. Turn everything you do repeatedly into a process. What I mean here is whether you are replying to your actionable emails, preparing for a meeting, or doing follow-up calls, create a process for doing it.
For example, when I clear my actionable emails, I make a cup of tea, turn on BBC Radio 2 and listen to Ken Bruce on the BBCs Sounds App—well I do at the moment, sadly we learned this week that Ken Bruce will be leaving at the end of March and I don’t know what I will be listening to from April. But that’s something I can deal with another day.
The tea, the music and the time of day (5pm to 6pm) sets an atmosphere and I open up my Action This Day folder and start at the top and work my way down (my email’s in reverse order—oldest at the top). I resist the temptation to cherry pick. I just start at the top and work my way down.
Sometimes, the top two or three are quick replies, sometimes they are longer replies. Either way, I start there and work my way down the list.
I would say five or six days a week I clear them all, and on the day or two I don’t, no worries, the ones I did not get to will be the first ones I deal with tomorrow.
It’s a process that begins in the morning when I clear my inbox. There’s usually 80 to 120 emails in my inbox in a morning (I live on the other side of the world, so most of my mail comes in through the night) So, I clear that first—I need to know about cancelled appointments and any “fires” before I start my day, and then email is pushed to the side until later in the day when I clear the actionable mail.
If you want to learn more about my process, I have a couple YouTube videos on it, and if you want to go much deeper, you can always enrol in my Email Mastery course. (Details as usual in the show notes)
Speaking of email and other forms of communication, here’s another tip I follow. Set rules for how and when you will respond to the various inputs. And I can assure you this works whether you are the CEO or the newest recruit if, and you need to courage to do this, you spell out your rules to everyone.
My rules are: Emails will be responded to within 24 hours. Instant messages within two hours and phone calls immediately.
I remember those laughable days when companies tried to apply rules such as phone calls will be answered within five rings. These kind of rules are ridiculous because they are unsustainable. It left staff on edge because every time the phone rang they started counting. Terrible if you were trying to do some focused work.
I’ve come across some companies that still think this is a good idea. Respond to customer or client emails and messages immediately. Not only is this impossible, but it’s terrible for your customers and staff. You set unrealistic expectations for both.
Set your own rules and communicate these to everyone. People don’t care whether you respond immediately or not, what they want is consistency so once you set your rules. Be consistent.
I can assure you, once you have these in place, you are much less jumpy when you get a message or an email. You know you have time to finish what you are doing before having the need to look at it. (That’s also hard to do, but again, with practice it does get easier)
One of the most powerful productivity habits I have is never going to bed without knowing what two things I must do tomorrow. This is so ingrained in me now that I cannot sleep until I know.
Most days, I will do this leisurely in front of Todoist before I close the lid on my computer. Other days, when I am a bit rushed, or not in my office, I’ll do it from my phone. Just open up Todoist, look at my tasks assigned for tomorrow and flag the two I must do tomorrow.
The beauty of this is I know once my morning routines are complete what I need to do and instead of not looking around for what to do, I get straight onto it. And that saves me a huge amount of time cumulatively through the week.
Ideally, I like to sit down and do this in front of my computer with my calendar open. It’s a ten minute daily ritual, if you like, that saves me hours each week. I think this is why I cannot understand why so few people do it and why I preach so much about it.
As I was thinking about this question, the biggest thing I do is to create processes for doing my core work—the work that is essential each week. That’s this podcast, my YouTube videos, blog post and newsletters as well as writing client feedback and of course doing my coaching calls. I know exactly how much time I need for these activities each week and that time is blocked out in my calendar.
It’s a non-negotiable part of my work life. Each part has a process, and from time to time, I look at my processes to see where I can improve them.
One final tip, whenever Todoist or Evernote update their apps, I always have a play with the new features. I want to know if the new features will enhance my processes or not. The only way to learn that is to play. Likewise, when Apple do their OS updates, I will watch the event, again to see where I can improve my processes.
I also resist the temptation to look at new apps. Todoist and Evernote have served me very well for the last ten years or so. I know them, they are familiar and they have never let me down.
And that’s about it, Craig. I think I’ve covered quite a few tricks I use that I may not have covered here or in my YouTube videos. I hope they can be useful to you.
Thanks, Craig, for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week’s question is on how to reduce the number of tasks in your task manager.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 259 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 259 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
We’ve all face this problem. Getting tasks into our task manager, adding dates and then discovering that we have far too many tasks to complete on a given day. It’s problematic because we feel once a date is added, it must be done on that day.
The truth is, most of the tasks on your list for today do not need to be done today. They could be done tomorrow or the day after, and nothing would go disastrously wrong. Yet, the task being on your list today leaves you feeling it has to be done today.
In many ways, this is a symptom of becoming better organised and more productive. It’s not the disaster many feel it is, just a growing pain and one that, with a little strategic thinking, can be overcome.
So, today, that’s what I will do. I will share with you a number of tips and methods that will help you to overcome this feeling of overwhelm and the need to do everything on your list each day.
And that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Philip. Philip asks; Hi Carl, I’m having a big problem with my daily tasks. No matter how hard I try, I never complete my tasks for the day, and it causes me to feel deflated and disillusioned. I keep trying different task managers, and that does help for a week or two, but after that, I find myself in the same problem. How do you stay on top of your tasks every day?
Hi Philip, thank you for your great question. And don’t worry. You are definitely not alone with this problem.
The first thing to understand is if you are following the Time Sector System, the focus is not necessarily on what you do each day; the focus is on what you get accomplished in the week. This is why the most important folder you have in the Time Sector System is the This Week folder. This is where you put all the tasks you want to complete this week.
All the other folders are just holding pens for tasks you have not yet decided when you will do. And that’s okay.
When you stop focusing on daily task numbers and instead focus on what you will accomplish in the week, if you get to the end of Monday and you still have several tasks to complete, you can relax and simply reschedule the remaining tasks for another day in the week.
Now, there will inevitably be tasks that need to be done on a given day. For those tasks, you use the 2+8 prioritisation method—where two of your ten most important tasks must be completed that day. (Even if you have to pull an all-nighter to do it—which hopefully doesn’t ever happen, but that’s the mindset you want to have)
You can utilise the power of time blocking and block out sufficient time to make sure you get those two tasks completed for the day. For instance, this week, on Tuesday, I had a two-hour block of time for writing. On my task list, I had this podcast script to write as a priority task. Hence, I wrote this script in that two-hour block of time.
When I did my planning for the day on Monday evening, I saw the task, and I saw I had a writing time block. I made writing the script a priority task and went to bed knowing I had sufficient time to write the script.
Linked to this, there are a couple of things you can do that will help to reduce your daily task list numbers. The first is to theme your days. This is an idea from Mike Vardy of the Producivityist podcast. Mike calls it Time Crafting, and essentially, you theme each day. For example, you may have Monday and Tuesday for client and customer work. Wednesday for follow-ups and chases, Thursdays for project work and Friday for admin.
Knowing what your core work is will help you design this effectively. If you don’t know what your core work is, you will fall into the trap of firefighting—where you are always reacting to what is thrown at you rather than being more proactive and focusing your time and attention on what you are employed to do.
Once you set your theme for the day, when you do your weekly planning session, you can move tasks that relate to each theme to its day. For instance, all your admin tasks can be scheduled for your admin day, your client matters can be scheduled for your client work days, and any project tasks can be done on project days.
The key to making this work, though, is to fix the days. When you find yourself knowing that Mondays are for working with your clients and customers and Fridays are your admin days, life becomes that little bit easier.
Now, there will inevitably be emergencies that need your time and attention on days when you planned to do something else. That’s just life, and that’s where you need to build some flexibility into your approach.
One of my favourite TV shows is BBC’s Repair Shop. If you don’t know this show, it’s about a group of skilled craftspeople who restores and repairs people’s things. These things can range from old alarm clocks that a grandparent owned and passed down to an old corner shop sign that has seen better days. The skills on the show are amazing. But one thing that stands out to me when I watch this show is before any work is done, the craftsperson looks at the object as a whole and looks to see what work needs to be done.
Invariably, the first step is to clean the object so they can get a better view of what needs to be repaired.
Often when we get a task, we don’t stop to look at the task as a whole and see what needs to be done. Our brains are terrible at estimating what needs to be done and how long it will take. It’s far better, when you process what you have collected in your inbox, to give yourself a few extra seconds to stop and think about what needs to be done before you move it to one of your time sectors. In my experience, most of your collected tasks don’t take as long as you first imagine. Often a task is similar in nature to other tasks you have to do and can be added to the same day you plan to do those similar tasks.
Which leads me to one of my favourite tricks to reducing my task list for the day, and that is to use spreadsheets.
The great thing about a spreadsheet is you can design it to contain whatever information you like. You can then manipulate that information in ways that give you a list you can work from.
So, if you work in sales and you need to follow up with prospects each day, rather than have all these follow-ups in your task manager, you put them into a spreadsheet. You then only need a single task in your task manager that tells you to do your follow-ups for the day.
The great thing about this is rather than having ten to twenty individual tasks randomly thrown into your task manager; you can “chunk” your follow-ups together because when you open your spreadsheet, the only decision you need to make is how long you spend on that task.
This also helps you better manage your time. You can dedicate however much time you like to doing your follow ups each day, and rather than looking for the tasks and the time you waste doing that, they are all contained in a single place with all the information you need from when you last spoke to the customer, to their contact details and any other information you want to keep.
This also avoids the problem that is inherent with a task manager. Once you check off a task it disappears. You no longer have any information you may have collected. You can try and search for your completed tasks and I know most task managers do allow you to do this, but it’s cumbersome and is a huge time waste.
Plus, if you are using Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel online, you can get the URL for the sheet and paste that into the recurring task so all you need do is click the link and you’re straight into the sheet you need with all the information you need right in front of you.
The final part to this conundrum is to be strict about what gets into your system. This comes back to the time v activity equation. Time is fixed. We only get 24 hours a day and we cannot change that. The only part of the equation we do have any control over is the activity part—what we do each day.
I’ve been reminded of this since I returned to Korea from Europe. Travelling east gives you jet lag and I am terrible with it. This means for the first week or two, on my return, I am very tired in the afternoons, become wide awake in the evening and wake up around 4 AM. I have in the past fought this and stayed in bed wide awake getting more and more frustrated. Instead, these days I get up at 4 AM and get as much work done as possible before the inevitable slump later in the day.
Gradually, my sleep returns to normal, but I find the 4AM starts are great for my productivity. I know. I cannot change the time I have each day, but I can get as much work done in the time of day I am awake and rest when I am feeling extremely tired.
So, there you go, Philip. I hope that has given you a few tips and tricks that will calm your overactive task manager and bring you some peace. Thank you for your question and thank you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week, it’s all about building a morning routine that leaves you focused and energised.
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Episode 258 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 258 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Something I have noticed about productive and successful people is they all have a morning routine that helps them to focus and energise themselves for the day ahead. Whether these people are sport stars, business executives or a stay at home parent, each days begins the same way—with time spent on themselves.
And that is the key to an empowering morning routine—it’s the time spent working on yourself in a way that leaves you feeling focused and ready for the day ahead.
This week’s question is all about morning routines: what to include and more importantly, how to be consistent with them.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jules. Jules asks, Hi Carl, I like to idea of having a morning routine, but I’ve never been able to make anything stick. Do you have any tips or tricks for being consistent with things like morning routines?
Hi Jules, thank you for your question.
The one thing I have learned about morning routines (and end of day routines) is to make them stick you need to ensure that the activities you do are activities you enjoy doing. For many people it would be nice to start the day with exercise, but if you live in a country where the weather is somewhat unpredictable, waking up and heading out for a walk in torrential rain, is not necessarily the best start to the day.
Another mistake I see is to copy someone else’s routines. For example, Robin Sharma, advocates waking up at 5 AM and spending the first 20 minutes of your day with exercise, then 20 minutes planning and finally 20 minutes of study. That works for Robin and indeed works for many others who follow the 5 AM Club (as it is called), but for others—such as myself—waking up at 5 AM is impractical as I often work late and need seven hours sleep.
Indra Nooyi, former PepsiCo CEO wakes up at 4AM to read books and her email. For me, if I were to wake up at 4 AM to read books I’d find myself falling back to sleep very quickly.
Other people’s morning routines are not going to work for you. You need to find your own way. But the question is how do you do that?
Well, the first step is to decide how much time you want to spend on your morning routines. Too much time, for instance, will either mean you have to awake up too early, or delay the start of your day leaving you with too much pressure to get things done.
The ideal amount of time is no more than sixty minutes. Sixty minutes is enough time to do most things and means you are not going to interfere significantly with your sleep.
For the record, my morning routine takes around 45 minutes.
The next step is to decide what you want to do in your morning routines. Now, the thing here is whatever you do it must be something you really enjoy doing. You are not going to be consistent with these if you do not wake up and look forward to starting your routine.
So, what would you enjoy doing in a morning? Some things you may want to consider are:
Meditating
Some light exercise
Writing a journal
Reading
Going for a morning walk (preferably with a dog—that’ll put a smile on your face)
Taking an ice bath (not my cup of tea)
Choose activities that leave you feeling happy and energised.
You may want to experiment here for a few weeks. I’ve found some things look exciting on paper, but in a morning when you try doing them they just don’t fit right. For instance, a few years ago I tried meditation for fifteen minutes. I really didn’t enjoy it, so I ditched meditating.
Once you have a few activities the next step is to find your trigger.
This comes from James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits. The idea is you use a trigger activity that is easy to begin your routines. For example, my trigger is putting the kettle on. This has been the first thing I have done each morning for years. The turning on of the kettle to make my morning coffee starts my morning routine.
While I wait for the kettle to boil, I begin my stretching routine. These are a series of stretching exercises I picked up from Brian Bradley of the Egoscue Method. Once the kettle has boiled I brew my morning coffee and while that is brewing, I drink a glass of lemon water.
The great thing about having a trigger activity is that once you start, it becomes natural to move on to the next activity and you do not need to think about what to do next. This is again something from James Clear’s Atomic Habits and it’s called habit stacking. The trigger begins the stack.
Now on to timing. Once you know what activities you want to do in your morning routine, the question is how long do you need? As I mentioned earlier, anything up to 60 minutes is great.
My work day usually begins at 8:00 am, and I need forty-five minutes for my morning routines. This means I wake up at 7:00 am. This gives me plenty of time to complete my morning routines and leaves me around fifteen minutes to prepare for my first work activity whether that is a coaching call or writing.
Now, if I need to wake up earlier—which sometimes does happen—for example, let’s say I have a call at 7:00am, then my wake up time is 6:00am.
If you have young children, being consistent with your start time can be difficult, however, as your children grow up, they will go through phases. Some phases could be they wake up early, and you may need to work with them—perhaps give them an activity to do while you do your routines, other times you’ll struggle to get them out of bed and perhaps waking your kids up could become a part of your morning routines.
The thing is, don’t let outside influences destroy your morning routines. My recent holiday travels meant I wasn’t able to complete my morning routines consistently and that was okay. As soon as I landed and got to my hotel, had a good sleep, I started the next day with my morning routine. It’s not the end of the world if you miss a day or two because of travel or kids waking up at unexpected times.
Now, one thing I would advise you don’t do is to add your whole morning routine to your task manager. Most people have five to ten items on their morning routine list and adding these to your task manager will clutter things up.
If you want to track your routines, use your notes app. Most notes apps allow you to create a checklist so all you need do is create a checklist and duplicate this list each morning, if you want to track your progress.
Alternatively, if you do want to track your routines, I would advise going old-school analogue and printing out a calendar. Stick that on your refrigerator or the door of your bedroom and crossing off the days you complete your morning routines. There’s something about seeing your progress across the month on paper that encourages you to keep going.
While all our digital technology is great and allows us to get a lot of things done, it can also hide inside our devices and be forgotten. Having a piece of paper stuck on your door cannot be hidden. You see it every time you go to bed and every time you wake up. It’s there to remind you of your commitment.
One thing I would recommend you do as a way to close your morning routines is to end them by reviewing what your objectives for the day are. This helps you by focusing you on the results you want from the day. For instance, if you have a proposal to finish, make that an objective. You may also decide that getting out and doing some form of exercise is important that day. These can then form your objectives for the day and when you review these, you can decide when you will do them.
It’s reviewing my objectives for the day that has been a revelation for me. This has been the single most important thing that has helped my focus. All I am looking at are the two most important things I have decided on doing that day. Before I end my morning routines, I decide when I am going to do them and that’s it. I’m ready for the day ahead.
So, Jules, to help you stick to your morning routines, keep things simple. Make sure you only allow thing you love doing onto your morning routines list and most importantly of all, find your trigger. The one thing you do each morning without fail. I should have mentioned that brushing your teeth is one of the best triggers because it’s something you do each morning.
Thank you for your question, Jules and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In our final episode of the year, we’re looking at how to improve the productivity of a team.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 258 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 258 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Over the last year or so, I’ve received a number of questions related to helping a team improve their overall productivity. Now, this is a difficult question to answer because each individual team member will be motivated by different things and each person will have a unique approach to getting their work done.
Motivation is a key part to individual productivity. If you are not motivated by your work and you see it only as a way to pay the bills, more fulfilling motives such as ownership of a project or task, developing your skills and helping people solve problems don’t feature in an individual’s mindset.
That said, it is possible to build a highly productive team that has clear outcomes each day and week and at the same time builds ownership, camaraderie and a strong team work ethic. And that is what we will be looking at today.
So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tony. Tony asks, Hi Carl, I manage a team of eight people and we are responsible to sales and the initial after sales programme following delivery of out product. The problem I am having is keeping my team focused on what we are trying to accomplish. They often get distracted by low value tasks that means we often fall behind on our plan. Do you have any advice on helping teams be more focused?
Hi Tony, thank you for your question.
As I mentioned in the introduction, working with a team of people has its own challenges when it comes to productivity but there are a few things you can do that will enhance you teams overall productivity.
The first is clear communication.
Often what happens within a team is there is poor communication on the results that the team is expected to accomplish. At the beginning of a year or a quarter, team leaders are usually reluctant to talk about what the team’s targets are.
Managers are quite happy to discuss individual targets with employees, but rarely talk about the group target.
The problem here is you encourage team members to focus on their individual targets and the team’s. What you want to be doing is ensuring that the team as a whole knows the target so that they can work together to achieve that team goal.
I remember when I was selling cars in the early 1990s, there were three of us in the new car sales team, plus a sales manager. Claire, Bob and myself.
Claire was an outstanding sales person. She was focused, aggressive (in a positive way) and could pull sales out of nowhere. Bob on the other hand was slower. He was patient and gentler, yet he had an enormous amount of experience and consistently brought ink the sales. Me? I was somewhere in the middle.
Each month out team’s target was to sell 35 cars. Now, traditionally, that number would be divided between the three of us equally, but while Claire rarely missed her targets, Bob and myself struggled to hit the target.
Yet, our sales manager, David, realised that the important target was the 35 cars. Not that his three sales people sold twelve cars each per month. If we had focused on the individual numbers, Claire would have slowed down in the forth week of the month, while Bob and I would be slow at the beginning of the month.
On the white board in David’s office, there was only two numbers. The target (35) and the number of cars we had sold that month. This way, we were encouraged to work as a team.
It also meant that if Claire’s more aggressive approach was not working with a particular customer, David would ask Bob or myself to step in and close the sale. Equally, if a slow burn approach appeared not to be working, we would ask Claire to step in and close the sale.
We had a regular morning meeting at 8:30am and in that meeting we discussed what we had on as potential sales, and we set objectives for the day.
The communication was clear and we set about our day with clear objectives to accomplish that day.
That team was the best team I ever worked in in terms of productivity. As far as I recall we never missed our targets, and we won a lot of awards for the best new car sales team within the group.
The success of that team was down to simple communication and a shared objective.
The next important factor for improving your team’s productivity is to trust your team to get on and do their work. This is about allowing your individual team members to own the task or objective.
If, as a manager, you are micromanaging your team and always monitoring what they are doing, you are destroying the team’s trust. You, as a leader, need to trust your team to get on do what they do best—their job.
As a leader of a team, your job is to ensure your team is moving in the right direction and to remove any barriers your team may face in the execution of their work—more on that later.
What this means, is once you have given your team members their instructions, so to speak, you need to leave them to get on and do it. Hence the importance of clear communication. If you are constantly calling, messaging and emailing them for updates, you are preventing them from doing their work. Your team need space to do their work.
Now in my experience, if a manager or team leader is always requesting updates, it’s a sign they do not trust their team. That is not a productivity issue, but a recruiting one. It means you are recruiting, or you feel you are recruiting, so called “B players”. That needs to stop. If you are employing the right people—the A Players—you can then step back and let them do what they do best.
Now, I know as a leader you need to report to your manager or leader. And that goes back to how you are communicating with your team. If you need to regularly report numbers to your manager, you should set up a simple reporting system that your team updates at the end of each day or week. That way, you will have access to the numbers you need to report to your boss without interrupting your team.
So, make sure you have clear reporting processes put in place for your team. Do not over complicate this. Updating the reporting system should not take your team more than ten minutes each day to do.
Now, back to your role as a barrier remover.
The best managers I’ve ever worked with saw their job as helping me and my colleagues to do their job with as little friction as possible. If there were procedural problems within the company, my manager would step in to sort out these problems. If I ever had a difficult customer, or student, my manager would step in and clear whatever problems I was having.
I remember one occasion where we had a particularly difficult student in our language institute. She was never happy with the teacher she was given and would inevitably complain if the teacher diverged from the textbook. Whenever she turned up in one the teacher’s classes, they would freeze up and their classes became very boring, which meant they lost students.
Our institute manager and I (as I was the native English teacher’s manager at that time) sat down and worked out a strategy to help this student achieve what she wanted to achieve. We even had a meeting with her to explain our teaching philosophy.
In the end it was decided I would teach her next class and before the class started I sat down and explained my teaching methodology to her and got her to agree to following my method for a month.
What we did was take a difficult student away from the other teachers so they could get on and do their job and allowed the most experienced teacher (at the that time, me) to solve the problem. We did. And, I got an invite to that student’s wedding six months later.
The one thing you do not want to be doing as a manager is imposing your productivity system on your team. What works for you is not likely to work for them. Instead, you want to be focusing on is giving clear instructions to your team and letting them get on do what they are best at doing.
The final piece of this puzzle is how you communicate with your team. If you allow your team to communicate in anyway they like, you are going to find you are swamped with emails, Teams or Slack messages and a backlog of phone calls.
Set a standard. If you are not already using something like Microsoft Teams or Slack, then look into adding a channel like this as your team’s communication channel.
This allows you to centralise all messages and gives your team a resource for solving problems that individual team members have solved. It can become a team Wiki page.
You also need to avoid placing response time expectations on your team too. If they feel they need to reply to your messages within minutes of receiving them. They are not going to be productive. Your team need the space to do their work, not worrying about replying to your messages as soon as they come in.
However, if you put in place a workable reporting system, you should not need to be asking your team for updates—that information will be available in the reporting system.
One final part to this is the question about whether you need a task or project manager to manage the tasks within your team. These can help if your team are working on joint projects. These can also help you as a manager to see what’s happening, what still needs to be done and where there are holdups. I don’t want to get into the pros and cons of the various apps you can use here, but in my experience working with teams, the best apps for managing team based work are apps like Trello, Microsoft Planner and Asana—boards seem to work better than lists with teams.
The key to making task and project managers work is someone needs to have responsibility to ensure they are updated. If you, as the team leader are the only one using this system it is not going to work. You need commitment from your team and that means you will need to show the benefits to your team.
I would suggest you set up a training morning or afternoon with your whole team to go through how to use the system. Allocate responsibility for making sure the system is up to date and clearly define expectations.
In my experience, if you commit to training your team correctly in using the task manager, you will get support. A lack of training and understanding of the benefits is usually the reason why these well-intentioned approaches fail to work.
So there you go, Tony. I hope that helped and thank you for your question.
Thank you to you too for listening and let me wish you a wonderful Christmas (if you celebrate Christmas), and a fantastic start to the new year.
This podcast will be back on the 9th January.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, what could you change about your system to get it ready for 2023?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 257 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 257 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
There’s something about an end of year that turns our minds towards cleaning things up, making changes and planning. Yet when you think about it, these things can be done at any time in the year. Cleaning your task manager of tasks that have been sitting around for over a year, reviewing how we manage our tasks and making plans can all be done anytime. All we need to do is make that decision.
That said, the end of year often does give us some extra time to do these things. Emails reduce a little, and most people’s attention turn towards the upcoming year. And certainly if you live in the west, Christmas week does take us away from our work and spending time with family and friends.
I find this presents opportunities to clean up my notes for the year, delete tasks I’ve added, not done and are just sitting around in my task manager cluttering things up.
This week’s question is on this very subject. What can we do to change things, reenergise tired processes and fix things that haven’t worked well throughout the year.
So, without further discourse, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jan. Jan asks: Hi Carl, I’ve seen you mention your end of year clean up in your blog posts in the past but I’ve never seen or heard you describe what you do. Could you explain your process for cleaning things up?
Hi Jan, thank you for your question.
My end of year clean up has become a bit of a ritual for me now. It’s something I enjoy doing because I am not working in the sense of creating content, instead I am doing a lot of sitting around and TV watching, not something I do at anything other time of the year. It’s relaxing and my mind isn’t “on” in the sense of thinking what to create next.
So, where do I start?
The first step for me is to do a review of all the apps I am using. The goal here is to eliminate apps I am not using. That means evaluating the usefulness of the apps I have on my computer, phone and iPad.
Through the year I will test a few apps to see what everyone is talking about. In the past, I’ve had apps like Notion, Obsidian, Things 3 and OneNote on my computer and as they didn’t make the cut, so to speak, I deleted them.
This year, I will be happily removing all the COVID apps I installed, I noticed these were still hanging around on a “just in case” basis. But as Korea is no longer doing test and trace and we can travel without the need for a PCR test, I can remove these.
I should point out if you do this exercise, once you’ve cleared all these apps, your computer, phone and tablets feel faster. I’m sure there’s no difference, but it does feel faster.
Next is to go into my workhorse apps and clean them up. I usually start with Todoist because this is the easiest one to clean up. With the Time Sector System, the folder you want to be paying attention to is your Long-term and on-hold folder. This folder can easily become a dumping ground and the end of the year is a good time to go in there and delete tasks you know you’re not going to be doing.
For tasks that have been sitting in there for a while but you feel you will still likely want to do them, you can move them out of your task manager and create a project note or add them to a list of tasks you want to do in the future but require further planning out, again in your notes.
Then it’s time to go into my notes. Now for me, this year is going to be a difficult one. This is the year I will be making a decision on whether to relegate Evernote to being a storage app and go all in on Apple Notes.
Now, the reason for this change of approach with Evernote is because Evernote is going in a direction that will not support how I use notes. That’s not a criticism of Evernote, I feel Evernote is doing brilliantly. However for me, I want my notes app to be simple with as few features as possible. When an app has too many features, the temptation to play around with formatting, colours and setups is too much for me. I spend more time playing than doing and that does nothing for my productivity.
Apple Notes, on the other hand, is simple, has great search features and works across all my devices. The test size is readable (while Evernote on my phone and iPad is too small for me to read comfortably), and it does the job I want a notes app to do with little fuss.
Throughout the year, if you are using a notes app properly, you will have collected a lot of notes that you no longer need. These need to be deleted (or archived). I love this purge. It almost acts as a review of my year. I go through my folders, clearing our old notes and making sure the titles and any tags I am using for the notes I keep are relevant and searchable.
This step is important. The search features on our computers are very powerful these days, and saves us a lot of time when looking for a note. If you haven’t learned how to use the system search on your devices, that’s something I highly recommend you do. It will save to a lot of time.
It during this clean up process when you will also see ways where you can improve your structure. If you’ve read Tiago Forte’s Building A Second Brain book this year, a book I would highly recommend, you may want to implement some of the principles in that book at this stage.
Now while you cleaning up your task manager and notes app, you want to be asking yourself: “how can I do it better?”. We want to be building seamless and effective systems, and there’s always room for improvement. If you remember the principles of COD—Collect, Organise, Do—you want to be asking yourself how you can improve your collecting process and how you can reduce the time it takes you to organise what you collect so you can spend more time doing the work.
The more time you spend in your task managers and notes apps, the less time you spend doing the work. So ask yourself, where can you speed up the process?
The final step to the end-of-year clean up is to go into the folders where you store your documents. Now, this is often the hardest part of the process because, over the year, we will have accumulated a lot of documents that either we no longer need or can be archived.
I use an external hard drive to move files and documents I no longer need. This helps to keep my computer’s drive clean and also reduces the need for more space in my cloud storage services.
I would also recommend you go into your Documents folder on your computer. We often download PDFs and other documents here and then forget about them. Clean that out.
Once you’ve cleared everything up, now it’s time for the fun part. Asking yourself how you can improve your system. Again, what we are looking for here is speed. How can we get faster at finding our stuff? Researching your device’s search tips and tricks is a great way to do this. I’ve learned so much by watching YouTube videos on learning how to get the most out of Apple’s Spotlight (and optimising it to work better for me).
The point of this exercise is to get your systems ready for the new year. You don’t want to be going into the new year with slow, unwieldy systems. Starting the new year with a clean set-up not only speeds everything up, but it also sets you up for a fantastic year.
The final part of this process is to look for bumps in the road where your system isn’t working too well. I find these bumps are usually in your task managers. Your task manager needs to tell you what you should be working on today. Everything else in there is simply holding pens for tasks you don’t need to do today, or you have not yet decided when you will do them.
How can you best set this up so when you go into your task manager to see what needs to happen today, you can see instantly what your objective tasks are—the tasks that must be done today?
And now for the bonus.
In recent years, I have taken to using the end-of-year break to go through my calendar to see how I can better optimise my week, so I get to spend more time doing the things I love doing. From spending more quality time with my family to being more consistent with exercise.
For 2023, the area I want to improve is my sleep. I am a terrible sleeper, and I need to be more consistent with this. So, one of my objectives is to redesign my week, so I have a cut-off time each day—a time I need to switch off my computer and a time I need to be in bed.
If you have followed my tip to design your perfect week, you can turn on this calendar and see how you can merge this with your actual week. To give you an example, I want to better use the mornings for creative work. I am at my most creative in the morning and a lot less so in the afternoons. I can block time out on my calendar for writing and recording and push off all my meetings to the afternoon or later in the morning.
I understand not all of you have complete control over your calendar. But you likely have more control than you think. Blocking time out now means other people cannot schedule meetings when you could be getting on with your focused work. Try it. It might just work. If it doesn’t, then you can go back to the drawing board and rethink your strategy here.
So, there you go, Jan. I hope that has helped and I also hope you get some time over the Christmas break to play with this. The key is to not put pressure on yourself to do this. It needs to be fun. I like to sit with my parents in the evenings and while they watch their favourite TV shows, I can be getting on and cleaning things up.
As this exercise is fun, I can be present when we are talking and while they are consumed in the TV show. I can be cleaning up.
Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 256
This week, we’re looking at the overwhelming number of so-called “projects” people create and why it’s these that contribute to overwhelm and a lot of wasted time.
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Episode 256 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 256 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
I read David Allen’s seminal book, Getting Things Done, around fifteen years ago, and it helped me to transform away from a manual Franklin Planner that had served me well for the previous 17 years to a fully digital productivity system.
In Getting Things Done, David Allen defines a project as anything requiring two or more steps to complete. He also mentioned that most people have between thirty and a hundred projects at any one time.
Now, if you are following a correct interpretation of GTD (as Getting Things Done is called), that would not pose a problem because projects are kept in file folders in a filing cabinet near your desk and your task manager is organised by context—meaning your lists are based around a place such as your workplace, home or hardware store, a tool such as your computer or phone or a person, such as your partner, boss or colleagues.
Unfortunately, when apps began to appear, many app developers misread or misinterpreted the GTD concept and built their apps around project lists instead of contexts. It could also have been a concern for intellectual property rights. But either way, this has led to people organising their task list managers by project and not context. And it is this that has caused so much to go wrong for so many people.
This week’s question is on this very subject and why managing your task manager by your projects is overwhelming and very ineffective.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Lara. Lara asks, hi Carl, Last year I read the Getting Things Done book and have really struggled to get it to work for me. I have nearly 80 projects in my task manager, and I feel I am spending too much time keeping everything organised. I never seem to be able to decide what to work on, and everything feels important. Do you have any suggestions on spending less time managing work and more time doing the work?
Hi Lara, thank you for your question.
So, as I mentioned in the opening, the problem here is you are managing your projects in the wrong place. Task managers are there to manage your tasks, not your projects. If you want to manage projects with software, you would be better off purchasing dedicated project management software. However, those apps can be very expensive and have been designed for corporations and large teams working on a single project. Apps like Monday.com and Wrike are examples of accessible project managers.
However, apps like these are designed for teams of people working together on a single project and will not solve your problem of being able to spend more time doing your work and less time organising it.
Now, you did not mention if you wanted to continue using the GTD model or not, but if you want to get things better organised, the first step would be to remove your projects from your task manager and replace your lists with something you can better manage.
Now, I use the Time Sector System to manage my tasks. This means my task manager is organised by when I will do the task. There are five time sectors: This week, next week, this month, next month and long-term and on hold.
This means when a task comes into my task manager, the only thing I need to decide is when I will do the task. If it needs doing this week, it will be added to my This Week folder; if it does need doing this week, I will distribute it accordingly.
In the GTD world, you need to set up your task manager by your different contexts. These can be anything, but they do need to work for you. While in the GTD book, David Allen gives us examples of @office, @computer, @phone and @home etc, these are a bit out of date today. We can do email from a computer, tablet or phone, and many of us work in a hybrid way in that we do a lot of work working from home.
Now, I’ve seen some people organise their work by energy level: for instance, high energy would be for big tasks that require quite a bit of time, low energy would be for easy tasks that can be done at any time.
The great thing about GTD is you can choose your own contexts that better fit your lifestyle.
However, a better way to manage all this is to treat the folders in your task manager as holding pens for tasks yet to be done. The only thing that really matters is what you have to do today. Allowing yourself to be distracted by what can be done tomorrow or next week will slow you down and bring with it a sense of overwhelm.
But, before we get there, let’s look at how you are defining a project.
In GTD a project is defined as anything requiring two or more steps. This is where I think GTD breaks down. For example, arranging for my car to go in for a service will require more than one step. I need to confer with my wife for a suitable day that we both will be available, I need to call the dealership to book the car in and I need to add the date to my calendar because the dealership is sixty miles away from where we live.
Yet, the only task I have in my task manager is an annual, recurring task that comes up on the 1st September reminding me to book my car in for a service. When that task appears, I know to ask my wife when she will be available. I don’t need three tasks all written out in a separate project.
Equally, much of the work we do is routine. For example, every week, I need to write a blog post, two essays, prepare and record this podcast and create two to three YouTube videos. Technically, in the GTD world, each of those tasks are projects. There are more than one step involved in each of those pieces of content. But I do not treat them as individual projects. They are tasks I just do.
I know I need around five hours a week for writing, so I block out five hours each week for writing on my calendar. I need three hours to prepare this podcast and another three hours for recording and editing my YouTube videos. As I know the amount of time I need for each of my pieces of work, I block the time out in my calendar.
Now, in your case Lara, what is the work you have to do each week? Before you do anything else, block out sufficient time for getting that work done on your calendar now.
Let’s say for example; you are in sales and each day you want to contact ten prospects. How long does that take you? If that takes you an hour each day, then you need to block an hour out on your calendar to do that work. There’s no point in ‘hoping’ you will find the time. You won’t. If it is something you must do or want to do, you need to allocate sufficient time for doing it.
On your calendar, you would write “Sales Calls”. In your notes, or a spreadsheet, you would have a list of people to contact. In this example, it’s unlikely you need a task for this because your calendar is dictating what you will do and the list of people to contact are in a dedicated CRM, spreadsheet or notes app. You don’t need to duplicate things.
Let’s look at a different kind of project. Let’s say you are moving house. That’s a big project. How would we manage that?
My advice is open your notes app. Project like this that are going involve checklists, emails, images, designs, things to buy, copies of contracts and so much more would never work well in a task manager. You are also likely to need a file folder on your computer to keep all these documents.
On your calendar, you will have your moving date and perhaps a few extra days for organising your new home.
What would go on your task manager? Very little. You may have tasks such as send signed contracts to landlord or your lawyers, or to call the electricity company to notify them of your moving in date, but you would be managing a project like this from your notes app, not a task manager.
Most of our difficulties with task managers is we are putting too much in there. There’s a limit to what we can do each day. We are constrained by the time available. It’s that part of the equation we cannot change. Time is fixed. The only thing we have any control over is what we do in the time we have available. And it’s there where we need to get realistic.
If you begin the day and there are 60+ tasks in your task manager for today, you have failed. You will never complete all those tasks. You’ve got to get realistic about what you can achieve each day.
For me, if my task manager has more than twenty tasks to do, I know I am not going to complete them all. I will go into my task manager and reschedule some of those tasks. It’s no good telling myself these tasks have to be done, because I already know I will not have enough time to do them all. You need to get strict about what must be done and what can be rescheduled for another day.
So, Lara, my advice is move your projects out of your task manager and into your notes. Whether you use Apple Notes, Evernote, Notion or OneNote (or something else), it’s your notes app that will better manage your projects. You can keep copies of relevant emails, links to documents and so much more in your notes. You can also create checklists.
I will be travelling to Europe in a couple weeks. It’s a ten day trip and I’ve create a note for the trip in my notes app. That note contains my travel checklist, copies of my flight confirmation email, and a list of the things I need to do while there. There is nothing in my task manager. A few weeks ago, there was. I had a single task telling me to book my flights. Now that’s done everything related to this trip is managed from my notes app.
The goal, is to keep your task manager clean and tight. Only relevant things that need to be done should be there. Routines such as cleaning my office and doing my admin and cleaning my actionable email each day are in there—while I don’t really need these reminders, they are there in case I have an emergency and need need a lit of things that should have been done where I can decide what must be done and what can be rescheduled.
I hope that has helped Lara and thank you for your question. Thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, we’re looking at new year goals and what we can do to improve our chances of success.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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Email Mastery Course
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Episode 255 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 255 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
A few weeks ago, I published a video on planning 2023 on my YouTube channel. In that video, I encouraged viewers to create a note in their notes app and to begin a two-month brainstorming period where they looked at a few areas of their lives and thought about what they would like to change.
These areas were around what they would like to change about themselves, their work and their lifestyles. Plus a couple of questions about goals and bucket lists.
The idea here is to open you up so you can go deeper than your usual new year's resolutions and to give you time to think about the person you want to become.
Well, that two month brainstorming period is coming to an end and it’s time to start looking at what you can do in 2023 that will move things forward on the areas you would like to make changes and in this week’s podcast, a break from the normal format, I will take you through the process of building a plan for 2023 that will be achievable, fun and more importantly will be the catalyst for the changes you will need to turn these ideas into reality.
So, this week, the Mystery Podcast Voice will be having a break, and we’ll get straight into the answer.
So, if you did the annual planning exercise, you will hopefully have quite a lot of ideas written down on your planning sheet.
Now, don’t worry if you haven’t done the annual planning exercise; there’s still a little time left for you to do it.
So, the four main questions on the planning sheet are:
What would I like to change about myself?
What would I like to change about my lifestyle?
What would I like to change about the way I work?
What can I do to challenge myself?
Each of these questions is designed to get you to explore a different part of your life, from you as an individual to the way you work. The final question on challenging yourself is there to help prevent you from stagnating and getting stuck inside the dangerous comfort zone.
If you have completed this exercise over the last six to eight weeks, you will, by now, have quite a list. The problem is you will not be able to complete all of these ideas in twelve months. The trick now is to look at your list as a whole and look for a pattern.
Often you will find in the part about making changes to yourself that there will be some areas you have not been happy with for a while. Your time management might be bad, or you may not be happy with the state of your health.
To give you an example, last year, I wanted to improve the quantity and quality of my sleep—which was not healthy. This led me to look at my day as a whole and to see why I was not getting sufficient sleep. I had too many early starts and late finishes. I could see from my calendar that this was not sustainable, so I created a few rules.
Now, I must be finished at my computer by 11pm and be in bed by 11:30pm. I also changed my morning start from 6:00am to 7:30am.
I also made a point to read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep, which is a fantastic book and learned a lot more about ensuring I had a better quality of sleep each night.
I have not been perfectly consistent with this, but I have made a lot of progress and will continue to refine this going into 2023.
And this is something you will discover. It’s unlikely you will be able to change something perfectly—most things we are working towards will always be works in progress—but the act of starting and building in new routines and habits will lead you towards where you want to be.
When it comes to the lifestyle question, what we are looking at here is the way we are living our lives. Three years ago, at the end of 2019, I realised I had got stuck in a rut in where we were living. A few years earlier, my wife and I had decided we wanted to move to the east coast and away from the noisy and poor air quality of the big city, but we were doing nothing about it.
I saw that our reliance on the public transport system was great if we wanted to stay living in the big city, but was the reason we were ‘trapped’ there. We decided that the best way to break this would be to get a car. And that became our goal in 2020.
This meant I needed to get serious about saving money, and that is what I did from the start of 2020. Now, I was helped by the pandemic. That reduced our expenditure significantly because for a large part of 2020, we were unable to go out.
In September of that year, we bought our car, and that changed everything for us. We travelled around the country once a week, discovering new places, and in December, we found a guest house on the east coast that we could rent monthly, and we took the plunge. We signed up for an initial three-month stay in January, and that led to us staying the whole of 2021. At the end of it, we had let our apartment in the city go and moved to a new home on the east coast.
None of these changes would have taken place if I had not identified areas we were not entirely happy with. It was taking the time to look at things as a whole and seeing where we could make changes that would lead us to where we really wanted to be.
Now, what about the way you work? Here you have greater control over things than you may imagine. The pandemic has brought more flexible ways to work, and that’s a great thing. Research suggests that if you are more of an extrovert, you thrive in an environment surrounded by people. Conversely, if you are more of an introvert, you will find working from home incredibly satisfying and productive.
So, perhaps one of the first things you want to investigate is what kind of person you are. Where do you do your best work? Alone, in a quiet place or when surrounded by people and noise.
But there are other things you can look at with your work. For one, identify what your core work is. This is the work you are paid to do. Look at your job description. For instance, a departmental manager is employed to manage a department. What are the core tasks involved in managing a department? Where do you think you could improve in these areas?
For instance, if you want to improve productivity within your team, the best thing you can do is improve your communication. If your way of communicating is not simple, direct, and to the point when assigning projects, that will profoundly affect the outcome of the project.
The method is to tell your team in clear terms what the outcome you want is, and to trust that your team will use their skills and knowhow to deliver the results on time. Interfering, calling too many meetings, and micro-managing will result in a team that performs poorly and is demotivated.
Learn to tell them what you want to and let them get on with it. Develop simple reporting systems that require little time from your employees so they can stay focused on the objective.
If you are a salesperson, what could you change next year that would improve your overall performance? Where do you feel you are weak and what could learn, change or develop that will improve that area?
And that brings us to the final question: what can you do to challenge yourself?
One of the biggest dangers in our lives is our comfort zone. Our ancestors had to deal with war, revolution, disease and predators. Today, for the majority of people on earth, our lives are incredibly easy by comparison. We have an abundance of food, safe houses and access to clean water.
This has made our lives far too easy, and we no longer put ourselves in challenging situations. Without challenging ourselves, we stop growing and when that happens our lives atrophy and we fall behind. You cannot let that happen. It’s devastating on your mental health and leaves you feeling left behind.
Set yourself a challenge in 2023. That could be to climb the tallest mountain in your country, or to do the from couch to 5k running race. Alternatively you could sign up for a challenging course such as a masters degree or to design a 30 day challenge for each month of the year.
Something that would really challenge you.
The great thing about setting yourself something challenging is you will reintroduce yourself to the concept of failure. Failure is the best way to learn and to grow. It’s through failure we learn what works and what does not work. From my own personal experience I’ve learned that failure is the greatest teacher there is.
It teaches you to analyse where things went wrong, where they went well and and helps you to reframe problems and difficulties so you find a way around them.
The important thing to remember is you do not have to change everything all at once. Changing slowly over a number of years is likely to give you better results than trying to change everything in one year. One of my favourite Tony Robbins’ quotes is “Most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade”
So, think long-term. Having an approach of CANI—Constant And Never-ending Improvement will help you to achieve the things you want to achieve and bring you a lot more fulfilment that trying to change too much too fast and giving up. That destroys your confidence and leaves you feeling terrible about yourself.
Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, we’re looking at the unsexy part of becoming more productive and better with our time management.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 254 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 254 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Now, most people in the time management and productivity field, such as myself, will generally talk about systems, routines and applications. And while these do have an important place in the helping us be more productive, there are three other parts to the productivity equation rarely talked about and often overlooked.
What are those?
They are Sleep, exercise and diet.
For many people, these three elements are elephants in their otherwise well-ordered life. You know, deep down, if you are not getting sufficient sleep, not getting outside and moving, and eating highly processed and unnatural foods, you are destroying your ability to focus, concentrate and ultimately that effects your overall output. (Not to mention what these will do to your long-term health)
And I am not just talking about work output. If you are constantly tired and unable to concentrate, that’s going to have negative effects on your family life. You will be too tired for quality time with your kids and partner, and that poor diet and lack of sleep will adversely affect your mood when you do have time for your family life.
We have a lot to look at here so, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ryan. Ryan asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been so busy at work this year that when I get home all I want to do is crash on the sofa and do nothing. I end up watching TV or watching YouTube videos until very late and then not getting enough sleep. I know I should spend some time planning my day and doing some exercise, but I just don’t have the energy. How do you fit in time for exercise and planning?
Hi Ryan, thank you for your question.
This is a problem I know many people face. Planning the day at the end of the day when you're tired and just want to do nothing because you are exhausted. It’s not going to be something high on your list of priorities.
Let’s be honest, we can all operate a reasonably productive day without doing daily planning. For most people, this is how they have operated for years without any immediate adverse effects. However, a question I would ask is without following a few simple daily practices, how are things turning out?
If you are stressed out, anxious and exhausted at the end of your working day, is that a good thing? Is that how you want to feel at the end the of the day?
So, what can we do?
Well, this is what I mentioned at the beginning of this episode. While new systems and apps are exciting, and the sexy part of productivity and time management, these things will only go so far. No new app or system will change the work you still have to do. Just because a task is in Things 3 instead of Todoist, won’t change the fact that the task still needs doing.
No app is going to plan the day for you—even with machine learning or artificial intelligence. Only you, as an individual knows what’s important to you. I find it interesting that Outlook Calendar’s AI will fill your blank times with work, never tell you to call your partner, or go for a walk.
Now, I’ve been studying productivity and time management long enough to know that it’s never the case of not having time. You have time. You have more than enough time to fit everything in. The real reason you “feel” you don’t have time is you have not prioritised what’s important to you.
But, let’s step back a little and look at the three absolute basics of being more productive. Let’s start with sleep. When you get sufficient amount sleep, you are more awake, more creative and focused. Those three on their own will give you a far more productive day than being half asleep, and distracted.
I did a little experiment earlier this year. I spent a week surviving on four and half hours sleep each day. That week was a complete disaster for my overall productivity. Work that I was normally able to easily get done in a week, was a struggle. In fact, I had to give up trying to do some of the work I wanted to do.
By the end of that week, I had a backlog. I NEVER have backlogs. I was too tired to clear my actionable email each day. I became irritable towards the end of the week, and I started craving sugary snacks after only two days.
By the end of the week, I was exhausted. My exercise was terrible. Even taking my dog for a work became a chore—something I normally love doing.
Now, I’ve never been a good sleeper. But The lessons I learned from that little experiment got me serious about my sleep. I will cancel meetings and appointments now if I need to, to ensure I get my minimum number of hours (six and half).
So, Ryan, my first tip is sort your sleep out. If you don’t know how much sleep you need, do an experiment over the end of year break and sleep with no alarm for seven days. Make a note of how many hours sleep you get each night and average it out. That will tell you how much sleep you naturally need. We are all different here.
From my experiment during my last break, I discovered I actually need an average of 7 hours 20 minutes. I’m not there yet. As I say, I have a minimum of 6 ½ hours, but next year I will work towards moving that to the seven hours twenty minutes.
I would strongly recommend to all of you that you read Matthew Walker’s book, Why We Sleep. That will change your whole thinking about sleep.
Just getting enough sleep each day will radically improve your overall productivity as well as your mood, so you are a lot more attentive to the people you care about.
Now, what about exercise? Now here’s the problem with exercise. A lot of people hate exercise. Possibly because how they were introduced to exercise at school has left a scar that still lives with them today. Yet exercise is essential for productivity.
However, to get the benefit of exercise, you do not need to go to a gym or out running. Really, what is meant by “exercise” is movement. We need to move.
It’s interesting that when Apple were developing the Apple Watch, the two key parts to their exercise app were number of “active” minutes and the number of times you stood up per day. They even put a target on these:
Thirty minutes of activity and standing twelve times per day. The standing metric was measured by making sure you stood at least once for sixty seconds or more every hour or so.
So, what is involved in movement or activity. Well, a thirty minute intentional walk would do. But you can go further. Stop using lifts (or elevators as they are called in North America) and escalators. Reintroduce yourself to stairs. The stairs are a great source for getting the blood flowing and improving your focus and productivity.
Even if you have a disability and are unable to walk unaided, any kind of activity you can do that will raise your heart rate counts as exercise. A non-motorised wheel chair gives you wonderful opportunities to move with your upper body for example.
One tip I learned from a preventative medicine doctor (Dr Mark Hyman) is to get yourself outside and walk for twenty minutes after a meal. That movement will prevent your blood sugar levels from spiking after a meal and help you to avoid the ‘afternoon slump’ that affects so many people.
Seventy years ago, it would have been very hard to find a gym. Lifting weights was an exclusive and minority sport and unless you were into body building—a sport most people had never heard of back then—your only introduction to a gymnasium was at school and most people treated those as a wicket form of torture netted out my evil PE teachers.
Why were gyms so rare back then? Well, that’s because we moved a lot more and never needed them. There wasn’t the convenience we have today. Escalators were rare, very few people had TVs in their home (and those that did had to keep getting up to change channel) and if someone called you, you again had to get up, go to the hall and answer the phone.
There was no home delivery pizza or other convenience foods, so we had to cook. Our whole lives were based around movement.
Today, it’s perfectly normal for many people to get home, sit down on the sofa and not move again until they head off to bed four or five hours later. They left their home, walked the three metres to their car, drove to the office, parked in the car park, walked the five metres to the lifts, got to their desks, and spend the next eight or nine hours sat down. Then repeated the homeward journey, to spend the evening sat on a sofa.
Is it any wonder in the developed world over 60% of people are dangerously overweight and suffering from some form of preventable cardiovascular disease?
And that leads me to the final piece in the mix. Diet.
Yes, convenience food is often delicious. It’s also quick and can fill a hole instantly. You would think if all I have to do is order something through an app, have it delivered to my door within thirty minutes that would allow me more time to get more stuff done.
Well, no. The majority of food we eat today is highly processed, full of sugar and is not satiating. It leaves you craving more which has disastrous effects on your blood sugars. This then leads to spikes in your insulin levels and if repeated over a long period of time will result in you becoming pre-diabetic or full blown diabetic.
And diabetes is not a disease you want. It’s linked to the increasing numbers of dementia, not to mention the likelihood of limb amputations, irreversible heart disease and kidney failure. You really do not want to develop this horrible disease.
The effects of all that sugar and highly processed food on your productivity is devastating. It’s what leaves you feeing hungry mid-morning, sleepy in the afternoon and exhausted in the evenings. You’re not in the mood to focus your attention on anything. This is why we are so easily distracted by email, messages and our co-workers gossiping.
The trouble is most people are in denial about the state of their diet. They think the problem is they have too much work, they are overwhelmed or their systems are a mess (so they need to find a new app).
No. If you’re not getting enough sleep or exercise and your diet is a disaster zone, that is the reason why you are stressed out, overwhelmed and tired all the time. It’s not your work or the things you have to do.
Now, as we come towards the end of the year, my advice is start with these three unsexy parts of the productivity mix. Make a commitment to yourself to start moving and sleeping more and sort out your diet.
As I mentioned before read Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep book. In addition, I would recommend Dr Mark Hyman’s Pecan Diet book as well as Dr David Perlmutter’s Drop Acid.
Once you’ve read those three books read Dr Jason Fung’s Obesity Code.
If you commit to reading those four books over the end of year break, you will furnish yourself with the knowledge to make better choices about how and when to sleep as well as what to eat. They will dramatically change your life.
Making changes in these three areas of your life: your sleep, movement and diet will have a profound impact on your energy levels through the day which will impact the quality and quantity not only on what you do last work, but with your relationships with the people that matter most to you.
Plus, of course, you will significantly reduce your risk of developing debilitating lifestyle diseases that will ultimately prevent you from living the life you have always dreamed of.
Thank you, Ryan, for you question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, we’re looking at building balance into our lives, and I explain why we look at the whole idea of balance the wrong way.
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Episode 253 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 253 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
We frequently hear about balancing our lives. Terms like “work/life balance” are bandied around as if it’s something we can achieve. The trouble is, building balanced days and weeks is an elusive goal. There’s simply too much we want to build into our days:
Seven to eight hours sleep, quality time with our family, exercise, eight to nine hours of work and time for eating, resting, TV and hobbies. Add all that up and it’s more than twenty-four hours.
This week’s question is about how we can build a more balanced life and there is a way, but first we need to dispose of the traditional thinking about what a balanced life is and embrace a different approach.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question from from Annie. Annie asks, hi Carl, I work a full time job, have two young kids, a husband and a lot of hobbies I want to pursue. The trouble I have is I cannot fit everything I want to do into my schedule. I’ve tried your perfect week idea, but I find I run out of time. Are there any other ways I can try to have a more balanced, less stressful life?
Hi Annie, thank you for your question.
I was very much in the same boat as you a few years ago. I was trying to build a business, work a full time job, exercise every day and spend quality time with my family and it was impossible.
Whenever there was a public holiday, I wanted to work on my own business, but there were family responsibilities that could not be ignored and my regular work days were lengthening. I found myself working well past midnight, and having to wake up at 6 AM to get to my first classes.
It was around then I realised that there will always be periods of time when we need to get our heads down and do our work. But these intense periods of work do not last.
Take starting a business as an example. If you decide to start your own business, the first thing to get thrown out of the window is the idea of working nine til’ five. That’s a corporate office life concept that does not work when you start your own business. Starting your own business requires a 24/7 commitment. If you’re not working on your business, your brain will be solving problems and coming up with fresh ideas. It’s constant and doesn’t stop.
However, that’s when you are in the startup phase. Once you have your business up and running, things slow somewhat. You develop processes for doing your work and you soon start to get your time back.
When I first began my YouTube channel, it took me pretty much all day on a Friday to record and edit my videos. Today, I can do the recording and editing in less than three hours. I developed processes. I learned how to use Adobe’s Premiere Pro video editing software and I have systems in place to ensure everything is uploaded quickly and efficiently.
What we need to do is to look at time and balance over a longer period. You are not going to balance individual days, everyday. You may be able to balance occasional days, but to do that you would have to almost micro-manage your day, and there are so many things that could torpedo your plans, trying to do this too often will just result in stress and anxiety.
For example, Annie, if you are trying to juggle your work, your family, hobbies and other things in your life, you could look at your whole week. Accepting on, say, Tuesday and Thursday you will be focused on work, but you could also make Wednesday and Friday family nights and Mondays could be used for your hobbies.
For this to work, you would need to be doing a weekly planning session. It would be during this planning time where you block activities on your calendar for the following week. Having a plan like this then allows you to plan at a deeper level at what you will do.
For instance, one of your children may have a swimming lesson on Wednesday evenings. You could block out Wednesday evenings to go to the swimming pool and perhaps add going out for dinner with your kids afterwards. That’s spending quality time with your kids.
If you know, you will have time on a Thursday for catching up on work, you would be much more relaxed and present with your kids on a Wednesday.
One of the things I’ve noticed over the years is that there will be periods of time when we need to be completely focused on a project. A project that requires a lot of time and attention over a month or more.
In these situations, if you are worried about trying to balance your time, you are introducing a lot of unnecessary stress into your life. Important projects that need lot of focus need time. You cannot rush these things. Introducing stress into the mix is going to harm that focus and will be very unhealthy for you.
However, if we look at a period of say three months, and see how balanced those three months were, you are likely to find that you have been pretty balanced. When I analyse my last three months, I’ve worked on two big projects, spent a few days with my family, exercised almost every day and managed a few easy days of rest and relaxation.
Those big projects consumed me for around ten days each. They involved a few sixteen hour days and a lot of focus and thinking. But a three month period has around ninety days, so twenty days out of ninety is pretty balanced.
In those ninety days, there have been twelve days off (I try to take one day off a week) for you, Annie, you may two days off a week, so that twenty-four days.
Most people’s problem with balance is they are looking at things in a too shorter time frame. If you extend the time frame over three or more months, you have a far greater chance of balancing your life.
If you look at author, John Grisham’s work and life balance, he will spend around three to six months of the year in intense writing mode. Each day for those three to six months he’s completely consumed with the book he is writing. Once finished and the manuscript is sent to his publishers, he disappears on holiday. For the next few weeks it’s all about rest and relaxation.
The great thing about seeking balance over a longer period of time is you feel a lot less stressed and anxious. You know you can allow certain parts of your life to consume you for periods of time. Whether that is work or family related. It also means you can be much more present in the moment, without worrying about what you are not doing.
Another concept I’ve looked at in the past is the eight week work cycle. This is where for six weeks you focus all your efforts and attention on working on a specific project and once that has been concluded, you rest for two weeks. During those two weeks you attend to all the things you haven’t put much attention on.
Around two years ago, I adopted a quarterly week off. This is where I take the last week of each quarter off. I got this idea from Tim Ferriss. He actually takes two weeks off and travels to a different country or city for the duration of the break. He’s a little stricter than I am in that he comes off the grid entirely. No phone, no internet, just him his thoughts and a notebook.
What I’ve noticed is people who have adopted a longer time frame to create balance in their lives get a lot more done and are a lot happier and less stressed. They know there will be time for spending with their family and friends, and when they are with their family and friends they really are with them. Not being physically present but mentally being elsewhere—thinking about work, or a project that is not getting done.
In a recent weekly newsletter, I wrote about the time pendulum. In this the needle swings to the left occasionally when you have a lot of work related stuff on your plate. It’s all consuming and needs you attention beyond your regular work hours. However, the pendulum will always swing back towards the right where you get time to rest recuperate.
Fighting to keep the pendulum in the middle is a stress you do not need. Acceptance of the intense period of work, knowing that the pendulum will swing back to the right is a welcome way to maintain a reasonably balanced life.
There are always going to be periods when your time and attention will be dominated by a single project or event. That’s life. There’s no point in fighting it, you cannot win that battle. However, acceptance, though, relieves you of that stress and you no longer feel like you are in a fight. Instead, you can put all your focus and attention on the task in hand, knowing you will soon have time to rest, recuperate and focus your attention on other areas of your life you feel may be out of balance.
Hence the reason why it’s so important to know what your areas of focus are. If you haven’t taken the time to build out your areas of focus, that would be the first thing I would recommend you do. I’ve put a link in the show notes for you to download the areas of focus workbook. I would recommend you give yourself a few days to go through that and build out those eight areas that important to us all.
Thank you Annie for your question. And thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, we’re looking at how to stop overthinking and over-complicating our lives.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Email Mastery Course
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Episode 252 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 252 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
One of the biggest drains on our productivity is over-thinking things. It’s this overthinking that usually leads to overcomplicating our task managers, notes apps and work in general.
However, there are a few things we can do that will eliminate the need to think too much about things. One of those, I’ve written and spoken about a lot, and that is in the way we write our tasks. If you write tasks in a haphazard way, you will end with tasks such as a website address with no idea what you need to do, or a single name with no indication what you need to do with that name.
Whenever you write a task, you need to have an actionable verb telling you precisely what needs to be done. For instance: “look at this website for design ideas” or “call Jenny about next week’s meeting”. It’s a simple trick that adds, perhaps, a few seconds to writing out the task, but it will save to a lot more than a few seconds when it comes to deciding when you will do the task.
It’s surprising how much time we lose when we need to think about what to do and how to do it. It’s when we do that that we discover multiple different ways to do something, and if we are not motivated enough to get whatever needs doing done, we use the excuse to “think about it” as a way to delay doing the task.
So, before we get into the depth of this, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Leon. Leon asks, Hi Carl, I’ve been following you for a long time now, and I understand how to set up my system. The problem I have is I feel I waste so much time trying to decide what to do and how to do it. I collect everything in my inbox but then never do most of the things I put there. How do you manage all your tasks?
Hi Leon, thank you for your question.
When you say, “I waste so much time trying to decide what do and how to do it” I presume that this will be a symptom of how your write your tasks and not being clear on where your priorities are.
If we leave writing your tasks out for the moment and look at the decision part, this should be almost automatic. When you know where your priorities are, there will always be a natural hierarchy for the tasks that you do.
For instance, if you were a salesperson when at work, your priorities would always be those tasks that risk you gaining a sale. Everything else, no matter how loud the task is—colleagues or bosses screaming at you for an activity report, for example—are not priorities.
I know it’s hard to ignore your boss. But if you needed to call your boss about your activity report or a customer asking for further information, your customer is the priority and there shouldn’t even be a debate about it. Remember, you’re a salesperson. Your job is to sell. So, of the two calls; calling your boss or calling the customer, which one is likely to result in a sale?
A doctor would never leave a seriously ill patient to answer a question from a manager. Doctors are trained to identify where their priorities are. You need to train yourself to know instinctively where your priorities are.
And therein lies the secret to simplifying your work.
When you know what your objective is, all you need work out is the fastest way to get from where you are now to where you want to be.
Now, it would be very rare for you arrive at a project or task you haven’t done before, or done something similar. A manager having to hire or fire someone will have done that before. The difference is the role you are recruiting for or the person you are firing. However, there will already be a process to achieve these results.
Over time you want to be fine-tuning your processes. I understand when you do something for the first time it’s likely to take longer, but as you are doing it you are learning how to do it, and you can fine-tune your process as you go along.
The key is the keep focused on your outcome. What are you trying to achieve?
Imagine you need to hire a new designer for your design team. Your company will likely already have a recruiting process, and if not, someone within your organisation will have hired someone at some time. Find out how they did it. Open your notes app, and write out a checklist of all the steps you anticipate you will need to do. Once you have your checklist, go through it and look for the shortcuts.
When we brainstorm these ideas, we overcompensate. We think of all the little things that likely don’t need doing. Once we have brainstormed what we think needs to be done to achieve our outcome, we should go through the list and eliminate the unnecessary (and obvious tasks).
Now, I’ve covered daily and weekly planning numerous times on this podcast, and it is a vital part of making decisions about what to work on.
What I’ve noticed is those people who get the importance of daily planning and do it consistently, are the ones who are not overwhelmed or struggling to get their work done. It’s this step back at the end of the day to look at what needs to be done and deciding what you must get done the next day that makes all the difference.
It eliminates procrastination at a key part of the day—the start. You know, from the moment you wake up what you will do first.
For instance, last night, as I was doing my planning, I identified my next YouTube video needed to be uploaded and scheduled and this podcast script had to be finished before 11:00am.
If you look at that sentence, two important words: “needed” and “had” to. There’s no debate. Once my morning routines were finished, I completed the YouTube video and uploaded it, and now I am writing this script. The current time is 9:40am. There’s no question in my mind about whether I will get these two tasks complete before 11 AM. They will be done.
This means, right now, my email is off—anything coming in in the next sixty minutes can wait and my phone is on do not disturb. I am focused on the job in hand and anything else can wait until this script is finished.
Now, if you have never allowed yourself to be in an environment where you cannot be disturbed by all the digital noise in our lives, you will find working in this focused way very uncomfortable. But the discomfort is temporary. When you know what’s on your calendar, and you know what needs to be done before your first commitment of the day, you will be relaxed and focused on the job in hand.
The worst thing you can do is to look at your task list first thing in the morning and try to decide what to work on. This will inevitably lead to procrastination and you waste so much time trying to decide, that very little of your important work will get done before you have to attend to your first appointment or the noise coming in from your phone or email.
Now here’s a quick tip for you. Do this planning on a weekend as well. On a weekend we do not need to be as meticulous, but it’s a very powerful way to make sure that the things you want to do in your personal life get done. For example, if you decide on Friday night that tomorrow you will wash the car, there is a greater chance you will do it without hesitation. Equally, you may decide that Sunday morning, you will take your kids out for a bike ride or a walk in the park. Make those decision before you end the day. When you wake up, you will be focused on getting your kids ready and won’t be looking for excuses not to do it.
Finally, how are you writing your tasks, Leon? David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, says: when you write a task in your task manager write it for your dumb self. What he means is, if you write out a task such as: “mum birthday”, that tells you nothing about what you need to do. All it tells you us your mum has a birthday.
Instead, what do you need to do about your mum’s birthday? Do you need to organise a family dinner? Buy her a present? Or something else?
Make sure when you write a task like this you include what you need to do. For instance, “Call my brother and sister to organise a family dinner for mum’s birthday”. Sure, it will take a few extra seconds to write a full task, but doing so will save you so much time later when you come to doing the task. You won’t be wasting time trying to remember what you need to do.
When you next do your weekly planning session, go through your tasks and make sure they are written out in a way that makes immediate sense to you.
If you are like most people there will be a lot of tasks that have been in your task manager for a long time. If they are not written out in a way you would immediate know what to do, either rewrite the task or delete it altogether.
That one trick will turn your task manager from a hodge podge of random tasks into a set of meaningful activities you can do something with without trying to remember what needs doing.
A way to remember this to make sure you have an active verb in your task. If there’s no active verb, it does not belong in your task manager.
I hope that has helped, Leon. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.
How best to organise all your files, documents and articles? That’s what we’re looking at this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 251 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 251 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Over the years, we have seen a lot of wonderful ways to organise our stuff. Elaborate notebook and tag structures in Evernote, Complex folders on our computers organising every facet of our lives.
And all that’s great. It’s a fantastic way to get things organised and gives us the motivation to clear out our stuff—which is no bad thing. We do collect too much stuff anyway.
However, are all these wonderful organisation methods the best use of our time? You see, getting all our stuff organised is a great idea, but that’s a one-time task that may take a few days or even weeks, but long-term we have to maintain this new structure and therein lies two problems.
The first is it will take time for you to develop the natural muscle memory to move stuff to their rightful place, and in my experience, most people have enough on their plates as it is. And secondly, the deeper the organisation structure you build the longer it will take to move the stuff you collect in the future—which will mean you won’t do it. After all, you likely don’t have a great deal of free time as it is, so adding a new process that takes time is not going to solve any problems.
So what can we do? Well there are a few things you can do and that is what we will look at this week. However, before we do that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Janine. Janine asks: Hi Carl, I am a professor at a large hospital and I not only have patients to see, I also teach. On top of that, I need to stay up to date with the latest research. This means I have a lot of papers to read, review and study. I really struggle to keep all these things organised and wondered if you have any tips and tricks that might help.
Hi Janine, thank you for your question.
This is the dilemma that has been creeping up on us over the last ten to fifteen years. More and more digital stuff has been replacing what typically would have been paper.
I remember in the late 1990s, I had a filing cabinet in my study that held all the important papers and documents I needed to keep. My car and house insurance, a file folder for gas, electric and water bills as well as bank and credit card statements oh, and a place to keep my running magazines and Law Society Gazette.
And because if I didn’t file these papers away almost immediately, they would be left sitting on the dining table, there was a constant reminder that these papers and documents needed to be filed.
Today, most of these documents are now online or in digital format. I don’t get bank or credit card statements through the post anymore. They are all digital. I no longer have a filing cabinet in my office. I am now largely paperless—save for documents such as my passport, residency permit papers and such like.
I can keep all these important documents in a single drawer in my office.
However, the problem isn’t really just about these important documents. The problem now is we receive so much more digital clutter than we ever received paper. Largely because it is so much cheaper and easier to send out a digital document than a paper one, we get exponentially more digital stuff.
So, how do we manage all this stuff.
First I would recommend you establish some basic rules. Don’t put files and documents in your notes app. Over time, this will slow down your notes app. It’s far better to put receipts, documents—such as your medical and teaching documents—into dedicated folders in the cloud.
Now it doesn’t matter whether you use Google Drive, Microsoft OneNote, Dropbox or iCloud. What matters is how you structure your folders. My structure is based around the work I do. For instance, I have a folder for my Online courses, YouTube, and Company documentation, which includes my receipts. Inside those folders the relevant parts are added as sub-folders.
For example, inside my company folder, I have all the company registration documents, invoices I need to keep for my accountant, salaries and other such administrative documents. These are inside appropriately titled folders.
For you, Janine, you would structure your folders as Medical and Teaching and then inside of those folders you would have the different areas. For instance, you would keep documents related to the different subject matters you teach inside your teaching folder under their relevant topic.
Now one piece of advice I would give you here is to try where possible to use your computer system’s drive. For example, if you are using a Windows computer, use OneDrive or if you are using Apple’s OS, use iCloud.
The reason for this anything on OneDrive will be searchable through your computer. Similarly, anything in iCloud will be searchable through Apple’s Spotlight search tool.
I know that is not always possible, but where it is. Stick with your computer’s system cloud storage system. It will just make your life a little bit easier.
Now, before we go any further, what about all your articles that need to be read (or you want to read). Use a read later service such as Instapaper or Pocket.
One of the downsides to being able to save articles we see on the web is we save articles into our notes apps and then never read them. Often I see people saving these articles into a “read later” folder in their notes and then never go in there to read those articles. Soon they have hundreds of articles saved that never get read and just clutter up your notes app.
Use Instapaper or Pocket to filter out articles you will never read. My system is simple. Any article I want to read, I will send to Instapaper and then, only after reading it, if Want to keep it for future reference, I will then send it to my notes app.
One thing that has happened over the last five years is Microsoft, Apple and Google have realised we are terrible at organising our stuff. For years these companies left it to us to organise our stuff how we want to and we failed. I know some people have created good, clean organisation, but most people haven’t. Just look around your colleagues’ desktops. They are full of documents, PDFs, Presentation files and so on.
Unfortunately, what happens then is we waste time searching for something we need.
So, Apple, Microsoft and Google have started to take that responsibility away from us and have developed excellent search tools. Apple’s Spotlight for instance, will search iCloud for any document I have with a keyword, date range or type of document. It doesn’t mater whether I am on my phone, MacBook or iPad. It will find those documents.
This means, once you get comfortable with how the system search works on your device, the only responsibility you have is to make sure the title of your document is something you will find.
For that I would suggest you create a format you use for all your documents. To give you an example, I use the same file naming convention for all my documents. This is The date to document was created or downloaded, the type of document. That could be invoice, receipt, or company I am creating a presentation for. And then the title.
What this does is helps me to quickly find what I am looking for directly from Spotlight.
For instance, if I need to find a presentation file for a presentation I did for a company last year, All I need do is type the company name into Spotlight and I will see from the list of results what I am looking for. I can see the date, so I know I am choosing the right document and I know it is a presentation.
Another thing that Google, Apple and Microsoft have done in recent years is to keep like documents together. This means if you have an Excel file, you can keep it inside Excel. Now the document itself is kept in OneDrive, but when you open Excel, you will see all your documents in one place. Google does this with its Docs, Sheets and Slides and Apple does this with Pages, Keynote and Numbers.
At first I resisted this sticking to my old-fashioned ways of moving these documents to separate folders. However, over the years I’ve trusted Apple to organise these for me and it’s so much easier. If I am looking for a Keynote file, all I need do is open Keynote and I can quickly find the file from the start menu.
Google is even better at this, if someone shares a Google Doc with me and I open it, it automatically gets stored in my Google Docs folder.
What I’ve learned over the last few years is don’t fight the system. All these companies are making it easier for us to find out stuff. If we stubbornly stick to our old ways we are making it harder for us to do our work productively. If we allow our computers to worry about how we organise things, we are saving ourselves a lot of time.
We don’t need elaborate organisation systems anymore. All you need is a loose folder structure that covers the different areas of our lives. This will help to keep things neat and tidy. Apart from that, let your devices worry about the organisation and start trusting your computer’s system to find what you need.
Incidentally, this also applies to email. In the past I’ve had a lot of complex folder structures. Now, all I have is four folders: An inbox, an Action This Day folder for emails that need some form of action from me, an Archive for stuff I may need later and the trash. That’s it.
Email search is incredibly fast and easy. I can search by person, date range, keyword or title. I have no need at all for elaborate folders that only slow everything down.
I hope that has helped, Janine. My advice is keep things simple, let your computer do all the hard work and focus you attention on getting your work done.
Thank you for you question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s podcast answers the question: where do goals fit into a task manager?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 250 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 250 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
We are told that setting goals for yourself is important, and, yes, I would agree with that. But the question is, once you have set yourself some goals, where do the activities you need to perform come in? If you are already close to your limit in terms of what you can do each day, how will you find time to add more stuff?
Now I think of goals as milestones on the road of a much longer journey. The destination of that journey is the same for all of us: death. Sorry to be so melodramatic, but that is true. Nobody gets out of life alive. It’s a very predictable end.
The good news here is that we all have a degree of flexibility and freedom to choose what road we take. The difficulty we face is there is so much choice. So many paths we could take and trying to decide which path to follow is scary. Which is why it is all too easy to make no choice and just follow the ebbs and flows that life throws at us—which unless you are extremely lucky is not going to lead to a fulfilled and happy life.
So, this week, I will share with you ways you can build your goals into your daily life so they become less of a task to be completed each day and more of just something you do, because that is who you are and what you do.
So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Adrian. Adrian asks; Hi Carl, I recently saw that you opened a new course on goal setting. I would love to have some goals, but I just don’t have the time to fit them in. I’m sure I’m not alone with this dilemma. Do you have any tips on fitting goals into an already busy life?
Hi Adrian, thank you for your question.
You are right to be concerned about adding more stuff you an already busy day, but there is a difference with tasks or activities related to our goals.
Goals are not something you do, and once complete or accomplished; you stop doing. A goal’s purpose is the create change. Once that change has happened, you don’t want to be returning to where you were before you started the goal. That would not be a clever move.
I remember in my twenties, many of my friends (and myself, I have to admit) would hit the gym in the spring and try to lose our ‘winter weight’ ready for the summer holidays so we could strut confidently up and down the beach. Once the summer was over, we’d pile the weight back on.
Looking back now, I can see how ridiculous this form of yoyo dieting and exercise was. Now I am older (and allegedly wiser), getting into shape should not be something you do for a particular time of the year; it should be an ongoing thing. Keeping your weight down and exercising regularly is a necessity if you want to enjoy a robust, healthy life.
So, today, I am careful about what I eat—no refined carbohydrates and plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. I also exercise pretty much every day, whether that is a session in the gym, a run or a gentle walk with my dog.
It no longer feels like a task. Spending an hour on exercise is an investment in my future. It’s built into my daily schedule, and I use it as a break from sitting at my desk all day doing work. I see exercise as something that assists my productivity rather than as something that needs to be done.
The same applies to financial goals. If you’ve read Dave Ramsey’s book; Total Money Makeover, he gives you five strategies to build a safe and healthy financial plan for you and your family. None of those strategies involves a lot of work. For instance, paying down your debts is a single action each month. Once you get paid, you use a percentage of your salary to pay down one of your debts.
Equally, a second strategy is to build an emergency fund that would cover your expenses for a given amount of time if you were to lose your job. For something like this, it’s simply putting a little money aside each month into a savings account. That would be around five minutes a month (or less if you were to automate the payment)
The goal here, for example, maybe to clear all your debts over the next three years. That’s a simple task. You send money to the debt each month until it is clear. You have a timeline (three years), and you have an action (send money somewhere).
However, the bigger goal here is to change your behaviour from one of spending to one of saving. Once that becomes a behaviour, it is not something you ever need to think about again. You just do it as part of who you are.
When you set a goal, whatever that goal may be, there is an initial stage where you need to be consciously taking an action. That stage will usually last around a month or two. Once you have been consistently taking action on your goal for that time, you find it becomes something you automatically do.
For instance, today, I know I will be going to the gym at 2:30pm. This means when I planned today, I knew I had around three hours of focused work plus a couple of meetings before I needed to go to the gym. That gym time has given me structure to my day. I know when my calls are, and I know what focused work needs to be done before I go to the gym. I have a purpose from the moment I wake up.
The way to look at a goal is to treat it as a waypoint. It tells you that you are moving in the right direction. I use fitness goals to make sure I don’t go stale. The habit of exercise is built into who I am. I am a person who exercises every day. However, like most people, I can quite easily become bored with doing the same thing over and over again, so I set fitness goals every three months.
These could be to run a certain distance or to run a half marathon in under two hours. Alternatively, I might decide to focus on strength for three months and set a target weight to bench press or squat. I mix it up depending on the season. I use the goals to give me focus and direction.
If you were to set a goal to complete a master's degree, what would be the behaviour or habit you need to develop? It would be to spend some time each day studying. The habit of working on your own self-development (an area of focus) should already be something you are doing. Whether that is spending thirty to sixty minutes a day learning something new or being more focused and setting yourself some study days each week doesn’t matter. Developing yourself by learning means you are growing mentally. Something important if you want to feel fulfilled and accomplished.
So the goal to complete a master's degree becomes the waypoint—the signpost—to give you something to focus on and to push yourself beyond your comfort zone.
You see, the real reason why we need to set goals is to prevent us from stagnating. Whether we like it or not, the world is constantly changing. It’s changing around us and we either change or we will get left behind.
During my time teaching English, I worked with many middle management people who refused to learn the new technologies that emerged from the smartphone revolution. Within five years, they were trapped in middle management no-mans land. They were passed over for promotion, and rather than staying where they were, their jobs were downgraded or removed altogether. They had become too comfortable with the way things were and resisted the changes that were happening around them.
The onus is on us to make sure we have time to learn new things. To stay ahead and to keep pushing our boundaries, so we continue to grow. The good news is the world changes at a slow pace. We can change at a faster pace, and that’s where goals help us. They pull us towards changing ourselves for the better.
Now one tip I would give you here is to not set too many goals all at once.
The way to use goals is to step back and look at your life as a whole. Where do you feel you need to improve? Are your skills giving you an advantage in the workplace? How is your health? Are you moving towards the vision you have for yourself in the next ten to twenty years? What do you need to change in order to feel more fulfilled in life and work?
To set strong, motivating goals, you need to do quite a lot of self-reflection. You need to find people who are already doing what you want to do and research them—a kind of healthy cyberstalking. Find out what they did to get where they are and see what changes you can make to follow a similar pathway.
We are building a life, and a big part of the pleasure we get is the journey to achieving that life. The goals you set form part of that journey; they ensure you are moving along the right path and tell you when you need to adjust your direction. The old phrase: “if at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again” is very apt when goal setting. There will be a lot of failures. A lot of adjusting, and with that you learn so much more about you.
I remember a few years ago I decided to do Robin Sharma’s 5AM club. I loved the idea of waking up early and having a series of activities that were dedicated to me and no one else. And for eighteen months I was pretty consistent with it.
However, as my coaching practice developed I found myself working alter and later into the evening and it came to a point where waking up at 5AM was no longer practical. For a few weeks I fought on, but in the end I “failed” to maintain the consistency.
I reviewed the goal and realised that what I really wanted was the empowering morning routine. The waking up at 5AM was nice, but it wasn’t the main purpose. The purpose was to have an hour or so for myself every morning. I revised the goal and set it to being consistent with my morning routine no matter what time. Woke up.
That adjustment began three years ago and there has not been one day since that I have not written my journal, done my stretches and drank a glass of lemon juice.
Now, I don’t even think about it. I just do it.
That’s what goals are there for. They change your habits and behaviours so you adopt better living practices that fulfil you and leave you feeling happy, accomplished and focused on what’s important in life.
I hope that has helped, Adrian. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, it’s all about multiple projects and tasks—all in one day.
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Episode 249 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 249 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
How do you manage running a new business, or even running your own department with multiple things happening each day and projects that need to be got off the ground, or maintained. It a real challenge and leave you feeling exhausted, and more importantly, stressed out about what you may or may not have done.
This is one of the many reasons why getting yourself organised and being consistent with your daily and weekly planning is so important. It’s this planning that gives you an edge. It elevates you above the fray and keeps you focused on the bigger picture.
Without a plan for the week, you will inevitably get sucked into the daily churn of low and high important tasks. It will feel endless and it doesn’t lead to a great outcome. Sure, you may have a reasonably successful business or department, but you, as an individual, will be exhausted, tired and stressed out and that leads to poor decision making and mistakes.
Now, before we get into the question, I just wanted to give you a heads up that I have just launched my latest mini-course. The Goal Setting course will give you a blueprint to build the life you want to live by developing the vision of what you want, and then using goals to make sure you are moving along the right pathway.
It’s an exciting course that will inspire you to grow, develop and start making the changes you need to make to become the person you want to be.
Full details of this mini-course will be in the show notes.
Now, on with this show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Cara. Cara asks: Hi Carl, I run a growing start up business and have found managing multiple tasks and projects each day is a real pain point. How would you suggest we manage multi-tasking to keep the business running and developing new projects?
Hi Cara, thank you for your question.
Now, we better first deal with the concept of “multi-tasking”. Straight up, don’t ever do it. Or rather try to do it. It’s impossible, never works and only leads to mistakes which will need correcting later.
Slow down. There is more than enough time each day to work on the important things. You don’t have to do everything in one day. I know our minds are telling us it has to be done today, but really? Does it?
When you step back, take a breath and look at what you have on your list of things to do, you will see that many of those tasks don’t really need to be done today. It might be nice to be able to do them, but it would not be the end of your business if you rescheduled the less important tasks to later in the week.
Now, there’s a good reason for rescheduling less important things to later in the week and that is most of these will not need doing anyway. They are what I call “reactive” tasks. Tasks that seem important right now, but with a little time resolve themselves and can be discarded.
I’m reminded of a story about former Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who would put aside his letters and memos for ten days before reading them. What he found was 90% of the issues resolved themselves and the remaining 10% was where he needed to put his attention.
Now, in today’s world things move a lot faster than they did in the 1980s, but the principle still remains, most of what comes into our inboxes will resolve themselves, there is no need to rush. You can put aside most issues for twenty-four to forty-eight hours without any problems. When you do come to them, it’s likely many of them will have resolved themselves.
I’m always surprised at how many emails I get asking a question, only to find an hour later the same person writes to tell me they’ve resolved the issue. That taught me to slow down and not rush into a response.
Of course, there are some issues that do need dealing with straight away. But most don’t. Learn to slow down. You will thank yourself for that later.
Now, I mentioned in the opening about the importance of planning. Planning is the key to staying on top of everything being thrown at you. You need some time each day and week to step back and evaluate what is important. What needs to get done about all else.
For instance, last week, my priority was to launch my Goal Setting course. I still had my core work to do—content and coaching client feedback—but aside from that work, my priority last week was launching the course.
Now, this was not the first course I have launched, so I have a process for launching courses. However, that process still requires a lot of time. This meant, each day last week, I made sure my core work was done early. For instance, on Monday, when I wrote the blog post, I started my day by getting that written. Once that was written, I blocked out two hours to work on the course.
For those of you who don’t know, your core work is your most important work—the work you are employed to do. If you are a salesperson, your core work is any activity that results in a sale. If you are an analyst, your core work is any activity that involves analysing. Everything else (email replies, meetings and admin work) is secondary to that.
When I finished each day, I gave myself ten minutes to go through my task list to see what I had on for the next day and prioritised two things: my core work and the course. I then looked at my calendar to see where I could fit those tasks in.
This month I have two courses to work on. That’s unusual, not only do I need to launch my Goal Setting mini-course, but I also need to work on the update to my Apple Productivity course. It would be easy to stress myself about the Apple Productivity course, but what’s the point? I can only work on one course at a time, so the only question is which one do I work on tomorrow?
Now that the goals setting course is launched, I can turn my attention to updating my Apple Productivity course. My work is much more manageable and realistic.
If I had tried to do both at the same time, I would be stressed out and inevitably make a lot of mistakes that will need to be resolved later.
The key is to focus on one project at a time. Of course, you may have multiple projects going on at the same time, but given that you cannot work effectively on two or more projects at the same time, you need to decide, at a weekly level, which projects you will focus on that week.
One thing that has worked for me, is to allocate time each week for certain activities. I also know a lot of business founders have also found this method effective. That is to block time out each day of the week for certain activities.
For instance, email and communications. These come in every day and it’s unlikely you will be able to stop them. This means, you need time each day for managing your communications. For me, I need around forty minutes a day to stay on top of my communications. So, I have a one hour block each day between 7 and 8pm for responding to my actionable messages.
Find an appropriate time in the day and block it out on your calendar for managing your email.
Other activities you need to do regularly, for example, prospecting, accounting, admin and your personal life need time allocating to them. You could dedicate Mondays to prospecting, Tuesdays to admin and Fridays to accounting. Wednesday and Thursday could be dedicated to project work.
Knowing you have time allocated to prospecting, admin and accounting leaves you feeling less stressed and it makes it easier to decide when you will do something.
I would add, that it helps to keep one day each week as free as possible for catching up when you have fallen behind with something.This is one of those inevitable things in life that our carefully laid out plans will get disrupted by an emergency. Knowing you have a reasonably free day later in the week for catching up helps to keep ion track with the things we need to do.
Finally, as a start-up business everything will be new and so you won’t have any settled processes in place. It’s important to be looking for the process for doing your work. I have a number of admin tasks to do each day. When I first began collecting the information, it would take me around ninety minutes each day. I focused on building the process and now, three or four years later, I still have the same admin tasks to do, but it takes me around twenty minutes to do.
Because I have settled processes, I know how to start, where to look for the information and can do the work in a lot less time.
If your projects are similar in nature—in my case creating or updating courses—you can develop checklists and processes there too. This makes doing project work a lot easier. You know where to start, have a reasonably good idea how long each part will take and you can build that time into your calendar.
Essentially, it all boils down to giving yourself time each day and each week to look at what needs to be done and planning out when you will do the work. If you are not planning out when the work will get done, your brain will convince you that you don’t have sufficient time—when you do—and that’s where stress and anxiety will come from.
Make sure you are planning the week. Identifying which project, or projects, you will work on each week. On a daily level, give yourself ten to fifteen minutes to plan the next day. What will be your priority the next day and make sure you have the time blocked out in your calendar so you know you have the time to work on it.
I hope that has helped, Cara. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening.
Don’t forget, if you want to learn more about my brand new Goal Setting course, the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, we’re looking at why you don’t need to worry if you cannot complete your planned tasks each day.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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Email Mastery Course
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Episode 248 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 248 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Do you feel you have to complete your daily task list every day? How do you feel if you don’t manage to complete your list of tasks? Most people become disillusioned when they end the day with several tasks left, and that can lead to a rabbit hole of app and system switching—which is never the solution.
Quite often, what will happen is those tasks that didn’t get done today will be automatically pushed off to tomorrow, which, rather than solving the problem, only exasperates it because now you have more tasks to do tomorrow on top of the inevitable disruptions, emergencies and distractions.
So, this week, I will hopefully give you some strategies and tips to eliminate this problem and give you the confidence to accept sometimes you will not be able to complete your tasks, and that’s okay.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Simon. Simon asks: Hi Carl, for many years, I have used a task list—from using a paper planner in the early 2000s to now being digital. One problem I have always faced is not being able to complete all my tasks. I always end the day with tasks still on my list. Do you have the same problem, and if so, how do you manage it?
Hi Simon, thank you for your question.
Firstly, let me say it’s perfectly normal to end most days with tasks uncompleted. You are not a machine—you are a human being, and we have a tendency to overestimate what we can do in a day. Added to that, there are always going to be disruptions, emergencies and things going wrong that you cannot plan for. When these disruptions and emergencies arise, we just need to deal with them as best we can, and that means some things you had planned for the day will have to be missed.
That’s a normal day for most of us. Disruptions, emergencies and things going wrong. Welcome to the real world. The solution is not to change your system or apps. The solution is coming to terms with these disruptions and emergencies.
Now, if we dig a little deeper, our daily task list will be a mix of three types of tasks:
Tasks that must be done,
Tasks that should be done
and tasks that can be rescheduled if necessary—these are what I would describe as the hope to do tasks.
If you look at your task list for today, you will see this mix.
Now, the strategy is to be very clear about what must be done. These tasks are your top priority for the day, and where possible, you should start your day with these tasks—before disruptions and emergencies occur. I know that is not always possible, and when it is not possible—perhaps you have an early morning meeting or you are travelling somewhere, you need to schedule the time in your calendar, so you know you have the time to do it.
Now when these emergencies and disruptions do occur, you need to accept them—embrace them, if you like—analyse what you have control over, and if you do have some control, make a decision on what you will do.
Often, if you just step back for a minute and analyse the emergency or disruption, you will find there is an easy solution. Panicking will not help you. The only way to deal with these is to stop. Look at the emergency or disruption, and decide what you can do about it. That might be a telephone call, or it could be delegating the problem to someone better suited to sorting the problem out.
Sometimes the emergency is so big you have to drop everything and just deal with that emergency. This happened to me a year ago. I was woken at 7 AM, and the emergency was staring me in the face. In that moment, I realised I had to deal with the emergency in front of me, and that was an easy decision to make.
I had a lot of work planned for that day. My task list was carefully curated, and when I went to bed, I knew exactly how I would start the day. That emergency stopped that. It was an easy decision to make.
Later in the day, when I had a few minutes, I went into my task list and checked my tasks—looking for the must-dos. Fortunately, there were no “must-do” tasks. I cancelled appointments for the following day as I knew I would not be able to make those appointments and completely ignored my email. When you are faced with a genuine emergency, it’s surprising how low-value things like emails become.
Once I had rescheduled my appointments and doubled checked there was nothing urgent on my task list, I didn’t look at the list again that day.
It was only when I got back home the next day, did I open my task list and begin rescheduling my tasks for other days.
Now, most of the emergencies we face are not going to take up the whole day. It’s likely that a quick call to a client or customer, or colleague will resolve the issue or at least remove the urgency. It’s better to deal with that now rather than let it destroy your concentration.
Now of the tenets of the Time Sector System is to learn how many tasks you can comfortably complete each week. Because we are managing our tasks by when we will do them rather than by project, you have a lot more control over just how much you do each week.
For me, I know that a realistic number of tasks each week, including my core work and areas of focus, is between thirty and thirty-five. This does not include my routine tasks; these are the meaningful, project or goal-moving forward tasks.
This means when I do my weekly planning, if I see I have more the thirty-five tasks in my This Week folder, I need to go in and push off some tasks for the following week.
Now, I get asked, but what happens if all those thirty-five-plus tasks have to be done? Well, even if they have to be done, I know I cannot change the time I have available, so whether they have to be done or not is irrelevant. The thing is, my limit is thirty-five tasks. After that, I will run out of time.
It would be very rare for you to be in a position where all your tasks “have to be done” that week. Many can be renegotiated; some dropped altogether.
The thing to remember in the time management equation is the time side of the equation is fixed. You get twenty-four hours a day. The only side of the equation that is variable is the activity side. That’s the only part you have control over. So either you drop tasks or you renegotiate deadlines, so you have the time and flexibility to manage your work.
This is why I stress the importance of establishing what your core work is. The work you are employed to do and are ultimately paid for. Once you know this, you have essentially created your priorities. Your areas of focus and core work will always have priority over your “volunteered” work.
Now, another way to look at this is if you have fifteen tasks to complete today and you only manage to complete ten, is that really a problem? To me, no, it isn’t as long as you managed to do the most important tasks. You made progress. That’s what is important. Having a 66% success rate is better than a 0% success rate.
You are not going to be perfect. There will always be things you don’t get done. On the day I had my big emergency last year, I still managed to complete a couple of tasks. I probably had a 5% success rate; to me, even a 5% success rate is better than zero.
If you have implemented my 2+8 Prioritisation method—where you select your two most important tasks for the day and make them your “must dos” and eight other tasks you should do. You will know that your two must-do tasks should be completed each day, and for the remaining eight, you will do everything you can to complete them, but it would not be the end of the world if you cannot.
Today, my two must-do tasks are to write this script and do my exercise. I have other tasks I want to do today, and I will get most of them done, but the most important thing on my mind when I began my day today was to make sure I wrote this script and get my exercise in.
With the 2+8 Prioritisation Method, there is an implied acceptance that you will not complete everything, but the point of the method is to train you to know what your priorities are. When you do this every day, you develop a keen sense of priorities, and you naturally make the decision when you do your daily planning.
When you accept that you may not be able to complete all your tasks each day, you will sense a huge weight coming off your shoulders. It’s liberating to know that it’s okay not to complete everything.
However, one mistake you want to avoid is automatically rescheduling those incomplete tasks to the next day. You need to look at what you did not do, and based on what commitments you have the next day and your other tasks; you reschedule these tasks to the days you will likely be able to do them.
There are days when I have to write my blog post as a task, yet for various reasons, I either don’t get around to doing or finishing it. Before I reschedule the task, I look at my calendar and look for the next available day. For example, if I fail to finish writing this script today, I know already I will be away tomorrow, not returning home until late in the evening. My next available day, looking at my calendar, is Friday. This means I will reschedule the task for Friday. It’s not perfect, but at least the task gets done.
Just because I don’t manage to clear my task list for the day doesn’t mean my whole system has failed. All it means is I didn’t allow sufficient flexibility for the unknowns. The truth is, over time, you learn how much flexibility you need to leave in your day. You may not be right every day, but the experience will teach you.
And that really the final piece to the puzzle, if you like. You will not be “perfect”, ever. There will always be days when you don’t complete all your tasks, and that’s okay. It means you’re human, you care, and it isn’t the end of the world. Just give yourself a few minutes at the end of the day to look at what you didn’t do, reschedule what needs rescheduling, and if necessary, renegotiate deadlines with the appropriate people.
And most of all, be patient. It takes time to build confidence in your system. You will make a lot of errors, and yes, you will overestimate what you can do in a day. The important thing is you learn. Debrief yourself and instead of criticising yourself, look for ways you can adapt and make the necessary adjustments.
Thank you, Simon, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
What elements do you need to have productive days consistently? That’s the question I’m exploring this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 247 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 247 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
One part of the productivity mix that rarely gets talked about is personal maintenance. By that I don’t mean the organising, structuring, apps or systems, but the deeper maintenance areas that are generally neglected, yet in the end have a bigger impact on your productivity than anything else.
For instance, how effective are you when you don’t get enough sleep? I know from my own personal experience if I get less than six hours sleep, my productivity is terrible. I generally can do an hour or two of focused work in the morning, but after that I find it difficult to focus, I often have to take a nap and my mood and energy levels are low. That’s certainly not a great place to be if have a lot of deadlines to meet.
This week’s question is about the non-obvious productivity essentials that when in balance, helps you to stay organised, focused and calm no matter what is thrown at you.
So, with that said, it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jenna. Jenna asks, Hi Carl, I’ve read a lot of your blog posts and I understand the importance of using a task manager, a calendar and notes, but I often find myself wondering if there is something deeper or bigger that is also important for being productive. Is there something I am missing?
Hi Jenna, thank you for your question.
Yes, you are right. There is a deeper, more personal part to being more productive than just using task managers and calendars. The task managers and notes apps you choose to use is the sexy part of productivity, yet really when it comes to measuring your effectiveness, the tools you use will have very little effect.
What will have an effect are less sexy, so don’t get talked about enough. Let me begin with sleep as I have already mentioned that.
We know that getting a good night’s sleep leaves you feeling great. You have more energy through the day, you can focus better and your mood is positive. According to Matthew Walker, a renown sleep scientist and author of the book: Why We Sleep, get less than six hours sleep and all sorts of problems will manifest themselves. For instance, a lack of sleep effects your appetite. Your body will tell you you are hungry when in reality you are not. This will lead you to snack, and more likely snack on the wrong kind of foods—donuts, bread, cookies and other sugar rich foods.
Not only does a lack of sleep contribute to weight gain, but because of the types of foods we crave when suffering from a lack of sleep, we get the post meal slump, which leaves us feeling tired and unfocused.
Then in the evening, when you should be spending some quality time with the people you care about, your mood is not great. You’re tired, have a serious lack of energy and will be uncommunicative. Over time, this will put a strain on your relationships which in turn will result in you being focused on the problems that causes instead of the work that needs to be done.
Now, how much sleep you need at a personal level will be different from other people. I know from my own experiments, I need around six and a half to seven hours, other people need closer to eight.
To find out how much sleep you need, you can do a simple experiment. For seven days, sleep with no alarm. Let yourself wake up naturally. This might not be possible when you are working, but it is a great experiment to do when you are on holiday or taking a vacation.
Make a note of how many hours sleep you got, and then average it out once you have seven straight days of data. That will give you your daily sleep requirement.
Once you know your sleep requirement, build that into your daily schedule. For example, I generally need to wake up around 7 AM, and I like to read in bed before going to sleep, so my bedtime is 11:30pm. This way, I can read for thirty to forty minutes before going to sleep.
Your sleep time needs to be protected. It’s huge part of being effective every day, so compromise of what you each day, but never compromise of getting your sleep requirement each day.
Next up is physical exercise. Now, we are not talking about going to a gym every day or running every morning. Of course, if that’s what you like to do, do it. But exercise really means movement.
Human beings are designed to move. We are not designed to sit around all day.
So what does this mean, how much movement do we need each day. Well, this is difficult to measure, but for most people we need to be doing at least thirty minutes walking each day. Those thirty minutes should be strung together.
Now, if you are over thirty-five you need to be doing a little lifting each week too. From around the age of thirty, you will be losing between 3 and 8% of your muscle mass each decade, which increases exponentially after sixty. That might not sound very much, but over time this is going to make you weaker and less effective with your daily activities.
Again, this doesn’t mean you need to be going to a gym. But you can take advantage of cleaning chores. I wash my own car for example, it has me moving my arms, shoulders, squatting and lifting. I also clean my office twice a week. I will move the chairs, sofa and tables to get the vacuum in, all designed, not only to keep my office clean, but to get some movement in.
You were designed to move, so move.
Another area to look at is your diet. We know what you eat has a huge effect on your health and well-being. Eat a diet rich in processed foods and refined carbohydrates, and your health will decline to a point where your future self will not be spending time doing activities you enjoy, but rather spending it in and out of hospital. Is that the vision you have for your later years? I hope not.
What we want is to live an active, healthy life and that involves enough sleep, a little exercise and a good diet.
There’s a lot written on diet and eating well and I’m certainly no expert in this area. However, my wife and I decided to remove refined carbohydrates from our diet earlier this year and it’s been amazing. I no longer feel hungry through the day. My energy levels remain consistent through the day and I feel fantastic. No more headaches, indigestion or fatigue.
If you want to learn more about what to eat and when, I would recommend books by Dr Jason Fung, particularly the Obesity Code and Dr Mark Hyman. These doctors have done a lot of research into what to eat for optimal health and will open you eyes to how a lot of the food we are eating is damaging our health and well-being.
So, there are three foundational areas where, with a little attention, we can build a strong support system to our productive ways.
Ultimately, you will be at your most productive when you are well rested, physically fit and supported by the right kind nutrition.
However, that takes care of your physical well-being, what about your mental well-being. Something that has gain a lot of attention in recent years.
Part of the problem here is society has become a lot more do, do, do, with little time for rest, rest, rest. However, we need time for ourselves, to reset, think and reflect.
This does not mean hours spent watching mindless TV shows and escapism. What it means is pursuing activities that bring us joy. For instance, doing puzzles, spending ten minutes a day meditating and reflecting.
How can we bring these elements into our lives? Well, create a personal morning routine. You only need thirty minutes, but those thirty minutes are packed with setting you up for an amazing day.
To give you an example of a morning routine. I start my day by making coffee, while my coffee is brewing, I do two minutes of stretches. Nothing strenuous, just some light shoulder and core stretching to get my blood flowing.
Once my coffee is brewed, I sit down and write my journal for ten to twenty minutes. This has become my favourite time of the day. I get to reflect on how the day went yesterday, capture my thoughts and brainstorm ideas that may have come to me through the night.
I end my journal writing by listing out my two objectives for the day. Then my day begins.
I would also recommend you have an evening closing down routine. This does not need to be a lot of time. For me, it’s really about deciding what must be done tomorrow and a quick look to see what appointments I have the next day. In all, I would say my closing down routine takes around five to ten minutes.
Finally, give yourself thirty minutes or so with the people you love and care about. One thing my wife and I have done pretty much since we began dating over twenty years ago is to chat for at least thirty minutes each day. We both live busy lives, but no matter where we are in the world, we will alway have our thirty minutes.
We humans are social animals. We need that connection. No matter how busy you are, you will always be able to find thirty minutes or so to connect with the people you love. Make it a part of your day. You will never regret it.
So, there you go, Jenna. Many of the things I’ve mentioned here, I know is common sense, yet so many people neglect these basic areas. It’s why I have written and spoken about designing your “perfect week”. This is where you create a bank calendar in your calendar app, and pollute it with the activities and routines you want to adopt. Doing it this way you will surprise yourself how much time you really have.
I hope this has helped and thank you for your question, Jenna.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
What elements do you need to have productive days consistently? That’s the question I’m exploring this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 247 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 247 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
One part of the productivity mix that rarely gets talked about is personal maintenance. By that I don’t mean the organising, structuring, apps or systems, but the deeper maintenance areas that are generally neglected, yet in the end have a bigger impact on your productivity than anything else.
For instance, how effective are you when you don’t get enough sleep? I know from my own personal experience if I get less than six hours sleep, my productivity is terrible. I generally can do an hour or two of focused work in the morning, but after that I find it difficult to focus, I often have to take a nap and my mood and energy levels are low. That’s certainly not a great place to be if have a lot of deadlines to meet.
This week’s question is about the non-obvious productivity essentials that when in balance, helps you to stay organised, focused and calm no matter what is thrown at you.
So, with that said, it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jenna. Jenna asks, Hi Carl, I’ve read a lot of your blog posts and I understand the importance of using a task manager, a calendar and notes, but I often find myself wondering if there is something deeper or bigger that is also important for being productive. Is there something I am missing?
Hi Jenna, thank you for your question.
Yes, you are right. There is a deeper, more personal part to being more productive than just using task managers and calendars. The task managers and notes apps you choose to use is the sexy part of productivity, yet really when it comes to measuring your effectiveness, the tools you use will have very little effect.
What will have an effect are less sexy, so don’t get talked about enough. Let me begin with sleep as I have already mentioned that.
We know that getting a good night’s sleep leaves you feeling great. You have more energy through the day, you can focus better and your mood is positive. According to Matthew Walker, a renown sleep scientist and author of the book: Why We Sleep, get less than six hours sleep and all sorts of problems will manifest themselves. For instance, a lack of sleep effects your appetite. Your body will tell you you are hungry when in reality you are not. This will lead you to snack, and more likely snack on the wrong kind of foods—donuts, bread, cookies and other sugar rich foods.
Not only does a lack of sleep contribute to weight gain, but because of the types of foods we crave when suffering from a lack of sleep, we get the post meal slump, which leaves us feeling tired and unfocused.
Then in the evening, when you should be spending some quality time with the people you care about, your mood is not great. You’re tired, have a serious lack of energy and will be uncommunicative. Over time, this will put a strain on your relationships which in turn will result in you being focused on the problems that causes instead of the work that needs to be done.
Now, how much sleep you need at a personal level will be different from other people. I know from my own experiments, I need around six and a half to seven hours, other people need closer to eight.
To find out how much sleep you need, you can do a simple experiment. For seven days, sleep with no alarm. Let yourself wake up naturally. This might not be possible when you are working, but it is a great experiment to do when you are on holiday or taking a vacation.
Make a note of how many hours sleep you got, and then average it out once you have seven straight days of data. That will give you your daily sleep requirement.
Once you know your sleep requirement, build that into your daily schedule. For example, I generally need to wake up around 7 AM, and I like to read in bed before going to sleep, so my bedtime is 11:30pm. This way, I can read for thirty to forty minutes before going to sleep.
Your sleep time needs to be protected. It’s huge part of being effective every day, so compromise of what you each day, but never compromise of getting your sleep requirement each day.
Next up is physical exercise. Now, we are not talking about going to a gym every day or running every morning. Of course, if that’s what you like to do, do it. But exercise really means movement.
Human beings are designed to move. We are not designed to sit around all day.
So what does this mean, how much movement do we need each day. Well, this is difficult to measure, but for most people we need to be doing at least thirty minutes walking each day. Those thirty minutes should be strung together.
Now, if you are over thirty-five you need to be doing a little lifting each week too. From around the age of thirty, you will be losing between 3 and 8% of your muscle mass each decade, which increases exponentially after sixty. That might not sound very much, but over time this is going to make you weaker and less effective with your daily activities.
Again, this doesn’t mean you need to be going to a gym. But you can take advantage of cleaning chores. I wash my own car for example, it has me moving my arms, shoulders, squatting and lifting. I also clean my office twice a week. I will move the chairs, sofa and tables to get the vacuum in, all designed, not only to keep my office clean, but to get some movement in.
You were designed to move, so move.
Another area to look at is your diet. We know what you eat has a huge effect on your health and well-being. Eat a diet rich in processed foods and refined carbohydrates, and your health will decline to a point where your future self will not be spending time doing activities you enjoy, but rather spending it in and out of hospital. Is that the vision you have for your later years? I hope not.
What we want is to live an active, healthy life and that involves enough sleep, a little exercise and a good diet.
There’s a lot written on diet and eating well and I’m certainly no expert in this area. However, my wife and I decided to remove refined carbohydrates from our diet earlier this year and it’s been amazing. I no longer feel hungry through the day. My energy levels remain consistent through the day and I feel fantastic. No more headaches, indigestion or fatigue.
If you want to learn more about what to eat and when, I would recommend books by Dr Jason Fung, particularly the Obesity Code and Dr Mark Hyman. These doctors have done a lot of research into what to eat for optimal health and will open you eyes to how a lot of the food we are eating is damaging our health and well-being.
So, there are three foundational areas where, with a little attention, we can build a strong support system to our productive ways.
Ultimately, you will be at your most productive when you are well rested, physically fit and supported by the right kind nutrition.
However, that takes care of your physical well-being, what about your mental well-being. Something that has gain a lot of attention in recent years.
Part of the problem here is society has become a lot more do, do, do, with little time for rest, rest, rest. However, we need time for ourselves, to reset, think and reflect.
This does not mean hours spent watching mindless TV shows and escapism. What it means is pursuing activities that bring us joy. For instance, doing puzzles, spending ten minutes a day meditating and reflecting.
How can we bring these elements into our lives? Well, create a personal morning routine. You only need thirty minutes, but those thirty minutes are packed with setting you up for an amazing day.
To give you an example of a morning routine. I start my day by making coffee, while my coffee is brewing, I do two minutes of stretches. Nothing strenuous, just some light shoulder and core stretching to get my blood flowing.
Once my coffee is brewed, I sit down and write my journal for ten to twenty minutes. This has become my favourite time of the day. I get to reflect on how the day went yesterday, capture my thoughts and brainstorm ideas that may have come to me through the night.
I end my journal writing by listing out my two objectives for the day. Then my day begins.
I would also recommend you have an evening closing down routine. This does not need to be a lot of time. For me, it’s really about deciding what must be done tomorrow and a quick look to see what appointments I have the next day. In all, I would say my closing down routine takes around five to ten minutes.
Finally, give yourself thirty minutes or so with the people you love and care about. One thing my wife and I have done pretty much since we began dating over twenty years ago is to chat for at least thirty minutes each day. We both live busy lives, but no matter where we are in the world, we will alway have our thirty minutes.
We humans are social animals. We need that connection. No matter how busy you are, you will always be able to find thirty minutes or so to connect with the people you love. Make it a part of your day. You will never regret it.
So, there you go, Jenna. Many of the things I’ve mentioned here, I know is common sense, yet so many people neglect these basic areas. It’s why I have written and spoken about designing your “perfect week”. This is where you create a bank calendar in your calendar app, and pollute it with the activities and routines you want to adopt. Doing it this way you will surprise yourself how much time you really have.
I hope this has helped and thank you for your question, Jenna.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
So, you’ve created a fantastic system for keeping yourself organised and on top of everything being thrown at you, and you’re happy with the apps you have that support you. Now, how do you stay consistent using your system?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 246 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 246 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
A common issue I come across with becoming better organised and more productive is staying consistent using the system you have developed.
The fun part of becoming more productive and better managing your time is the setting up of a system, choosing the apps you are going to use and getting stuff into that system. The hard part is staying consistent with it over time.
The problem is once the excitement of creating something new is over, you still have to do the work and the work has to be done day after day. That’s the boring part and it’s then that most people’s systems break down.
This week’s question is all about this and I hope my answer will shed some light on another part of a strong, supporting system that often hides in the shadows but needs to be developed so your system disappears into the background and a process of doing your work comes to the foreground.
That means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, Hi Carl, for years I’ve been searching for a productivity system that I can stick with, but I have never been able to stay with any system. I’ve tried them all from GTD to your Time Sector System. It’s always exciting at first believing this time I have the right one, only to find after two or three months I’m a disorganised mess again. Am I missing something?
Hi Greg, thank you for your question.
I don’t think you are missing anything essential, but you may be missing one element. That element is a process.
Let me explain. Your productivity system is only a system. It’s a place to collect things you need to pay attention to. Things like email and messages that require replies, tasks that come your way and meeting requests that need to be put on your calendar.
However, a productivity system is just that, a system. Once you have that in place you need to develop the processes that allow your system to work and it’s the process that is boring. It’s just something you do day after day.
However, while at first following a process can be boring, over time it disappears into the background and becomes more of a habit you no longer need to think about. A task comes to mind, and you collect it into your task manager. A meeting request drops into your inbox and you check your calendar to make sure you have the time to attend the meeting. These actions are done automatically without thinking.
Unfortunately, to get to that point, you have to go through boredom. It’s boring to look at the same list every day and check off the tasks. It’s boring to sit down for ten minutes at the end of the day and plan the next and it’s boring to review the same projects week after week in a weekly planning session.
Once the excitement of a new system and set of apps disappear, you’re left with having to do the work and that’s not fun.
I’m reminded of a story Simon Jefferies, a former British Special Forces soldier talked about when he was going for selection to the special forces. The first part of that selection process is two weeks in the Welsh mountains in the UK where every day you are given a map reference point, which you have to memorise, a heavy backpack and told to get there within a certain amount of time. The problem is, you don’t know how long you have to get there. Oh, and each day the weight of your backpack is steadily increased.
Simon talked about simply focusing on the process. Waking up at 4:30 AM, preparing his feet, putting his boots on and doing the climb. When he finished, he made sure he ate a meal that would aid recovery, sorted his feet out, washed and dried his socks and got to sleep as quickly as he could.
His goal was to pass selection and he knew if he followed a process every day and focused on getting through the day, he would achieve his goal.
It was boring, but it helped him through the relentless pain, tiredness and boredom of climbing up mountains every day.
Most people quit—to give you an example, around 200 people start selection every year, and by the end of that first two weeks, 60 to 70 per cent have dropped out.
Giving myself ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day to process my inboxes and plan for tomorrow is boring. But I also know the consequences of not doing it. Not knowing what my important tasks are for the day and where my appointments are before I start the day never leads to a good result. Something will inevitably be missed and that always leads to a lot more work as I scramble to get back on top of my work.
My goal is to have an effortless day. To get my most important tasks done and to move projects forward. I know, that those ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day give me an advantage and stack the odds in my favour. Not doing it leaves me vulnerable to the unexpected things I should have known about and missed appointments and tasks.
Following the process is not about the new and shiny apps, it’s about doing the work. New apps, and new organisation systems don’t help you do your work. They destroy your productivity because you are having to learn how to use these new apps, transfer all your old data across and deal with the unfamiliar. The more familiar you are with your apps and system, the more productive you will be.
So how do you build days that feel effortless? Well, start the day the same way each day. I recommend you develop a morning routine that you enjoy—something to look forward to. For me, that’s a cup of coffee and sitting down for ten to twenty minutes with my journal. For others that could be ten minutes of meditation, a walk in nature or some exercise. Choose things you enjoy doing.
The first forty-five minutes of your day needs to be dedicated to you. If you have a young family, adjust your wake-up time so you get your morning routines in before your kids wake up. It’s about making your morning routines a non-negotiable part of your day and not something you will sacrifice at the first opportunity.
Next is to find a period of two to three hours each day for deep, focused work. Now this applies to weekends too. You may not be focusing on your work-related tasks on a weekend, but there are always things that need doing around your home on a weekend. Treating weekends differently to the working week will not serve you. Morning routines are done seven days a week, not just for work days. The same applies to your two to three hours of deep focused work.
Us humans were not designed to sit around all day doing nothing. We’ve evolved to be incredibly smart, flexible organisms and our bodies need movement. Now we are not talking about 180 mile bike rides or 20 mile runs on a weekend, but a gentle walk for thirty to forty minutes, cleaning your home and going out to the supermarket for the weekly shop all things you could build into your weekend routine.
Now, as for when you do your deep focused work, that will depend on the kind of work you do. For me, I have control over my schedule each day so, I fix my focused work for between 9:30 and 11:30 AM. I also have another focused work session between 7 and 9pm. That’s the nature of my work. I create content and coach people. I do my calls generally later in the evening or early in the morning and I protect my afternoons for exercise and errands.
For you it may mean you need to find two to three hours of focused work between 9 am and 5 pm. I would try to do your focused work as early in the day as you can. It’s less likely those unexpected emergencies will arise in the morning—they have a habit of rearing the ugly heads in the mid to late afternoon.
Now, this is where your daily planning and focus time connect. It’s during your daily planning, that you decide what needs to be done in your focus time. Don’t leave it to chance. If you do that, you’ll open up your tasks manager and look for something to do and you will be presented with a long list of tasks. Inevitably you will seek out the easiest tasks. What you do in your focus time needs to plan in advance so that when the time arrives, you get straight into it.
The biggest challenge with all this is it takes time to develop the processes and develop habits. Following this advice for one day is a great start, but it has to be repeated the next and the next until you do it without thinking. I cannot imagine going to bed not knowing what I need to do tomorrow. Equally, it would feel incredibly strange not to wake up in the morning, make coffee and sit down for at least ten minutes to write in my journal. These are habits I’ve worked on for the last five years or so.
Now you might think finding new apps to play with is all part of the fun, and in a way, you would be right. But that approach is never going to improve the thing you want to improve—your time and task management. However, when you focus on your processes for doing your work, you will find not only do you get the joy of creating something yourself, but you also get to tinker and optimise your processes over time.
I’ve been down the road of app switching and while there is an initial buzz in setting up a new app, it will inevitably descend into disappointment when you discover something you used in your old app doesn’t work in your new app. And then the search for another new app starts.
Building your own processes is far more fun. You have ownership of the process, you get to share it with your colleagues and it will grow with you.
I hope that has helped, Greg. Remember, you won’t find what you’re looking for in a new system or app. You will find what you are looking for in your processes. Look at these, build your own and enjoy the process of optimisation and fine-tuning.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
So, you’ve created a fantastic system for keeping yourself organised and on top of everything being thrown at you, and you’re happy with the apps you have that support you. Now, how do you stay consistent using your system?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 246 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 246 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
A common issue I come across with becoming better organised and more productive is staying consistent using the system you have developed.
The fun part of becoming more productive and better managing your time is the setting up of a system, choosing the apps you are going to use and getting stuff into that system. The hard part is staying consistent with it over time.
The problem is once the excitement of creating something new is over, you still have to do the work and the work has to be done day after day. That’s the boring part and it’s then that most people’s systems break down.
This week’s question is all about this and I hope my answer will shed some light on another part of a strong, supporting system that often hides in the shadows but needs to be developed so your system disappears into the background and a process of doing your work comes to the foreground.
That means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, Hi Carl, for years I’ve been searching for a productivity system that I can stick with, but I have never been able to stay with any system. I’ve tried them all from GTD to your Time Sector System. It’s always exciting at first believing this time I have the right one, only to find after two or three months I’m a disorganised mess again. Am I missing something?
Hi Greg, thank you for your question.
I don’t think you are missing anything essential, but you may be missing one element. That element is a process.
Let me explain. Your productivity system is only a system. It’s a place to collect things you need to pay attention to. Things like email and messages that require replies, tasks that come your way and meeting requests that need to be put on your calendar.
However, a productivity system is just that, a system. Once you have that in place you need to develop the processes that allow your system to work and it’s the process that is boring. It’s just something you do day after day.
However, while at first following a process can be boring, over time it disappears into the background and becomes more of a habit you no longer need to think about. A task comes to mind, and you collect it into your task manager. A meeting request drops into your inbox and you check your calendar to make sure you have the time to attend the meeting. These actions are done automatically without thinking.
Unfortunately, to get to that point, you have to go through boredom. It’s boring to look at the same list every day and check off the tasks. It’s boring to sit down for ten minutes at the end of the day and plan the next and it’s boring to review the same projects week after week in a weekly planning session.
Once the excitement of a new system and set of apps disappear, you’re left with having to do the work and that’s not fun.
I’m reminded of a story Simon Jefferies, a former British Special Forces soldier talked about when he was going for selection to the special forces. The first part of that selection process is two weeks in the Welsh mountains in the UK where every day you are given a map reference point, which you have to memorise, a heavy backpack and told to get there within a certain amount of time. The problem is, you don’t know how long you have to get there. Oh, and each day the weight of your backpack is steadily increased.
Simon talked about simply focusing on the process. Waking up at 4:30 AM, preparing his feet, putting his boots on and doing the climb. When he finished, he made sure he ate a meal that would aid recovery, sorted his feet out, washed and dried his socks and got to sleep as quickly as he could.
His goal was to pass selection and he knew if he followed a process every day and focused on getting through the day, he would achieve his goal.
It was boring, but it helped him through the relentless pain, tiredness and boredom of climbing up mountains every day.
Most people quit—to give you an example, around 200 people start selection every year, and by the end of that first two weeks, 60 to 70 per cent have dropped out.
Giving myself ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day to process my inboxes and plan for tomorrow is boring. But I also know the consequences of not doing it. Not knowing what my important tasks are for the day and where my appointments are before I start the day never leads to a good result. Something will inevitably be missed and that always leads to a lot more work as I scramble to get back on top of my work.
My goal is to have an effortless day. To get my most important tasks done and to move projects forward. I know, that those ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day give me an advantage and stack the odds in my favour. Not doing it leaves me vulnerable to the unexpected things I should have known about and missed appointments and tasks.
Following the process is not about the new and shiny apps, it’s about doing the work. New apps, and new organisation systems don’t help you do your work. They destroy your productivity because you are having to learn how to use these new apps, transfer all your old data across and deal with the unfamiliar. The more familiar you are with your apps and system, the more productive you will be.
So how do you build days that feel effortless? Well, start the day the same way each day. I recommend you develop a morning routine that you enjoy—something to look forward to. For me, that’s a cup of coffee and sitting down for ten to twenty minutes with my journal. For others that could be ten minutes of meditation, a walk in nature or some exercise. Choose things you enjoy doing.
The first forty-five minutes of your day needs to be dedicated to you. If you have a young family, adjust your wake-up time so you get your morning routines in before your kids wake up. It’s about making your morning routines a non-negotiable part of your day and not something you will sacrifice at the first opportunity.
Next is to find a period of two to three hours each day for deep, focused work. Now this applies to weekends too. You may not be focusing on your work-related tasks on a weekend, but there are always things that need doing around your home on a weekend. Treating weekends differently to the working week will not serve you. Morning routines are done seven days a week, not just for work days. The same applies to your two to three hours of deep focused work.
Us humans were not designed to sit around all day doing nothing. We’ve evolved to be incredibly smart, flexible organisms and our bodies need movement. Now we are not talking about 180 mile bike rides or 20 mile runs on a weekend, but a gentle walk for thirty to forty minutes, cleaning your home and going out to the supermarket for the weekly shop all things you could build into your weekend routine.
Now, as for when you do your deep focused work, that will depend on the kind of work you do. For me, I have control over my schedule each day so, I fix my focused work for between 9:30 and 11:30 AM. I also have another focused work session between 7 and 9pm. That’s the nature of my work. I create content and coach people. I do my calls generally later in the evening or early in the morning and I protect my afternoons for exercise and errands.
For you it may mean you need to find two to three hours of focused work between 9 am and 5 pm. I would try to do your focused work as early in the day as you can. It’s less likely those unexpected emergencies will arise in the morning—they have a habit of rearing the ugly heads in the mid to late afternoon.
Now, this is where your daily planning and focus time connect. It’s during your daily planning, that you decide what needs to be done in your focus time. Don’t leave it to chance. If you do that, you’ll open up your tasks manager and look for something to do and you will be presented with a long list of tasks. Inevitably you will seek out the easiest tasks. What you do in your focus time needs to plan in advance so that when the time arrives, you get straight into it.
The biggest challenge with all this is it takes time to develop the processes and develop habits. Following this advice for one day is a great start, but it has to be repeated the next and the next until you do it without thinking. I cannot imagine going to bed not knowing what I need to do tomorrow. Equally, it would feel incredibly strange not to wake up in the morning, make coffee and sit down for at least ten minutes to write in my journal. These are habits I’ve worked on for the last five years or so.
Now you might think finding new apps to play with is all part of the fun, and in a way, you would be right. But that approach is never going to improve the thing you want to improve—your time and task management. However, when you focus on your processes for doing your work, you will find not only do you get the joy of creating something yourself, but you also get to tinker and optimise your processes over time.
I’ve been down the road of app switching and while there is an initial buzz in setting up a new app, it will inevitably descend into disappointment when you discover something you used in your old app doesn’t work in your new app. And then the search for another new app starts.
Building your own processes is far more fun. You have ownership of the process, you get to share it with your colleagues and it will grow with you.
I hope that has helped, Greg. Remember, you won’t find what you’re looking for in a new system or app. You will find what you are looking for in your processes. Look at these, build your own and enjoy the process of optimisation and fine-tuning.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
What do you need to pay attention to if you are to build yourself a solid, sustainable productivity system?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 245 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 245 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
I am usually asked to help someone when their productivity and or time management has collapsed. This usually happens because, since the day they started their first job, they have been able to breeze through their work, relying on their boss or customers to tell them what to do.
I know when I started my work life, for the best part of the first ten years, there was also someone in the background telling me what I needed to do next and holding me accountable.
Inevitably, there comes a time when you will be given responsibility for your own work. You’re given more freedom to decide what to do with your time and you too now need to guide new members of the company and tell them what needs to happen next.
It’s at this point if you do not have a system to manage your work, projects and responsibilities that things begin to crack and fall apart.
So, this week, I am looking at what you can o to avoid this from happening and to help you transition from where you are today to the next level—whatever that may be—be that promotion to management or starting your own business.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Riccardo. Riccardo asks: Hi Carl, I’ve recently been promoted, and I’ve found myself drowning in work. I am having to take a lot of work home and working late into the night and at weekends. Do you have any tips on managing a sudden increase in workload?
Hi Riccardo, thank you for your question and congratulations on your recent promotion.
One of the most important things you can do to be prepared for increasing workloads is to have a ‘how can I do it better mindset’. When I learned the power of this simple question, a lot of positive changes happened for me.
To give you one example, many years ago, not long after I became a teacher, I was assigned what was called a free talking class. This class took a topical news article, which we read out in class, then discussed it. Having one of these classes a week was manageable, but when I had to prepare fief articles for the week, what was originally an hour of preparation turned into six hours.
I had to find a suitable article, highlight difficult words and phrases and create three to five questions to get the students talking.
Spending six hours on a Sunday looking for and preparing articles was not my idea of using my time on a Sunday well. So, I asked the question: how can I do this better?
I soon found I could spend the week collecting articles into a read list as I was reading the news each day—this was something I did every day anyway. If I came across an article that might be suitable for my free talking classes, I could save the article (I had to use my browser’s bookmarks for this back then—no easy-to-use read later services then) and all I needed to do on a Sunday was to prepare the document. I managed to reduce those six hours down to ninety minutes.
It’s a simple yet powerful question we can all use with tasks and jobs that we feel are taking too much time—How can I do it better?
If you are ever feeling overloaded and stretched to your limit, it usually means the processes you have in place are too complex, or you haven’t fine-tuned them, so they work seamlessly.
One of the reasons so few people ever become consistent with daily and weekly planning is because the first few times you do it, it takes a long time. It would not be unusual for your first weekly planning session to take two hours or more. Likewise, your daily planning will likely take thirty-plus minutes when you first begin doing it.
However, those first few are important because as you are doing them, you learn what needs looking at and what doesn’t.
In David Allen’s Getting Things Done Book, he advocates reviewing all your projects each week. Yet, most of your projects don’t need reviewing so frequently. I have about twelve projects left for this year. To follow the GTD standard, I’d be reviewing projects that are not moving forward right now. That’s a waste of time. I know these projects are not moving forward, nothing needs to be done on them for the next two to three months, so I don’t review them.
The only projects I look at are my current, active ones. These are moving forward and all I am looking for is what needs to happen next.
Let me give you an example of a small project I have at the moment.
I am re-doing my profile photos so I can update my website. This small project was complicated a few weeks ago when I had my eyes tested and ordered a new pair of glasses. These glasses took a couple of weeks to arrive, and now they are at the opticians having the new lenses put in.
This is complicated by a big public holiday this weekend, so I don’t expect my new glasses to arrive for around ten days. As I don’t know when they will arrive, I cannot book an appointment at the photographers. So, this project is on hold for now.
This means that when I did my weekly planning on Saturday, that project was skipped. Everything I needed to do is done. I’ve got the new glasses, my eyes have been tested, and I now have to wait for ten days or so for the new glasses to arrive. Nothing will happen next week. So, that project is not reviewed.
Now, I do have the next task in my task manager—book photographer—but it is in my next week folder. Nothing needs to be done this week, so I don’t need it coming up and distracting me. I will see that task when I do my next weekly planning session, and I can decide if I want to bring things forward or not then.
Everything you do can be improved by a process. Once you have a process in place, you can then apply the question: how can I do it better? To the process.
Now, you didn’t mention what your old role was and so I don’t know what changes have occurred with your new role, Riccardo, but let’s say you were previously a salesperson and now you are a sales manager. This is actually quite a big change in a person’s work.
You’ve gone from managing customers and prospects to managing salespeople who do that. So, the first step is to establish what your new core work is.
Is it allocating targets to your team? Developing forecasts for your boss? Hiring new salespeople? Training your sales team?
This is the first step. What is your core work? Once you know what your core work is, what does that look like at a task level?
Let’s take forecasting as an example. We might be told our new responsibility is to present a monthly sales forecast every month at the departmental heads meeting. That’s great. We know what one of our core tasks is. However, what does that look like at a task level?
The danger here is we add a task that says: Prepare this month's sales forecast, yet is that really the task? What does that involve?
It could be you need to collect current sales data, review last year's sales data and calculate your forecast based on market conditions and past sales. That’s not a single task. That’s a minimum of three tasks.
If this were your core work, you might have a task in the second week of the month telling you to collect the data. In the third week, you could add a second task to read up on the current market environment and perhaps add the new figures to your sales forecast file.
Now, what was possibly a four-hour task has been broken down into tasks that take no more than an hour or so.
You set these tasks as recurring tasks in your task manager, so they come up when they are due, so you no longer need to keep them stored in your head.
Now to deal with the current issue of having to take work home with you, what is the work you are taking home? What’s preventing you from dealing with that work while you are at work?
Now, a lot of this extra work is caused by too many meetings throughout the day and interruptions throughout the working day.
The first step here is to gain control of your calendar. This begins by blocking times out in the day when you are not available for meetings. The great thing here is you do not need to block a great deal of time. Most people find if they can get two hours a day for focused work, that is enough to stay on top of the critical work. This leaves six hours each day for meetings and being available for other people.
Ideally, you want to block the same time out each day, but that may not be possible. If not, create the blocks, and when you do the weekly planning and move them around so they fit into your days for the following week.
Next up dealing with interruptions. Here you need to learn to say no. That’s hard, particularly for salespeople, because they come from a place where everything is possible and yes is the default.
Again, this doesn’t need a lot of effort. I remember when I was working in a law office, my boss had a fantastically simple system. If he need time to work on a difficult case, he would close his office door. This meant we all knew if his door was closed, we could not interrupt him. If it was open, we could walk in and ask anything.
My boss closed his door around three or four times a week, and everyone knew the “code”—so to speak.
Don’t be afraid of closing your door. If you explain to your team when your door is closed not to disturb you, your team will respect your request.
I remember, no matter how urgent something was, if my boss’s door was closed, I would have to wait. If I had a screaming client on the end of the phone, I would calmly explain my boss was unavailable at the moment, but as soon as it was available, I would ask him and get back to them. For four years, I never had an issue with that.
So, Riccardo, the first step is to list out your new core work. What does that look like at a task level? Get those tasks set up in your task manager or calendar as recurring tasks or events.
Get comfortable blocking time out on your calendar for focused work. Then when you are in a focused work session, make sure nobody disturbs you.
Finally, make sure you are doing a weekly daily planning session. Remember, not all projects need attention every week. All that really matters is what needs your attention next week. In the daily planning session review your tasks and appointments for the next day and make sure they are realistic. Don’t try and be a hero and convince yourself you can attend six meetings and clear fifty tasks—you can’t, and you won’t. Get real.
I hope these ideas help, Riccardo. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
What do you need to pay attention to if you are to build yourself a solid, sustainable productivity system?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 245 | Script
Hello, and welcome to episode 245 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
I am usually asked to help someone when their productivity and or time management has collapsed. This usually happens because, since the day they started their first job, they have been able to breeze through their work, relying on their boss or customers to tell them what to do.
I know when I started my work life, for the best part of the first ten years, there was also someone in the background telling me what I needed to do next and holding me accountable.
Inevitably, there comes a time when you will be given responsibility for your own work. You’re given more freedom to decide what to do with your time and you too now need to guide new members of the company and tell them what needs to happen next.
It’s at this point if you do not have a system to manage your work, projects and responsibilities that things begin to crack and fall apart.
So, this week, I am looking at what you can o to avoid this from happening and to help you transition from where you are today to the next level—whatever that may be—be that promotion to management or starting your own business.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Riccardo. Riccardo asks: Hi Carl, I’ve recently been promoted, and I’ve found myself drowning in work. I am having to take a lot of work home and working late into the night and at weekends. Do you have any tips on managing a sudden increase in workload?
Hi Riccardo, thank you for your question and congratulations on your recent promotion.
One of the most important things you can do to be prepared for increasing workloads is to have a ‘how can I do it better mindset’. When I learned the power of this simple question, a lot of positive changes happened for me.
To give you one example, many years ago, not long after I became a teacher, I was assigned what was called a free talking class. This class took a topical news article, which we read out in class, then discussed it. Having one of these classes a week was manageable, but when I had to prepare fief articles for the week, what was originally an hour of preparation turned into six hours.
I had to find a suitable article, highlight difficult words and phrases and create three to five questions to get the students talking.
Spending six hours on a Sunday looking for and preparing articles was not my idea of using my time on a Sunday well. So, I asked the question: how can I do this better?
I soon found I could spend the week collecting articles into a read list as I was reading the news each day—this was something I did every day anyway. If I came across an article that might be suitable for my free talking classes, I could save the article (I had to use my browser’s bookmarks for this back then—no easy-to-use read later services then) and all I needed to do on a Sunday was to prepare the document. I managed to reduce those six hours down to ninety minutes.
It’s a simple yet powerful question we can all use with tasks and jobs that we feel are taking too much time—How can I do it better?
If you are ever feeling overloaded and stretched to your limit, it usually means the processes you have in place are too complex, or you haven’t fine-tuned them, so they work seamlessly.
One of the reasons so few people ever become consistent with daily and weekly planning is because the first few times you do it, it takes a long time. It would not be unusual for your first weekly planning session to take two hours or more. Likewise, your daily planning will likely take thirty-plus minutes when you first begin doing it.
However, those first few are important because as you are doing them, you learn what needs looking at and what doesn’t.
In David Allen’s Getting Things Done Book, he advocates reviewing all your projects each week. Yet, most of your projects don’t need reviewing so frequently. I have about twelve projects left for this year. To follow the GTD standard, I’d be reviewing projects that are not moving forward right now. That’s a waste of time. I know these projects are not moving forward, nothing needs to be done on them for the next two to three months, so I don’t review them.
The only projects I look at are my current, active ones. These are moving forward and all I am looking for is what needs to happen next.
Let me give you an example of a small project I have at the moment.
I am re-doing my profile photos so I can update my website. This small project was complicated a few weeks ago when I had my eyes tested and ordered a new pair of glasses. These glasses took a couple of weeks to arrive, and now they are at the opticians having the new lenses put in.
This is complicated by a big public holiday this weekend, so I don’t expect my new glasses to arrive for around ten days. As I don’t know when they will arrive, I cannot book an appointment at the photographers. So, this project is on hold for now.
This means that when I did my weekly planning on Saturday, that project was skipped. Everything I needed to do is done. I’ve got the new glasses, my eyes have been tested, and I now have to wait for ten days or so for the new glasses to arrive. Nothing will happen next week. So, that project is not reviewed.
Now, I do have the next task in my task manager—book photographer—but it is in my next week folder. Nothing needs to be done this week, so I don’t need it coming up and distracting me. I will see that task when I do my next weekly planning session, and I can decide if I want to bring things forward or not then.
Everything you do can be improved by a process. Once you have a process in place, you can then apply the question: how can I do it better? To the process.
Now, you didn’t mention what your old role was and so I don’t know what changes have occurred with your new role, Riccardo, but let’s say you were previously a salesperson and now you are a sales manager. This is actually quite a big change in a person’s work.
You’ve gone from managing customers and prospects to managing salespeople who do that. So, the first step is to establish what your new core work is.
Is it allocating targets to your team? Developing forecasts for your boss? Hiring new salespeople? Training your sales team?
This is the first step. What is your core work? Once you know what your core work is, what does that look like at a task level?
Let’s take forecasting as an example. We might be told our new responsibility is to present a monthly sales forecast every month at the departmental heads meeting. That’s great. We know what one of our core tasks is. However, what does that look like at a task level?
The danger here is we add a task that says: Prepare this month's sales forecast, yet is that really the task? What does that involve?
It could be you need to collect current sales data, review last year's sales data and calculate your forecast based on market conditions and past sales. That’s not a single task. That’s a minimum of three tasks.
If this were your core work, you might have a task in the second week of the month telling you to collect the data. In the third week, you could add a second task to read up on the current market environment and perhaps add the new figures to your sales forecast file.
Now, what was possibly a four-hour task has been broken down into tasks that take no more than an hour or so.
You set these tasks as recurring tasks in your task manager, so they come up when they are due, so you no longer need to keep them stored in your head.
Now to deal with the current issue of having to take work home with you, what is the work you are taking home? What’s preventing you from dealing with that work while you are at work?
Now, a lot of this extra work is caused by too many meetings throughout the day and interruptions throughout the working day.
The first step here is to gain control of your calendar. This begins by blocking times out in the day when you are not available for meetings. The great thing here is you do not need to block a great deal of time. Most people find if they can get two hours a day for focused work, that is enough to stay on top of the critical work. This leaves six hours each day for meetings and being available for other people.
Ideally, you want to block the same time out each day, but that may not be possible. If not, create the blocks, and when you do the weekly planning and move them around so they fit into your days for the following week.
Next up dealing with interruptions. Here you need to learn to say no. That’s hard, particularly for salespeople, because they come from a place where everything is possible and yes is the default.
Again, this doesn’t need a lot of effort. I remember when I was working in a law office, my boss had a fantastically simple system. If he need time to work on a difficult case, he would close his office door. This meant we all knew if his door was closed, we could not interrupt him. If it was open, we could walk in and ask anything.
My boss closed his door around three or four times a week, and everyone knew the “code”—so to speak.
Don’t be afraid of closing your door. If you explain to your team when your door is closed not to disturb you, your team will respect your request.
I remember, no matter how urgent something was, if my boss’s door was closed, I would have to wait. If I had a screaming client on the end of the phone, I would calmly explain my boss was unavailable at the moment, but as soon as it was available, I would ask him and get back to them. For four years, I never had an issue with that.
So, Riccardo, the first step is to list out your new core work. What does that look like at a task level? Get those tasks set up in your task manager or calendar as recurring tasks or events.
Get comfortable blocking time out on your calendar for focused work. Then when you are in a focused work session, make sure nobody disturbs you.
Finally, make sure you are doing a weekly daily planning session. Remember, not all projects need attention every week. All that really matters is what needs your attention next week. In the daily planning session review your tasks and appointments for the next day and make sure they are realistic. Don’t try and be a hero and convince yourself you can attend six meetings and clear fifty tasks—you can’t, and you won’t. Get real.
I hope these ideas help, Riccardo. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Podcast 244
Becoming more productive and being better at managing your time is not about the hustle culture or squeezing every spare minute out of the day. It needs to be more human than that. That is what we’re looking at this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 244 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 244 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Productivity has a bad name. Many believe it’s about maximising your time doing work, so your company can squeeze the most value out of you without having to pay you more.
But becoming more productive and better at managing your time is and should never have been, about companies exploiting their workforce. Personal productivity is about building balance into our lives. A life where we can earn a reasonable income and have time to spend with the people we care about without becoming overwhelmed, stressed or burnt out.
But how can we do that with all the demands on our time? Well, that’s what we will be looking at in this week’s episode.
Which means, it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ann. Ann asks, Hi Carl, how do I convince my team that becoming more productive is to help them, not just the company? Every time I try to teach them to be more productive or be better with their time, they don’t want to know.
Hi Ann, thank you for your question.
This is one of the sad things about the work of time management and productivity. For a lot of people, they think it’s all corporate mumbo-jumbo and is designed to “exploit the workers”.
Now, perhaps in the early days of mass manufacturing, that was the case. Hungry, ambitious factory owners wanted to squeeze every last drop of energy from their workers so they could maximise their profits from their endeavours.
However, we’ve come a long way since then. Today, we are much more aware of the need for adequate rest. Indeed many countries have laws protecting workers from exploitative bosses. The European Union countries have what is called the Working Time Directive which sets limits on the number of hours workers can be asked to work in a week.
In recent years, we’ve had the hustle culture trend—where if you want to build your own business you need to be pushing 100 hours+ each week. This has been widely advertised by the likes of Elon Musk and Gary Vaynerchuk as a good thing.
Well, is it? To me that depends.
In the early days of starting my own business, the business was my total focus. I was working up to eighteen hours a day because I was working two jobs. I had my regular teaching work and in my spare time I was developing my online business.
The thing is I never felt exhausted or close to burn out because I was loving every minute. I couldn’t wait to start the day and I never wanted the day to end. Sleep, back then was an inconvenience to me.
But that kind of working is not sustainable in the long-term.
And that’s the key to this. There will be times when you need to pull out all the stops and work long hours. But that should never be the default position.
Very much like when we lived an agrarian life. The years went in seasons. The spring time was for planting, the summer was for nurturing and protecting our crops. The autumn was the harvesting of those crops and winter was for relaxation and maintenance. Spring and autumn were our busiest times. During those periods we were working from daybreak to sunset, likely seven days a week. In the summer and winter, we worked less hours.
Now the way I see productivity and time management is by getting to grip with how we are using our time, we can build balanced and sustainable lives. We have time for our relationships, to take care of our health and to develop our knowledge and skills while working a full-time job.
It’s not just about our work. Work is a part of our lives, but it is only a part of our lives.
When you think about it, the average person works forty-hours a week, yet a week has 168 hours. That’s roughly a quarter of our week. What do we do with the other three quarters?
Becoming better at managing your time and ultimately more productive allows you to complete all your work tasks within those forty hours, so you can enjoy the other 126 hours. That may mean ensuring you get at least seven hours sleep each evening. Taking some time out for exercise to protect your health and for spending quality time with the people that matter to you. That to me is the best reason for getting better at managing time and being more productive.
But it is more than that. Being more aware of time and what we do with the time helps us to focus more on what is really important to us.
It’s true at some point, our career will be high up on our list of priorities. Most people want to advance their careers, perhaps they have a goal to become a leader in their organisation, or ultimately to start their own business. There will be times when eight hours a day will not be enough to achieve what you want to achieve. That’s fine, as long as it’s temporary.
What I find with the most productive people is they make their productive and time management practices a part of who they are. They develop processes that while are flexible to deal with the unexpected, enable them to have the time available for exercise, family and friends.
I remember reading an article about Cheryl Sandberg a few years ago, that described how her mornings were focused on getting her children ready for school. She ensured there was always time for a family breakfast before her kids headed out to school and she headed to the office. Equally, she made sure she was there when her kids returned from school later in the day.
It’s her time management and productivity practices that help her to manage her family life as well as her professional life. Any article you read about Cheryl Sandberg will show you where her priorities lay.
And that’s where your Areas Of Focus step in. It’s these eight areas that inform you where you priorities are. Once you know what your areas of focus are, what they mean to you and what you need to do each week to make sure you are giving sufficient time to them, you can build those activities into your weekly life.
For instance, keeping fit and healthy is a core area of focus for me. So, I have a two hour block each day for exercise. One my favourite times of the day is the hour my wife and I take Louis for his daily walk. He gets on with his thing and we can talk and laugh.
While we don’t schedule these walks on a weekly basis, it’s something we do plan each day.
A couple of questions you can ask your colleagues, Ann, is what is important to them? What would they like to spend more time doing? This moves the narrative away from the word “productivity” to something more interesting.
Now, you may get answers like spending more time sitting on a beach drinking cocktails. That’s fine, because what you want to do is to connect the notion of better time management and productivity with the idea that by being more intentional with their time, they can build habits and practices that will enable them to do more of the things they want to do.
Nobody wants to be sitting on a beach with a cocktail in hand worrying about what’s in their inbox. While you might be at the beach, you’re not mentally there. You’re still at work. That’s not a good place to be.
Having processes and systems in place allows you to completely turn off from work and focus yourself on being present with the things you are doing in the moment. When my wife and I are walking Louis, I’m not thinking about the email I need to respond to or the next YouTube video I will be recording. I am present.
Time management isn’t really about managing time. You cannot do that because time is a fixed resource. What we can manage is the activity we do in the time we have available. So, the only question we need to answer is what are we going to do with the time we have each day?
How much sleep do you want to get each day? How much time would you like to spend exercising, socialising, resting and doing your work? This is where creating a calendar and calling it your perfect week helps.
With your “perfect week” calendar, you start with the things you want to do on a regular basis. For instance, I like to have ninety minutes each day for exercise and an hour a day for walking Louis. I try to get seven hours sleep a night and I like to have an hour at the end of the day for reading and learning.
So, these are scheduled on my perfect week calendar. In total, I like to have ten and a half hour a day for sleep and my own activities. Eating takes up around two hours a day—I like to cook dinner as it gets me away from the computer screen. So in total I get to spend half my twenty four hours on myself and family. The remaining twelve hours can be given over to work.
Now as it’s my own business I run, twelve hours is perfect. For me my work is a way to help people which is my biggest motivator. Helping people regain a better relationship with their time so they are spending it doing the things they want to do is my purpose in life.
That doesn’t mean I do spend twelve hours a day working. Some days I do, others I don’t. For instance, I won’t do any work on a Saturday night. That’s reserved for meeting friends or watching British detective dramas—it’s a hobby of mine to watch these shows trying to work out who did it.
It’s when we can get to decide what we do with our time that we regain control over our time. Remember our work is twenty-five percent of the week. The remaining seventy-five percent is ours to chose what we want to do.
I hope that explanation helps you, Ann. I think the secret is to change the way we see time management and productivity. It isn’t just a bout our work. It’s about our life. If we want more time to do things we want to do, we need to manage the activities we do in the time we have available.
I hope that has helped and thank you for your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
What’s the easiest way to become more productive and better manage your time? That’s what we are considering this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Email Mastery Course
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Episode 243 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 243 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
I have a confession to make. I cyber stalk very productive people. In particular, I stalk authors who publish books every year without fail, content creators who never fail to publish a podcast, blog post or YouTube video every week (or more frequently in some cases) and business leaders who manage multinational companies and still have a private life.
I’ve also had an interest in the people in the companies I’ve worked with who were the top managers or salespeople.
I am fascinated with how they do it. How are they so productive with the work they do?
The truth is, they all share something in common and this week’s question relates to this commonality.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Martine. Martine asks: Hi Carl, you’ve mentioned in a few of your blog posts and videos that you get a lot of inspiration from highly productive people. What I want to know is, are there any special habits or tricks these people use that most people don’t?
Hi Martine, Thank you for your question.
You are right; there are a few tricks these people follow that the vast majority don’t. I suspect that the reason most people don’t follow these tricks are multifaceted, and they are not easy to follow.
First, there is an inherent human characteristic that will always prevent you from becoming more productive, and that is the need to be liked. We have this need to some degree or another.
The so-called “culture wars” are a great example of this. People are queuing up to be a part of their chosen tribe, and social media has given them a voice. They want to be liked by their tribe so much, that they will say increasingly wild things.
Left or right, there seems to be a rush to be the most outraged because someone had the audacity to disagree with something their tribe believes “passionately” about.
Yet, what makes humans so great is our diverse opinions. It’s fascinating to learn why someone believes the things they do. Learning about those beliefs and thoughts behind those beliefs has helped the human race to progress at an incredible speed.
However, this desire to be liked means we will sacrifice our dreams and goals and the things that are important to us, so we can be a part of the crowd.
I saw this a lot when I first arrived in Korea twenty years ago. I was told that family was very important to Korean people. Yet, when I arrived here, I discovered that the majority of married office workers thought nothing about staying late in the office because their boss and co-workers were staying.
Nobody would leave the office until the boss left. It caused me to stop and question how could their family be so important when they put being in the office until 10 or 11pm as a higher importance than getting home to be with their family.
Over time I was educated. These office workers (mainly men in those days), felt that earning their salary and getting promoted and ultimately getting more money was their way of taking care of their family. Nobody questioned this thinking back then.
Now, I should caveat this. This is generally no longer the case. The younger generations who have now come through into the workforce don’t do this in most cases. But in some small to medium-sized companies, that sentiment is still living and breathing.
It was another example of being a part of the tribe. The time was an extension of their family.
Now the most productive people I’ve met do not subscribe to this mentality. They are driven, focused and know precisely what they want out of the day.
A few months back, I watched an interview with Sylvester Stallone. While most of us see Sylvester Stallone as an action hero actor, he’s also a prolific writer.
Every day, he’s working on writing a script.
The thing that stood out for me about him was each day, he will spend four hours writing—with his phone switched off, and he’ll spend ninety minutes to two hours exercising. That six hours a day is taken up with the things he loves doing.
After that, he’ll eat with his family and socialise. But nothing gets in the way of the two things that are important to him.
John Grisham, the author, writes every day. He wakes up early, goes to his writing room and will spend the next four hours writing. Once again, no phone, no interruptions. From 6:30am to 11:00am nobody can reach him. He’s working on his next novel. As he gets closer to finishing the book, he wakes up earlier and earlier, often beginning his writing at 4am.
Stephen King, another great author, does something similar. He writes for a set period of time each day.
Now, when you analyse this, there’s nothing difficult about it. They know what they want to do, and they get on and do it.
I recently finished learning about Charles Darwin. He also had a set routine. He’d wake up early, go into his study, and for the next four to five hours, he would research and write. Nobody was allowed to disturb him.
Now for most of us, we may not have the luxury to spend our days doing the things we love in the same way Sylvester Stallone, John Grisham, Stephen King and Charles Darwin have been able to do. But, that misses the point somewhat.
What these amazingly productive people know is that if you want to produce work that you are proud of, you need to spend time each day working on it. No excuses. Thinking, planning and dreaming produce nothing concrete. It’s only by committing time each day to working on your craft that you will become incredibly productive. There is no other way.
Now for the majority of us, not answering a colleague’s email message within a few minutes or instantly responding to a text message would be unthinkable. I mean, what would you colleague or friend think of you if you didn’t reply instantly?
Then there are those people who believe their purpose in life is to wait around for the next contact by a client and to be instantly available for them—I mean, isn’t that excellent customer service?
Well, perhaps not. You see if you are constantly being interrupted, how will you ever be able to deliver the real service your client wants? Your client wants results—however, they interpret that—I mean, how many people say oh customer service is excellent, they answer the phone immediately?
Answering the phone immediately is not great service. Great service is delivering outstanding results for the client. If the client needs to wait an hour or two while you finish delivering real customer service to another client, they are not going to complain. They will have the confidence that you will deliver the same level of outstanding service for them.
It always amazes me that people with degrees, PH.Ds and MBAs see outstanding work as being measured by how fast you respond to an email or message.
No, that’s not outstanding service. That’s wanting to be liked by the tribe.
The first step to becoming more productive is to know, at a task level, what is important to you professionally and personally. It’s no good being one dimensionally productive—that is being productive at work and Never working on your own personal projects. It’s about knowing what’s important.
That could be supporting your kids in developing their sporting abilities by taking them to practice two or three times a week and being present—not sitting in your car responding to emails. Or it could mean taking your partner out once or twice a week to do something new. You know, being present with them and not doing it out of a sense of obligation. Doing it because you want to spend time with them.
It could be about dedicating Saturday to doing odd jobs around your home. Planning the week ahead and getting some fresh air. That’s being personally productive.
When it comes to your work, this means knowing what your core work is. It’s just like Sylvester Stallone knows his core work is to develop scripts and stay in good shape so he can continue to act. He knows he needs time each day for this work. There can be no excuses. If he does not do this core work, the work will ultimately dry up.
That same principle applies to you too. I know you are not Sylvester Stallone, or John Grisham or Stephen King, but you do still have core work. What is it? Make sure that however much time you need for this work, you protect that time. Allow no interruptions while you are doing it. After all, it’s what you are paid to do.
This means, when a colleague, a client or even your boss is messaging you, you don’t allow it to interrupt you. They have to wait. We are not ignoring them. We just know our priorities, and whatever your core work is, you get that done, then you attend to your messages and calls.
When I was teaching, I always made sure my phone was off. I was employed to teach. My boss could wait until I finished the class. Teaching my classes was my core work. It would have been wrong for me to stop my class while I took a call from my boss. It’s equally wrong for you to allow any interruptions while you are doing your core work.
Attending to your core work is not going to take you long. You could break things up. For instance, writing a blog post takes me around an hour. After I finish writing, I will respond to messages and process my email inbox. Then I get back into my next core task—planning this week’s YouTube videos or writing this script. What are we talking about here? Two hours tops before you need a break. Use those breaks to respond to your messages.
It might not make you the most popular person in your company, but you were not employed to be the most popular person. You were employed to do a job. Do that job first. You will always be judged on your results. Not by how nice everyone says you are.
The number of people I’ve worked with who lost their jobs and couldn’t understand why is countless. The usual cries of but I was always helping my boss and colleagues with their work. How could they fire me? Well, while you were helping all those other people, you were not doing the job you were employed to do.
So there you go, Martine, that’s the secret. Be selfishly obsessed with getting your core work done to highest possible standard. It won’t make you popular, but it will get you results.
And also never neglecting the important people in your life. Your work is one thing; your personal life is what stays with you. Make sure you are spending an adequate amount of time with the people that matter most to you.
Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very, very productive week.
How complex is your system? How complex do you need it to be? That’s what we’ll be looking at today.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
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The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 242 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 242 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
So, a couple of weeks ago, I published a video on how I have my whole system set up. In that video, I shared how I bring all the apps I use together to get my work done.
I was rather surprised that a few people felt that my system was too complex. I didn’t understand why at first, and then it dawned on me. Of course, it looks complex. It was put together on a slide, and everything looks complex when it is broken down into small pieces and laid out in a diagram.
The truth is, it’s not complicated at all. It works beautifully, and I get everything I need into my system in seconds. There are no obstacles; I just know what to do when I need to add a task or collect an idea.
But, to someone not familiar with the way everything works, it will understandably appear complicated. I’m sure if you broke down your system, I would feel yours was overly complex. However, it’s nothing to do with how many apps you use, it’s how you use your apps that matter, and that’s what we are going to explore in this week’s episode.
So without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Stuart. Stuart asks: hi Carl. I saw your video on how you have your system set up, and I felt that you have a very complex system. How do you manage all those apps and still get your work done?
Thank you, Stuart, for your question.
Now, this is an interesting one, and it’s certainly a good example of why we should not be copying other people’s systems. What works for me is unlikely to work for you.
You see, everyone’s way of working will be different. Not only do we do different jobs, but we also have different expectations put upon us. However, the questions are how do you know what to do and when do you do the work?
As long as you know that, it really doesn’t matter how many apps or processes you have in the background. What matters is you are getting your important work done.
I noticed from some of the comments on the video that some people see Ulysses, my writing app, as a note-taking app. I suppose Ulysses could be used as a note-taking app, but it wasn’t designed to be a note-taking app. It was and always has been a writing app.
I’ve been using Ulysses for writing my blog posts, these scripts and all my newsletters for well over six years now, and in that time, I have everything I have written. That includes 250 thousand plus words of blog posts and over five hundred newsletters. There will be over a million words written in there, and naturally, there’s very little I don’t know about Ulysses.
A big part of my work is writing, I will write around 10,000 words a week, and I want a dedicated writing tool that will allow me to get on and write in a distraction-free environment with an app that has never let me down. Ulysses does that for me.
And that’s really the whole point of choosing apps that work for you and the work that you do.
I’m reminded of an analogy I wrote a few years ago: a carpenter doesn’t use a Swiss Army knife to build a table. They could do it, but a carpenter will always use the right tools for the job.
Another thing you need to take into consideration when choosing apps is how you will be using them. Theoretically, I could use Apple’s Pages or Google Docs for writing my blog posts and newsletters. And if I only used a laptop for writing, that certainly would be a consideration. But I don’t always write using my laptop.
There are a lot of times when I am in a coffee shop waiting for my wife, and I find I have thirty minutes or so. Now, I could sit there and scroll through social media, or I can open up Ulysses and continue writing the blog post I started on my laptop that morning. Ulysses on my phone is brilliantly simple. No menus, no distractions. Just the written words and a keyboard.
I remember when I did some extensive testing of Notion a couple of years ago. Notion was great on my computer but was a nightmare on my phone. This made it unworkable for the way I did my work. Now for those who largely do their work on a laptop, Notion works fantastically. For those like me who need a lot more flexibility in devices, it wasn’t good enough.
So when it comes to my system, I use Drafts almost exclusively on my phone for collecting. For those of you who are not familiar with Drafts, Drafts is a simple note-taking app that allows you to collect tasks and ideas and send them to pretty much any app you have on your phone.
For example, if I collect a task in Drafts, When I open Drafts, I am presented with a blank screen and the keyboard. I can then type immediately what I have in mind, tap a button at the top of the keyboard, and it’s directly sent to Todoist. The original ‘note’ is then deleted. This is three seconds faster than trying to add something directly into Todoist on my phone.
However, when I am on my computer, using Todoist’s keyboard shortcuts is the fastest way to get something into Todoist, and that is how I do it.
For me, speed is everything. The less time I spend collecting and organising, the more time I have for doing the work.
One thing I have learned over the years is the more features an app has, the slower it is going to be. Often that doesn’t matter too much on a computer, but in the mobile environment, the fewer features, the better and faster the app will be.
Now, for you, having a single app for all your tasks and notes could be your preferred system. There’s nothing wrong at all with that—if it works for you.
I recently tested that when I was looking at Craft—a relatively new productivity app. Within an hour or so of testing, I realised it didn’t fit comfortably with the way I work. While the desktop app was great, trying to get things into Craft quickly on my phone (or iPad) was not so good. It, therefore, failed my test.
Your testing could be different. You are likely to have different criteria for how well an app works.
Over the last week, I’ve reflected on the apps I use. Do I have too many? Could I streamline my system? On analysis, the answer is no. One of the most important parts of becoming more productive is to have a set of apps you are settled with. Sure, there are always going to be new, exciting apps appearing, but none of them is going to instantly make you productive. You will have months of learning a new way of doing something—it won’t be instinctive, and the time cost of moving all your existing notes and tasks to new apps is never going to be a good use of your time.
A few months ago, I looked at Obsidian. A great app, but I soon realised I would need time to learn the syntax. Obsidian extensively uses Markdown—a simple syntax method to quickly add bold, italics and links. Now, I do know a little Markdown, but it does not come naturally to me.
On the other hand, I have a few clients who are computer programmers or software engineers. Writing that way does come naturally to them, and Obsidian works great.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to find apps that work the way you work. Once you find them, stick with them. Learn everything you can about them. Find the fastest way to get stuff into them, learn how to search them and make sure you make the app yours.
You cannot do that in a few weeks. It takes time. Give it time. That patience, and yes, frustration at times, pays off in fantastic ways.
Sometimes, Evernote or Todoist don’t sync immediately. Over the many years I’ve been using these apps, I know this can happen from time to time. I also know exactly what to do to fix the problem. It may take me two or three minutes to get things syncing properly again, but that doesn’t mean I have to ditch the app and find something else.
Things will inevitably go wrong. Often, it’s not the app; it’s the device. If you are unfamiliar with an app, you won’t know the difference. You’ve got to give yourself time to learn these things.
With all that said, to get to the hub of your question, Stuart, I don’t think I use too many apps. I use apps for the jobs they were designed to do. Todoist manages my tasks. Evernote manages my long-form notes, such as research, meeting notes, client notes and my projects.
I do have specific uses for apps like Apple’s Reminders. That manages my family’s grocery list. My wife isn’t into productivity apps, so she prefers using Apple’s built-in apps. So, we use a list in Reminders for our grocery shopping. This does have its advantages for me too. While I am cooking, I can add items to the shopping list using Siri.
I will leave you with this thought. Using my iPhone every day is simple. I’ve had an iPhone since 2009. However, if I were to open the phone up and look inside, it would seem incredibly complex—It is. I’m pretty sure the only thing I would be able to recognise is the battery. But that’s not the point. The point is the phone works. It does exactly what I want it to, and it does that well.
I hope that has helped, Stuart, and thank you for your question.
Thank you also you too for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
This week, we’re looking at David Allen’s quote: “what does doing look like?”
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
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The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 241 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 241 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
In his book; Getting Things Done, David Allen uses the term: “What does doing look like?”. Now for those of you who have read the book, this quote probably washed over you in the excitement of learning about contexts, next action, ticklers and someday maybes.
However, these five words connect perfectly to a common issue many people face. We know we need to do something, and we have a reasonable idea of what the finished something is, but we are not clear on what we need to do in order to accomplish it.
This results in tasks that are unclear or seemingly too large to do, and we end up stalling and postponing the task.
So, this week, we’re going to look at this and see where we can get some clarity. And that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Joseph. Joseph asks, Hi Carl, I find I am avoiding doing a lot of my tasks because I am not sure what exactly I need to do. I might have a task to contact someone about something, but when I sit down to do it, my mind is blank, and I procrastinate and then don’t do it. How do you make your tasks doable?
Hi Joseph, thank you for your question.
That’s a good question, and it reminded me of David Allen's quote about knowing what doing looks like.
Essentially this means when you write a task, you need to be very clear about what action needs to be taken in order to complete the task.
I see this problem a lot when people are working on listing out their core work. One of a manager’s core tasks would be to manage a team of people. But what does managing a team of people actually mean at the task level?
You will see this also with a project manager’s role. “To facilitate successful conclusions to projects and to report progress to the responsible director”. Great, but what exactly does that mean at a task level?
This is an important area for all of us when it comes to getting our work done. If we are not clear about what our roles are within the company at a task level, we will find our most important work is neglected, and that can lead to all sorts of problems with our career.
The first step to breaking these tasks down into simple, actionable steps is to look for the verbs. For instance, if you manage a team of, say, ten people, perhaps one of your roles would be to have regular meetings with your team members to see how they are getting on and to make sure they are clear about their responsibilities.
Now there are two ways of doing this. The first is to have regular recurring tasks that say: “set up a meeting with Joanne” or “set up a meeting with Joe”. These tasks are clear, and it’s obvious what you need to do.
Alternatively, you could arrange to meet with Joanne on the first Tuesday of every month and Joe on the second Tuesday. And spread out meetings with your other team members throughout the month. Fix these meetings in your calendar, and you have clear tasks.
To write a blog post, I have four tasks. Plan this week’s blog post, write this week’s blog post, edit this week’s blog post and finally, post this week’s blog post. These tasks are spread out over three days.
I’ve been doing this every week for seven years, and I know precisely what needs to happen with each task. The planning takes around twenty minutes; writing will take an hour, editing thirty minutes and posting fifteen. Each task is clear, and that means I never procrastinate. When I plan my day, I will see the task, and all I need to decide is when in the day I will do those tasks.
And that’s an important part of making sure your tasks are clear—when a task is clear, you can anticipate the total amount of time required to complete the task without guessing, which will help you with your time management.
But how do you know what doing looks like?
This involves thinking about what you have to do. “Contact important customers”, might sound like a well-written task, but how will you contact your important customers? Email, telephone, text message? And who are you contacting? Where’s the list of names? Without establishing these two simple parts to the task, you will procrastinate when you see the task on your list.
The verb you use is “email” or “call”. And you make sure the list of important customers is accessible. Perhaps link the list to the task in the notes section of the note or turn the task into a clickable link (as you can do with apps like Todoist)
Now, this is the same with projects. Most projects begin with an abstract idea that is not as clear as we would like it to be. Even something as clear as update my Time And Life Master course”. Okay, I know I need to update it, but what do I need to do at a task level to update the course?
I know the first step would be to list out all the updates I want to make to the course first and to do that, I will need to find time to go through the course class by class, so I can make notes on any changes I want to make.
So, a simple “update Time And Life Mastery course” might seem clear, but at a task level, there are a number of things I will need to do. So, in this example, in my This Week folder, I do have “go through Time and Life Mastery Course and make notes on new update ideas”. I have this task set to recur every day this week, and I know if I spend an hour a day on it, I will have gone through the whole course by the end of the week.
I don’t need to add the next task to my task manager because, at this stage, all I need to do is go through the course. When I do my weekly planning session on Saturday, I can add in the next step. Which at this moment would be to outline the updated course, although that could change as I am going through the lessons.
This is why I don’t like to plan out projects in minute detail at the start. Too many things can change—and often do—and so all that planning time was a waste of time. I know what my project outcome is: a completed update to the Time And Life Mastery course, and I know my deadline. So, now all I need to know is what needs to happen at a task level this week.
Brainstorming next actions at the start of a project might seem like a good idea; in practice, though, all this is guessing what needs to happen and often leads to an overwhelming task list. Instead, look at the project’s objective, and decide what you need to do to get the project started.
From there, the “real” next steps will occur to you as you are working on the project, and they can be added to the project note.
A lot of the work we do is recurring work. Whether you are a salesperson, dentist, doctor or teacher.
Salespeople need to be communicating with their customers and potential customers. What does that look like at a task level?
It could involve getting a list from your company’s CRM system every morning and giving yourself time each day to contact people on that list.
A dentist or doctor perhaps needs to know what patients they will be seeing that day so they can prepare any equipment they need prior the seeing the patient. For instance, if you have a patient returning for a crown fitting, where is the crown? Is it ready for when the patient arrives?
And teachers will need time to prepare classes as well as teach their classes. How much time do you need to prepare your classes, and what tasks are involved in preparing them?
These types of tasks are recurring tasks—they are part of your core work. If you set them up as recurring tasks and ensure you have time in your calendar for doing them, they get done.
It’s no good saying I don’t have time to do these tasks. They are your core work—or part of it—you will have to do them at some point in time. Making them fixed recurring tasks takes the decision-making out of it because you know you must do them. Plus, your colleagues, students and customers soon work out your routines and are much more likely to leave you alone so you can get this work done.
Understanding what doing your work looks like prevents procrastination because each task is clear, and you know precisely what needs to be done. It’s when we are not clear about what exactly needs doing that we procrastinate and reschedule tasks.
And here’s a great tip for you. If you find you are repeatedly rescheduling a task, stop and ask yourself what doing that task looks like. The chances are, as the task is written, it is not clear, and that is why you are not doing it. Rephrase the task, and make it crystal clear what you need to do. That’s the way to ensure the task gets done.
I hope that has helped, Joseph. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Do you find you frequently run our of time but rarely run out of tasks? That’s what we’ll be looking at in this week’s episode.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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Episode 240 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 240 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I’ve been coaching people for around five years now and in that time one problem comes up again and again. That is there does not appear to be enough hours in the day to get everything done.
Well, the truth is, there is enough time—there’s always enough time—the problem is on the other side of the equation; tasks and appointments.
If you fill your tasks manager up with an unrealistic number of tasks when you have several meetings on the same day, the problem is not enough time, the problem is you are not prioritising correctly.
For most of us, appointments—whether they are business meetings or personal appointments—are the priority. They are on our calendar, confirmed and someone else is relying on you to turn up and be present. Tasks, on the other hand, while they may need doing, are less of a priority. Tasks can be done at anytime in the day be that the morning, afternoon or in the evening.
Problems start to happen when you have five or six appointments for the day and a task list with 40 Plus tasks. There’s no way you are going to find the time to do all those tasks. So what do you do?
So, with that in mind, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Bryan. Bryan asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed the Time Sector System for over a year now and it’s transformed my productivity. However, one problem I continually face is I rarely complete all my tasks for the day. I generally have between two and five meetings each day which take up a lot of time. This means when I get to my tasks for the day, I feel overwhelmed. Is this normal or have I missed something along to way?
Hi Bryan, thank you for your question.
Don’t worry, it’s unlikely you are doing anything wrong. Part of the problem is the world we live in today. So much to do, so little time to do it.
However, that said, if you do find yourself rarely completing your tasks for the day, there are a few things you can do to sharpen up your prioritising that will help.
When it comes to your tasks, the strategy I advocate is begin with your areas of focus. These are the eight areas we all share that mean something to us. Things like our family and relationships, health and fitness and self-development. Once you have established what each of these eight areas mean to you, and you know what tasks need performing to keep them in balance, you will know where your priorities for the day are.
Areas of focus are also important because it is these that will give you your goals. Meaningful goals you set will all come from your areas of focus. Imagine you have become aware that your savings are not where you want them to be. This will come from your finances area and you can decide what savings goal to set for the next twelve months. Or it could be you notice your waistline has expanded a little over the years and you want to do something about it. You could set the goal to lose a few pounds over the next six months.
Now, you don’t necessarily need to have an actionable task from each of your eight areas. For example, the spirituality area of focus may mean you just need to attend a spiritual retreat once or twice a year, or you go to the Synagogue or Mosque every morning. These are not tasks, these are things you just do. They become a part of who you are. You routine if you like.
When I look at my areas of focus, I have around five or six tasks each week that come from these. Exercise for example, is not a task, it is an event on my calendar. I make time each day for some form of exercise. It’s a non-negotiable part of my day.
Once you have established what your areas of focus are, the tasks and events are in your task manager and calendar, you can then look at everything else.
Work is where most of out daily tasks will come from during the week and it’s here were you need to get smart.
Start with what you are employed to do. Are you employed to sell product, teach, manage a team or create designs? What is the core work involved here so you are hitting your targets?
For example, I have a few clients who’s core work is to manage clients. Their role is to develop relationships with clients, new and old, and give outstanding customer service. Now, that’s something to work with. Begin with what “manage client relationships” actually means for you and your company.
What are the measurable results you and your company want from this?
That could be a given target for referral business, it could be numbers from a customer satisfaction survey or a given number of client contacts each quarter. I know that sounds a bit cold, but you do need to be able to measure something. If you cannot measure it, how do you know you are doing a great job?
Like areas of focus, you need to set up your core work as tasks (or events) so that these high priority tasks are being taken care of each and every day. These become your priorities.
I consider myself a content creator, I create content that helps people become better organised and more productive. But what exactly does that mean on a day to day basis?
For me, it means each day I need to create content. It doesn’t have to be a 2,000 word article or a recorded and edited video. It could be creating content, idea development, planning and writing outlines. As long as I am doing something each day related to content creation, I know I am doing my job.
When I start the week, I know I need to write a blog post, prepare and record a podcast episode, plan and record two YouTube videos and write two newsletter essays. You could say these are my weekly deliverables.
This means, when the week starts, I need to have the time to create this content scheduled and blocked in my calendar. To make this easier, I fix these in my calendar as repeating blocks of time. It means I don’t have to plan them out each week. I also know when I begin the day on a Tuesday, I have a three hour block in the morning to write. Likewise on a Friday morning, I have a two hour block for recording YouTube videos.
I don’t want to be trying to find the time every week. Once it’s fixed in my calendar, I am not going to be tempted to schedule meetings or allow meetings to be scheduled over these blocks.
Now, you may not have the freedom I have to block fixed times each week for doing your core work, but you will have some degree of flexibility. However, you will not be able to do that unless you know what your core work is. This is why spending a little time thinking about what it is you are employed to do and pulling out the actionable tasks that need to be done in order to accomplish your targets and key performance indicators—your KPIs—will pay you a huge dividend.
Next up is to get smarter about your calendar and task list. In the hierarchy of things, your calendar takes precedence over your task list. Events on your calendar are things that need to be done at a set time on a given day. Meetings, for instance, are fixed so we can have everyone involved at the same place at the same time.
Tasks, on the other hand, can be done at anytime in the day. Clearing your actionable email can be done mid-morning or late in the afternoon. Putting the final touches to the presentation you are delivering on Friday can be done first thing in the morning or after lunch. As long as it’s done, it doesn’t matter when you do it in the day.
This means, when you look at your calendar and see you have four or five meetings, you do not want to have thirty to forty tasks on your task list for the same day. You will not complete all those tasks. This is where you need to make sure you do your daily planning.
So what does daily planning look like?
All you need do with your daily planning is look at your calendar and task list and ask yourself if that is a realistic day. If you have several meetings that take up a large portion of your work day, reduce your task list to accommodate it.
Start by removing tasks that can be done another day—when you look at your list objectively you will find a lot of the tasks on there can be pushed off to another day. A key tip here is to look again at your calendar and find a day where you have less meetings scheduled.
If you are getting close to the end of the week and a lot of tasks are building up, look for time on your calendar you can block out for focused work. If you feel you are going to need more time than time available on your calendar, you may want to consider rescheduling some meetings. Don’t be afraid of this, all you need do is ask.
Sending a message to a colleague asking if you can postpone a meeting until next week because you need to finish some important tasks is not hard. What’s the worst that could happen? They tell you; no. But in my experience, most people are happy to reschedule a meeting, and if not, what have you lost? Nothing.
Daily planning puts you in control of your day. It will help you to stay focused on the things that are important to you. How long does a daily planning session last? Well, for the most part it’s going to be less than ten minutes. All you are doing is looking at your calendar and task list for tomorrow and asking yourself if this is a realistic proposition. If you feel it is not, reduce your task list.
If you are new to daily planning, it may take a little longer at first. We are also susceptible to over scheduling ourselves. We think we can do far more than we can in a day. This is where consistency and experience will help you. You will inevitably over-schedule yourself at first. It’s part of the learning process.
In those first few weeks pay attention to what you are getting done and what types of tasks you find you don’t get round to doing. It’s those tasks—the tasks you don’t do each day—that are your natural low priority tasks. You might tell yourself they are important, but if you are consistently not doing them, no matter what you tell yourself, they are not priorities. If they were, you would do them.
Try to eliminate these tasks.
I see people putting tasks like “do a mind-dump” each week, but they rarely ever do them. If you constantly skip these kind of tasks remove them. Mind-dumps don’t want to be done each week anyway—you have enough work to do. Mind-dumps, should be done every three months or so, or when you feel overwhelmed and you need time to get whatever it is overwhelming you out of your head.
You might think they are important, but if you never do them, drop them. All they are doing is cluttering up your task list and giving you a false reading on how much you need to do.
I hope that has answered your question, Bryan. Thank you for sending it in.
And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog post on how living a disciplined life brings an abundance of benefits. This week’s question was inspired by just that blog post.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 239 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 239 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
So, what is living a disciplined life? Well, it’s not living a regimented life—that’s a kind of life that is very restrictive and doesn’t allow any flexibility. A disciplined life is a life lived with a few core tenets that provide the building blocks for a healthy, productive day. As Jim Rohn said, “Success is a few simple disciplines practised every day.”
This is very much in contrast to living an undisciplined life where anything goes and can, over time, lead to the destruction of careers, marriages, health and dreams.
The great thing about living a disciplined life is you feel great about yourself. It builds self-confidence and self-respect and is the foundation to living a successful life because those little things you do every day move you closer to living the life you dream of living.
So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Cindy. Cindy asks, Hi Carl, a few weeks ago, I read your article on living a disciplined life, and it got me wondering about what would you consider being the right sort of things to bring to a disciplined life. A few pointers in the right direction would really help me.
Hi Cindy, thank you for your question and for reading my article.
The great thing about building a disciplined life is that we have a blank canvas on which to draw up what we want to focus on. In many ways, this will start from knowing what your long-term, life goals are and what your areas of focus.
If you have taken the time to establish what you want from life and what is important to you in terms of your career, relationships, finances, health and lifestyle expectations, creating a disciplined life around these will give you a fantastic platform on which to build.
For example, if your long-term goal is to build a beach house so you have a place to go for long holidays, then you will need to be disciplined about your finances. To build (or buy) a beach house, requires money. Leaving this to chance is not going to work. Sure, you may buy lottery tickets every week, but the chances of you winning a sufficient amount to purchase a beachside property are very slim. You will need to be deliberate with your savings. How much you spend today, will have an impact on your future goal.
You will have to become a saver instead of a spender.
Now imagine you have a long-term goal to travel the world when you retire. Aside from the money, you will need, you will also need your health. If you let your health go now, when you retire, you will find many of the places you want to visit will be inaccessible to you. For instance, climbing Mount Kilimanjaro to see the sun rise over the African savanna or visiting the Angkor Wat temple in Cambodia, both of which require a reasonable level of health and fitness to access.
I don’t know any people whose long-term goal is to spend their final years in and out of hospital waiting for the next heart attack or stroke.
Statistics from the American Heart Association state that almost half of American adults have some form of cardiovascular disease. This figure is probably similar for most other western countries. People need to take notice of these statistics.
Cardiovascular disease is the biggest killer in the developed world today. But it’s not that you are shortening your life expectancy that’s the real problem here. The biggest problem is most people have dreams and goals that they are waiting for—living an active retirement, being able to walk their daughter down the aisle or being able to play games with their grandchildren. If you are not disciplined about what you eat and how you exercise, none of those dreams will happen.
Living a disciplined life is about getting the basics right and being consistent with them. Having a healthy eating habit that ensures you get the right nutrition and doing some form of exercise every day. A thirty-minute walk each day would be enough. If you can do more, then the better.
I think the biggest problem with the word exercise today is we associate it with running or going to the gym. That’s just a modern concept. Not everyone likes going to the gym or going out for a run. Exercise simply means movement. Walking, taking the stairs, doing housework (a great form of exercise), doing a little gardening each week or taking your kids out on a bike ride every weekend. All these activities are exercise.
So what are the basics? In theory, these will differ from individual to individual, but your health is certainly one area you should be disciplined about. Finances would be another. Working for thirty to forty years and having nothing saved for your retirement would be a disaster. I’m no financial expert, but you should be saving at least 10% of your salary each month for your long-term future.
I like the way Jim Rohn puts this—see that 10% as a tax for your future. If the government decided to raise income tax by 10%, you’d grumble—perhaps get angry—but you would pay it. Stop finding excuses, and start putting a minimum of 10% of your income away each month.
Another essential would be planning the day. Let me give you an example.
Each day I have a few core activities that must be included in my day. These are writing my journal (for my mental health), exercise (for my physical health) Taking our little dog out for a walk with my wife (for quality time with my wife and little Louis) and creating something to help people improve their lives (linked to my purpose in life).
This means when I sit down at the end of the day to plan the next day, these activities are built into my day. There can be exceptions—for instance if my wife is away or we are on holiday—but on the whole, these activities are scheduled on my calendar and are non-negotiable.
This is an example of living a disciplined life. These core activities form the non-negotiable part of my day. When I woke up this morning, I wrote my journal. Writing this podcast, is how I can help people and once this script is finished, I will be heading out for a run at the local park. After dinner, my wife and I will take Louis out for his daily walk.
In total, these activities will take up around three hours of my day. That leaves me plenty of time to deal with my email and other work related matters. I have enough time to eat and sleep and perhaps have a little time at the end of the day to relax and learn something. I don’t feel stressed or overwhelmed. I feel comfortable, relaxed and I know at the end of the day I will feel great because the important thing in my life have been given time and attention.
If you flip that and look at an undisciplined life. The day starts with no plan. There’s no consistency and no reason to wake up except to get to work. This means wake up time is often decided on how much time it takes to boil the kettle and brush your teeth before heading out the door to go to work where you spend all day being told what to do, where to stand or sit.
Lunch is whatever everyone else is having, be that pizza, fried chicken or a highly processed pre-packaged sandwich which leaves you feeling tired and mentally drained all afternoon.
When you get home at the end of your work shift, you feel so fatigued and worn out, all you can do is crash on the sofa and binge-watch whatever you can find that may be interesting on TV or mindlessly scroll through your social media feeds being triggered by whatever opposing political view you happen to read—which then puts you in a foul mood for when you finally fall asleep.
You repeat that every weekday. I know which kind of life I want to live.
Living a disciplined life is about making decisions that are in your best long-term interests. Discipline is like a muscle, the more you exercise it the stronger it becomes.
It’s that discipline that makes each day feel constructive and meaningful. It prevents you from feeling you are wasting your life and it leads to better relationships because you are dependable, solid and inspiring to other people.
One of the interesting things about following a disciplined life is that after a few months, living that life becomes easy. It becomes something you just do. I write my journal every morning. It feels effortless, to make a cup of coffee, sit down with my iPad and write for ten minutes. I write about how I feel, what’s going well and what’s not going well. I write about my dreams, how I would like to live my life and where I feel I can improve. It’s just who I am. I write a journal.
To begin living a more disciplined life needs to start small. It could be something as simple as doing the washing up before you go to bed, or it could be you make your bed before leaving to start work. Once that becomes something you “just” do, you can then expand that something else. For instance, going out for a thirty minute walk after dinner—a fantastic way to help control your blood sugars by the way—or perhaps sitting down after your walk and spending ten minutes planning what your objectives for the next day will be.
I should say, planning my objectives for the next day is one of my favourite times of the day. It gives me a sense of control over my life. Instead of waiting for things to happen to me, I feel I am making things happen for me. It gives me a focus for the day and when I complete those objectives I get a wonderful sense of achievement.
The key to living a more disciplined life is deciding what you want out of life and finding a few little things you can do each day that will move you a little closer towards achieving those things.
I’ve seen so many people destroy their lives because they lived an undisciplined life. People who can no longer say yes to doing new exciting things because of health issues, or relationships breaking down because of a lack of attention and unreliability.
Don’t be one of those people. You can take control of your life and build amazing things with a little discipline. It’s how we humans thrive, flourish and grow.
It can be hard to become disciplined; I understand that. This is why you want to be thinking long-term. Start small. Develop your self-discipline strength and think of it as building a life you want to live small step by small step. I can promise you once you get started, and you begin to see results you will continue to grow.
Thank you, Cindy for you question and thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Why set goals? After all, most people fail to achieve them and for those lucky few that do, what then? What do you do after you’ve achieved your goal? Find out in this week’s episode.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 238 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 238 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
It always surprises me that many topics come round in cycles, and suddenly I am inundated with questions and queries about that topic. And that’s what happened with this week’s question. I got a podcast question and then a few emails about the subject, and then it came up in two of my coaching sessions.
Now I suspect the goals question has come up because of the realisation we’ve just gone past the halfway point of the year, and when we look at the list of things we wanted to do this year—our goals and projects—we discover we are way off achieving the things we wanted to do, and our goals appear on our radar again.
So, why do we set goals? What’s the point? With a statistic that claims only 8% of you will achieve your goals, it suggests even attempting to go after a goal is going to result in disappointment for 92% of you.
Well, this statistic hides the real purpose of a goal—it’s not about achieving the goal; it’s about what you have to change about yourself to achieve that goal. And that is what we are going to look at in a little more detail today.
So, I guess that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Liam. Liam asks, hi Carl, I recently went through my goals for 2022 after your recommendation in your weekly newsletter, and I realised I am miles away from achieving them. If I am being honest, I haven’t really done much about them at all. What can I do to stay focused on my goals? I do this every year, and it’s really frustrating.
Hi Liam, thank you for your question and please don’t worry. You are certainly not alone. Most people will find themselves in the same position as you are right now.
Okay, first, let’s look at what a goal is for. Setting goals gives you a roadmap—a direction, if you like—to help you grow and flourish as a human being. Without a goal or a set of goals, we drift. We will be pulled and pushed towards what everyone else wants for us, and that’s never usually what we desire or want. Without that direction, you are setting yourself up for a very disappointing life.
I remember reading Bronnie Ware’s book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying several years ago, and it scared me. I realised I was heading in the same direction as many of the people in that book. Who knows when we will leave this world? All we do know is there will come a time for us to depart. So the only question we need to ask is what would I like to do with my short life?
And that’s the key here. What do you want? If you don’t have an answer to that question, you will drift through life and become another dead being, having achieved nothing and done nothing. Sorry to be so dramatic. I hope that scares you, it should do. It scares me.
So now we’ve dealt with the morbid part; let’s look at the bright side.
Having a few long-term goals gives you a sense of purpose and a pathway to follow. You can change that pathway at any time if you feel you no longer want to pursue the direction you were going, but at least you have a direction, and you are growing and developing while you are on that path.
If I look back at my early life, I wanted to be a police officer, a Royal Marine, a vet and a physiotherapist—these were all goals I had while I was at school. However, like all teenagers, I changed my mind and went in a different direction. But each one of those occupations were goals at one time or another that I abandoned. But the abandonment was not in vain. I learned what it takes to become a police officer and a marine. I also learned a little about animals and human physiology.
Now, as I am older, my goals are more refined and more long-term, but I still have them. My goals don’t change much. Indeed, they haven’t changed much at all over the last ten years. I wanted to build a business—which I’ve now done, and now I want to grow that business. One change I have had to make about myself in the last ten years is to change my mindset from an employee one to a business owner. That was a lot more difficult than I expected, but it has been a wonderful journey.
And that is where having goals brings its the biggest benefit. You have to change. If you don’t have to change, then there’s no goal.
For instance, a lot of people set themselves the goal of losing weight. Great, with two-thirds of the western world population overweight or obese, that’s a good goal to have. However, the goal is not really to lose weight. Anyone can lose weight. Skip dinner tonight and weigh yourself tomorrow morning. You will have lost weight. But skipping meals long-term is not sustainable. Instead, what a weight loss goal needs to do is change your eating habits and lifestyle.
A weight loss goal is a lifestyle change. Most of us eat too much of the wrong types of food and develop painful, debilitating diseases as a result. So, the goal is to change our eating habits, move more and keep the weight off so we can live a healthy, active long life.
If your only purpose is to lose a few pounds, you’ll likely lose it, but if you are not changing your habits at the same time, you will quickly put that weight back on.
One of my biggest current goals is to buy a piece of land and build our family home to our specifications. Right now, I do not have the money to buy the land, but the habit I needed to change to achieve this goal is to become less of a spender and more of a saver. I have cut out a lot of my expenditure, and I save a lot more money now than I did before. I became aware of just how much I was spending and was able to reign that spending in.
If we choose to abandon that goal in a few years' time, it won’t matter. What matters is I now longer spend frivolously. I have become a saver, not a spender. My whole identity has changed.
So, what about you, Liam? What do you want?
For you to achieve what you want, what do you need to change about yourself?
We humans can achieve almost anything we want to achieve. Millions of people before us have achieved incredible things. How did they do that? They did it by first learning what they need to change and then dedicating themselves to changing.
How do you write a book? You have to dedicate an amount of time each day to doing focused writing. To do that, you need to learn how to focus and do deep work without distractions. You need to change your habits. Rather than sitting down and consuming, you need to change to be a creator.
If you desire to be the CEO of a leading company, you need to change from being a follower to being a leader. Again, it’s not easy, and you will need to learn about leadership by reading about leadership and learning from the greatest leaders.
There’s a concept that Tony Robbins teaches. It’s called CANI (C-A-N-I), which stands for Continuous And Neverending Improvement. As humans, we thrive and grow when we are continuously improving ourselves. We can do that by learning—reading, and studying. We can do that through exercise if we want to improve our health or by learning more about the food we eat.
There has never been a better time to apply CANI. We have an abundance of resources through YouTube and blog posts to be in a state of continuous improvement.
And finally, a word about failing. You never really fail unless you quit. Altering your goals, refining them or changing them completely is fine. Quitting is not. However, if you start down a path and struggle, you are not failing; all you are doing is gaining data points.
Failing is a part of achieving goals. The failure gives you data you can use to adjust your approach so you can try it a different way. This is part of the fun of having goals.
My first attempted marathon was a complete failure. I remember the day well. It was a hot, humid day, and the marathon I was attempting was ten times up and down a large hill. Stupid of me to try this as my first marathon, but there you go. I managed to do half the course before pulling out.
However, while I was disappointed, I learned I needed to change my training. I needed to add a few long runs of around eighteen to twenty miles, and I needed to get off the flat ground and start adding a few hills to my training runs.
I changed my approach, and three months later, I ran my first full-course marathon.
Did I fail at the first one? of course not. It turned out it was a training run (although, at the time, I treated it as a proper race). I learned a lot from that first attempt and was able to make adjustments so I could complete a full course marathon three months later.
So, I urge you, Liam and anyone else listening who has struggled with their goals to focus on what you need to change about yourself to achieve your goal. What is it that has prevented you from achieving them before that you could change and start to achieve your goals?
Remember, if you write 500 words a day for 120 days, you will have written a 60,000-word book. That’s just four months. Develop the habit of writing.
If you cut out soft drinks full of sugar, refined carbohydrates and fast food, in three months, your blood sugars and LDL cholesterol will have returned to normal (or close to normal). Make some minor changes to your diet, and you’ll be a lot healthier.
A goal is less about accomplishing the goal. It’s much more about who you become in the process of achieving the goal.
Thank you, Liam, for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.
Is your time management and productivity system optimised so you are always focused on doing the right things? That’s what we’ll be looking at today.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 237 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 237 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
If you are like me, you will be reading, watching and listening to anything on time management and productivity. And there’s a lot of content out there.
Now, I must confess, I’ve been consuming this content since I was in middle school and I’ve tried a lot of ideas, systems and structures over the years. In the end you realise there are a few fundamentals that work and many that don’t.
Most of the ones that do not work are the things that look great in a blog post or YouTube video, but when put into daily practice involve so much maintenance, doing the work becomes secondary to keeping the work organised—a sure bet that the new idea is not going to work.
And so, this week, we’ll be looking at how to optimise our systems so that we are pointed towards the right things every day. It’s also a good time to be doing this because we’ve recently crossed the year’s half-way point and this a great time to be a half-year review.
So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Scott. Scott asks, Hi Carl, I want to make my system better but I don’t know where to start. I took your Beginners Guide To Productivity years ago and I love how everything comes together, but sometimes I feel my system has become boated and slow. What do you do to keep things fresh and fast?
Thank you, Scott for your question. Good question and it got me thinking.
I know it’s very easy to keep adding to our systems once we feel it is working. What we do is add something new, and while that might be a small change when you add, the problems start when those small changes add up.
This often begins in adding more and more project folders to our task managers. This is often where things start to go wrong because the more project folders you have in your task manager, the more folders you need to review when you do your weekly planning.
This can also happen in our notes app where we add more and more categories and sub-categories. Eventually, it becomes a mess and we do not enjoy going in there to find what we need.
Generally, I look at my system as a whole every three months or so. However, there is a key question I use here: what can I eliminate?
It’s easy to accumulate plugins, extensions and apps. I do it all the time. I become curious about a new app everyone is talking about and install it on my computer and ‘take it for a test drive’. In 99% of cases I don’t see how it would improve my overall system, but the app sits there on my phone or computer. This three monthly clean out keeps these out of my system and out of temptation’s way.
If you are relatively new to this world of productivity and time management, it’s going to be hard to stop looking at these tools. The best advise I can give is by all means go looking and playing, but after three months do a clean out. Remove apps, plugins and extensions you’ve accumulated and no longer use.
But let’s start at the beginning. How are you collecting your tasks, ideas and notes? How fast is it? Do you find yourself sometimes resisting to add something because of the effort it takes to get something into your system?
How you collect your stuff needs to be easy. Keyboard shortcuts on your computer, and widgets and long presses on your mobile devices. There needs to be as little resistance as possible. I like to think of it as like a Formula 1 racing team always searching for that extra hundredth of a second in speed. This is my approach to my collecting. Speed is key.
The problem is we don’t have ideas when we want to have ideas. Ideas come at us at the most inopportune times. I could be in the middle of a run and an idea comes to me, I need to be able to get that idea into my notes app while breathing heavy, sweating and not wearing my glasses.
Next up is how you organise everything. Now in the last five years or so, Microsoft, Google and Apple have been helping us here. You may have noticed that we are getting more and more stuff coming at us each day. Newsletters, books and articles we want to read, reports to review and of course messages and emails. It’s a lot of stuff. Where do we put all this?
Well, Microsoft, Apple and Google’s engineers have obviously experienced this problem too and so they’ve done a lot of background work into their search features. Now, I don’t use Microsoft tools, but I know you can do a system search and find pretty much anything on your computer. Apple has Spotlight which in the last year or so has become brilliant, and Google, is the king of search.
This is one area where I have significantly changed my system over the last few years. I remember six or seven years ago I was advocating a hierarchical tagging structure in Evernote. Today, I rarely use tags and my notebooks are a simple structure called GAPRA - Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive.
To be honest, because search is so powerful today, you really don’t need many folders or notebooks. A simple structure called personal and work would work. It would also be fast because you don’t have to think too much about where to put something.
The only thing you need to make sure is the titles of your notes and files are recognisable to you. For example, I use a simple meeting note title. I put the date first in the year, month, day format and then the word “meeting” and finally the person’s name I am meeting with. This way, I can search my notes via date, type of note (meeting) and/or person.
Next would be to look at your calendar. How are you doing against your “perfect week” calendar? I did a video on this a few months ago where you create a blank cleaner and call it “Perfect Week”. Then you add everything you want time for each week. This would include your social time, your exercise, family time and any else you want time for.
Ideally you would also break down your work. For example, if you would like to have two or three hours each day for doing focused work, then you would add that to the calendar. Likewise adding an hour each day for communications.
Every three months or so, turn that calendar on and compare it with your current week. How are you doing? Are you merging the two calendars? That’s the goal.
When I last did this, at the end of last year, I realised I needed more time for sleep. I wasn’t getting enough and I had just finished reading Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep book. So, I made sure there was a gap of at least eight hours from when I finished my day and when I began the next.
I’m not doing great here, but I am getting closer towards my sleep time goal.
Now, a quick word on your task manager. All those project folders are holding pens. They don’t drive your day. Your day comes from your Today list. That’s the list of tasks that you have decided needs to be done today. Now the question here, is are you trying to do too much. How frequently do you complete you list for the day.
Here, is where you need to optimise things. When you know what you can reasonable do each day, that becomes your daily number—or rather the maximum number you will allow on your list each day.
When I include my daily routines, that number for me is twenty. I will not allow more than twenty tasks on my daily list. I know if I ever have more than twenty I am not going to complete them all, so I can optimise my day by only allowing a maximum of twenty tasks. It helps me to eliminate the less important tasks.
And the final piece is how consistent are you with your daily and weekly planning sessions? I recently heard that those people who follow GTD (that’s Getting Things Done system) less than 5% do the weekly review consistently (and that means every week). That astonished me. The GTD book, the bible of modern day productivity systems, repeatedly tells us to do our weekly review. The weekly review is glue that brings everything together.
I’m guessing those of you who follow the Time Sector System very few of you are consistent with the weekly and daily planning sessions. Yet, like GTD, it’s the glue that brings everything together. You need to know what’s on your plate for the following week. You want to be eliminating the things that do not need doing next week and making sure you are attending to the things you have identified as being a part of your areas of focus.
Similarly with the daily planning, you need to know what your objectives are for the day. They are the tasks that will pull you towards successfully accomplishing your goals and projects. Without that clarity, other people’s dramas will get in the way and you’ll quickly become overwhelmed and that’s what you are trying to avoid by becoming more productive and better with your time management.
Your weekly and daily planning sessions do not require a lot of time if you are consistent with them. Twenty to thirty minutes for a weekly session and ten minutes for a daily session. It’s less than 1% of your total weekly time.
Now, I do know it’s easy to skip it and it’s unlikely there will be any immediate issues. But if you are not consistent and you skip these sessions a lot, something will eventually slip through the cracks and then the whole system falls like a house of cards. That’s when those thirty minutes you didn’t do turns into several hours of fixing a problem that should never have occurred in the first place.
The final part to optimising your system is to look at how much time you are spending on doing the work versus planning and organising the work. The goal should be 95% doing and 5% planning and organising.
I spend around five minutes a day cleaning up my desktop of files, screenshots and other digital stuff I have collected through the day. I do my ten minutes planning—although as I am consistent with this it often takes less time—and I clear my task manager’s inbox—around another five minutes. So, in an average twelve to fifteen hour working day, I spend around twenty minutes planning and organising my work each day. That’s around 2% of my working time spent organising and planning.
So there you go, Scott. I hope that has helped and given you some ideas on how you too can optimise your system. Remember, the goal is elimination, not accumulation and that includes minimising the amount of time you require for planning and organising. If that is an area where you are spending too much time, I would suggest you start there.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, the question is all about how to simplify your system so there’s less maintenance and more doing.
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Episode 236 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 236 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Over the last ten to fifteen years, we’ve been blessed with a lot of fantastic digital applications that have made managing our tasks, goals and notes easy. We can start a note on our mobile phone and finish it off on our computers when we get to our desks. We can add tasks to a task manager while out hiking when we remember we need to do something and it will be there waiting for us on any device we choose to use.
However, what started out as a simple idea—use a device we carry with us everywhere to collect tasks, notes and ideas—has now become an ocean of complexity.
How do we organise all this stuff?
Where do I put this quote I want to keep for a presentation I may have to do in six months' time?
What do I do with all my bank statements?
And true to form, we humans have come up with increasingly complex ways to manage all this stuff. We now have elaborate digital filing systems—The alphanumeric system we’ve successfully used for hundreds of years isn’t good enough anymore, of course. And the humble task manager that started out simply telling us what we needed to do today, now has thousands of tasks hidden away in project folders often three or four levels deep.
What all this complexity does is slow us down. We end up spending more time organising than doing. We waste hours looking for answers to our problems on YouTube or in blogs (or podcasts) and yet, the answer to these problems is staring at us in our face. Reduce the complexity and get back to basics.
And that is what I will be looking at in this episode.
So, before we go any further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Eric. Eric asks, hi Carl, last year I decided to get myself organised and to start using my computer and mobile phone to organise my life better. Unfortunately, I really struggle to keep on top of everything. I often can’t find something I’ve saved (I know it’s somewhere) and my task manager has hundreds of projects which take a long time to clean up each week. Is there a better way to manage documents, files and projects?
Hi Eric, Thank you for your question.
You are certainly not alone with this one. With a lot of my coaching clients, this is one of the first areas we need to sort out. Cleaning up their basic system so that managing it is simplified and the focus can return to accomplishing the work.
Let’s start with the task manager.
All your task manager needs to do is tell you what you must do today. Everything else is a distraction. This means the only list that matters each day is your today list. The list of tasks you have decided needs to be done today.
On a daily basis, everything else is a distraction. If you find yourself having to go into your project folders each day to look for something to do, your system is failing you.
Now, this might not be because of the apps you are using, it could be you are not doing a weekly or daily planning session and I have talked a lot about the importance of these in previous episodes. Basically, the weekly planning session is where you look at all your active projects to see what needs doing next week and add a date to when you anticipate doing those tasks.
Once you have that done, you can ignore all those project folders. They are just holding pens for tasks you think you need to do at some point in the future, but have not yet decided when they need doing.
On a side note, one of the reasons I don’t like having individual project folders in my task manager is because they often fill up with tasks that don’t need doing. You just add these tasks because you don’t want to have an empty project folder.
Creating a new online course, for example, could have hundreds of tasks in a project folder in a task manager. But ultimately there are only a few things that need to happen.
Write the outline,
Record the course
Edit the videos
Publish the course
Tell people about the course.
Five tasks. If you look carefully at these tasks, the outline needs around two to four hours, recording the course needs a full day, as does editing the course.
Uploading and publishing the course will require around four hours and telling people about the course will need another three or four hours.
My task manager will not help me much here. All these tasks will need to be on my calendar because I need sufficient time to work on them. My notes will be where my ideas and comments will go.
All I need my task manager is to tell me to “continue working on the course”. There may be a few little tasks such as write course description, but until the course is outlined and recorded, I am not going to be able to do that.
I certainly don’t need a project folder for something like this. I do need a note somewhere for my ideas and the outline will be in a spreadsheet.
Your focus needs to be on doing the work, not organising your work. And that leads me to the next problem.
For apps to be attractive they have to lure you in with more and more features. And rather than simplifying your workflow, all these features add complexity. And it’s this complexity that slows you down.
It might sound great that your new task manager can connect to your Google Calendar. But then every few months you’ll waste thirty minutes or so having to reconnect the calendar to your task manager. All that does is cause you to lose trust in your system—which again means you will be checking that events and tasks are moving as they are supposed to between your apps—another waste of time.
Now, what about all those files and documents? Well, there is some good news here. Apple, Google and Microsoft have, in recent years, been working very hard on their system search. What this means is as long as you know a keyword, a date range or a title, you will be able to find a document whether it is on your computer, or cloud service (if you are using iCloud, OneDrive or Google Drive).
You no longer need to develop complex folder structures for your files and documents. For example, If you create a Word, Google Doc or Pages file, you are encouraged to leave the file within the app’s file saving system.
What this means is if you write a Word document, the document will be automatically saved in Microsoft’s Word documents folder. This applies to Apple’s Pages folder. All your documents are contained within the apps folder.
You can then manipulate how your documents are listed. By date created, modified, title, size etc. You no longer need to create folders within folders for all your different projects.
And as all these documents are essentially saved in the cloud, you can use your system search on any of your devices to find any document. Plus, this means you have a URL link which you can copy to your project notes so any relevant document can be found quickly via a single click or tap.
When you focus on keeping your whole system as simple as possible, you will spend a lot less time having to go through folders looking for something to do.
But again, it comes back to planning. Knowing what you want to get done the next day.
If you maintain a simple system—a system based on when you will do your work rather than project tasks—the only thing you need to decide when planning the day is what needs to be done today?
A daily planning session is not about going through your projects to see what needs doing next—that’s what the weekly planning session is for—a daily planning session is about deciding what you will do tomorrow based on your appointments in your calendar, and what your priorities are for the day and week.
Of course, if you are not doing a weekly planning session, then your daily planning will become a weekly planning session and that will take up a lot more time.
Seriously, all you need is thirty minutes on a weekend for weekly planning and ten minutes at the end of each day to plan the next. A total of around 90 minutes a week planning. —around 1% of your week.
If you struggle to find that amount of time each week, you have a serious time management problem— or, as is more likely, a big self-discipline problem.
The problem is the consequences of not doing these planning sessions. Not doing these sessions will result in you wasting so much time each day just trying to figure out what to do next—often what you end up doing is other people’s work. It’s much easier to say yes to someone’s request when you have no plan for the day.
When you have a plan for the day, you’ll find you’ll say no to frivolous requests from your colleagues. You will also gain a lot more respect for your time from other people because they will see the results you are getting.
The bottom line is if you want to be more productive and get more out of your time each day, you need to keep things simple. Stop wasting time trying out new apps in the hope they will make you productive. They won’t.
Reduce your folders, you really don’t need them. Things to read can go into things to read folder, your documents can be kept in their documents folders. All you need to make sure is they have a recognisable title so you can use keywords to find what you are looking for by using your computer system’s search features.
Make sure before you end the day you give yourself a few minutes to decide what needs doing tomorrow and never skip the weekly planning session. That is the foundation on which all productive weeks are built.
I hope that has helped, Eric. Thank you for your questions.
Thank you also to you too for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
What do I do with this email? That’s what we’ll be looking at in this week’s episode.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery Course
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 235 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 235 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Email. Possibly the most revolutionary new form of communication in the business world over the last thirty years. It’s transformed the way businesses communicate with each other and speeded up aspects of our work that in the past took days if not weeks to do before its advent.
However, as with all great new things, it can be abused and email has likely been one of the most abused innovations. Now, things that could have waited until the next meeting, are often quickly written down in an email and sent to the other side of the world, with an expectation of an almost instant reply. And that is where many of the issues with email rest.
But, another problem for us today is where do you put important emails that do not need a reply, but do need to be kept for informational purposes or just in case? That is what we will be exploring this week.
And so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Anna. Anna asks, hi Carl, I get hundreds of emails each day, many of which do not need a reply, I just need to keep them, and I struggle to know where to put them. I don’t trust sending them to the archive, so I have a huge list of folders that are now overwhelming me. Do you have any tips or tricks to better manage email?
Great question, Anna, thank you for sending it in.
The key to getting on top of email is to understand the basics of what you need. Let me explain:
The inbox is for collecting email. It is where all the messages that are sent to your address will come in. It’s the collection point. The archive is for emails that you’ve either dealt with or want to keep for future reference and then there’s the trash for emails you no longer need to keep.
Now, on their own, those folders could work in a system. But I feel there’s one folder that bridges the gap between the inbox and the archive and that is a folder for emails you need to take action on.
I call this folder the “Action This Day” folder. Any email that requires action from me, will go into that folder. That could be emails I need to reply to, emails I want to read such as newsletters or reference emails with information I want to transfer to a project note.
Over the years, I’ve seen some pretty elaborate structures in email with long lists of project folders or folders for bosses and colleagues emails. These are still the most common ways for people to organise their email. It can work—up to a point. It stops working once the folder list becomes so long it takes forever to find a folder to save a mail message.
And there lies the “secret” to better managing email—speed.
As with most things related to productivity, the less time you spend organising your tools and stuff, the more time you can spend doing the work. All these folders you created, Anna, work if the volume of email you receive is low—less than twenty to thirty mails per day—when you receive over 100 emails a day, this system is going to break. It will slow you down so you spend far too much time organising it instead of dealing with it.
A question I would ask you, is why do you not trust archive? The archive is a great place to store your non-actionable, reference mail because it is searchable via sender’s name, keyword, topic or date range. As long as you know at least one of those search terms, you will find anything in seconds.
Now if there is a fear you will lose it in archive, always remember, if you receive an email there will be a copy of it somewhere. If you replied with an acknowledgement mail (a thank you for sending that mail) then you also have a copy of it in your sent folder. There’s nothing wrong in asking someone to resend an email they sent you. I am sure people would prefer that to someone simply ignoring their mail.
Search within email has come a long way in the last five years. All top email services have excellent search. Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail are fast and have multiple ways to find a mail.
There are thousands of articles and videos online explaining how to get the most out of search on these services. This is where we can develop our skills and learn how to search our email effectively. Just type a search query in Google for “How to search Gmail, or Outlook, Apple Mail” etc. Then set aside an hour or two to study.
It will take a little while to become competent at search, but once you learn the basics and apply what you learn, your confidence in your archive will grow and pretty soon you will be able to let go of all those folders.
Now, what about managing your mail. What do you do with it? Well, there are a number of different types of email. The easiest to deal with are all those newsletters you receive that you don’t read.
Often these are newsletters from industry bodies you feel compelled to read because they are about your industry. Now if you read them, great. When they arrive, put them in your action this day folder for reading later in the day.
If you don’t read them, unsubscribe from them.
Here’s an interesting thing, there will always be someone who does read them and if there is anything interesting they will tell you. You can always ask them to forward them the email. Alternatively, you can resubscribe at any time.
The problem I’ve seen is people who subscribe to these newsletters and never read them. They place them in a dedicated folder and pretty soon they have thousands of unread newsletters. Seriously, you are never going to read them. Let them go.
All those mails are taking up digital space and slowing down your mail. You want mail to be fast and efficient. With thousands of unread newsletters clogging up your system, you will be slow.
Get real, and be honest with yourself. If you are not reading these mails, let them go. Unsubscribe.
Actionable mails get dropped into your Action This Day folder for acting on later in the day. These are easy to deal with when you are processing mail. If you need to reply, drop it in your Action This Day folder.
Now those emails that contain a paragraph or two that are relevant to a project but do not need a reply—the CC’d emails. What I do is rather than send the whole email to my project notes, I copy and paste the relevant parts of the email directly into the project note and link back to the original email. If your email app doesn’t allow linking directly to a mail, then copy and paste the title of the email together with the date the mail was sent into your project notes. That way, if you do need to reference the original email again, you have your search terms.
There is a class of mail that doesn’t need a reply immediately but does require a lot of work. This to me is a project and therefore I would treat the email as an instruction to begin a project. That means I open up a project note in my projects folder in my notes app, paste the email and add the link back, then I will add a task in my task manager’s inbox. I can decide later when I will begin work on the project.
The original email is then archived. I have a link back to the original email, and the relevant instructions are now in a project note.
For linking back, Gmail, of course, is the best at this as each email you receive will have its own unique URL. Apple Mail allows you to drag and drop emails into notes that generate an in-system link back, and With Outlook as long as you are using OneNote as your notes app, any email sent to OneNote will also have a track backlink.
And that’s a good point, I know there are a lot of great notes apps around, but you are only making things harder for yourself if you are using Outlook mail and a third-party notes app that doesn’t allow you to link back to an email. Apple Mail and Apple Notes work fantastically together. My advice is don’t make life harder for yourself than is strictly necessary.
Now, what about emails you are waiting for a reply on. This one is interesting because in many ways if you don’t trust the person you sent the email to reply to you, then there’s an issue with trust, not an issue with email. It’s easier to blame mail, a lot harder to blame your own lack of trust.
However, there are some emails you may need to keep as you wait for a response. One of which would online orders. I keep the order confirmation email in a waiting for folder, just in case there is a problem with the order. However, emails I sent to a colleague or client, I would add a note in the relevant project to tell me when I sent an email.
The problem with waiting for folders is they don’t automatically clean themselves out. What I mean is when you get what you asked for, we forget to remove the sent email from our waiting for folder. Pretty soon, that folder fills up with things you are still waiting for and stuff that you received a reply to weeks ago.
This is about minimising what you are keeping. It’s more effective to add a note to the project note with a date you sent the email than it is to add another mail to a waiting for folder.
Another issue I have with waiting for folders is if you have a task that says “get presentation materials from Jane”, and you send the email to Jane asking for the materials, you have not completed the task. You do not have the materials from Jane, therefore the task is not complete. The task was not “send email to Jane” it was to get the presentation materials. Don’t complete the task, reschedule it a day or two in the future. That will be the reminder to you that you still have not received the materials.
Managing email can be simple or complex. Which one you choose will have a big impact on how effective you are at dealing with mail. The truth is we’ve always received a lot of mail. Even before email. The trick is to develop a system that filters out the necessary learning only the necessary to deal with.
One final point. There are two parts to managing email. Processing and doing. Don’t mix up the two. Processing is about clearing your inbox as fast as possible. It does not involve doing email—even if it would take two minutes or less. Just clear that inbox as fast as you can. Then set aside an hour at the end of the day for dealing with your actionable mail. Doing it later in the day avoids email ping pong because it’s unlikely you will get a reply on the same day. Reply in the morning and you’ll be doubling up your email.
I have a course on managing email called Email Mastery. I have put a link to that in the show notes for you.
SO, there you go, Anna. I hope that has covered most of the types of emails you receive. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Why does doing your work feel overwhelming and so hard? That’s what we are looking at this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Where We Get The Eisenhower Matrix Wrong
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 234 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 234 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
A lot has changed over the last two hundred years or so when it comes to how and why we work. For most people living two-hundred years ago, there was a purpose to work—to put food on the table and keep a roof over our heads. Life wasn’t fair, crops were destroyed by drought, floods and wars, but we had a purpose every morning when we woke up. To ensure our family were fed.
Today, there are multiple reasons why people work. The truth is, despite everything going on in the world, we are living like emperors and empresses. The vast majority no longer need to worry about where the next meal will come from. For most, their biggest worry now is their mobile running low on battery power.
With all this luxury, it can be very hard to find our purpose. We have everything we need. Food, clean, running water and, for most of us, a safe, stable environment in which to go about our lives. Why do we even need to work? Great questions and ones that all come from this week’s question.
Speaking of which, I think it’s time now for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jesper. Jesper asks, hi Carl, I recently lost my job and I’ve found myself struggling to find the motivation to construct a system to find another job. Instead I am waking up later each day and instead of working on my CV, I read news and look for new productivity apps. Is there a way to help me be more productive now I don’t have a boss telling me what to do?
Hi Jesper, firstly I am sorry to hear of your lost job. I hope you find a new job quickly.
Now, let’s deal with how you structure your day when hunting for a job. A myth I need to remove is the myth that you need to spend all day hunting for a new job.
One of the benefits of not having to go to an office or place of work is you no longer need to commute and sit in meetings all day. Instead you can concentrate your time. This means you no longer need to be “working” on your job seeking activities eight to ten hours a day. Instead you can do the required work on less than four.
This is great when it comes to structuring your day.
Now, I don’t know how long you have been working for, but if you have held down a job for the last five or more years, now is a good time to do some deep personal thinking. Many people get a job based on advice given to them by teachers and professors who may know about a student’s academic credentials, but have no knowledge of their individual motivations.
It could be that you were good at chemistry while at school and so you were pushed towards a career in science. But that might not be where your motivation is. Your motivation could be entrepreneurial or legal and studying law or business is really what you wanted to do.
A loss of a job, while devastating, it’s also a great time to reflect. What was it about your work you enjoyed? What was it you did not enjoy? That’s going to help you to find your own motivation. It’s unlikely it will be the money. Money is a poor motivator in the long-term. People are not motivated by money. People are motivated by what they think money can do for them. What is much more likely when you reflect on your previous job is there will have been parts of that work that excited you, motivated you and gave you a buzz. And there will have been parts of your work that did the opposite.
Look at these first. This will give you a starting point for what to look for in a new job.
Now, if money is tight, it’s often worth swallowing your pride and going to work in a coffee shop or other job below your skill level, temporarily. You do not want to let money get in the way of choosing the right career or job for you.
I remember, I lost my job when I was in my late twenties and was struggling to pay the rent. I wanted to get into law at that time and so I worked in a bar five nights a week so I could pay my rent and have food to eat. It was an unpleasant five months, but it was worth it. Had I let me pride dictate the course of action, I would never have worked in a law firm and instead gone back into selling cars. Who knows, I might still be doing that today, had I not taken that part-time bar work for a few months.
Once you know what you liked about you previous job, you now have a list of things you want to do. You also have list of things you don’t want to do.
Next up is your skills. What skills do you possess? We all have skills, often we are unaware of them, but we all have them. Take some time to think about what you are good at. Don’t worry at this stage is some of the things you are good at are things you do not enjoy doing, just list out the things you believe you are good at. A good way to determine this is to think of things you do with ease that other people find difficult.
Are you good at talking to strangers? Organising events? Delegating? Leading teams? Where are your skills? Write them down.
Next comes the fun part: matching your skills with a job. Find a job vacancy site and read through the listings. See which jobs match your skills. This is going to lead you down avenues you may not have ever considered. Once you’ve done this, what are the jobs that match your skills?
Okay, now the hard bit. It could be that the jobs that jumped out at you were jobs that required professional qualifications. Qualifications that currently you do not have. Here’s where you need to decide whether it’s worth going back to school, even part-time, to get those qualifications.
Now, when you look at the process to get to where you want to be, do you really need to be spending eight to ten hours a day searching? Not likely.
So, while you were in full-time employment, what did you miss out on? What were the things you wanted to do, but could not do because you were stuck in an office or wherever your workplace was?
Do those things now.
You will be back in full-time employment again soon and these opportunities will disappear. Take these opportunities now. Get plenty of rest, do a lot of reflection, exercise and give yourself four hours a day for job searching.
That means, if you prefer to wake up later in the day do so. Do your job search work in the evenings or the afternoons. You have complete freedom now.
And here’s the thing. While there is a lot of debate around how we should be working. Working from home, working in an office or a combination of both, learning to structure your time during the day is going to be a new skill we all require. And structuring your day is part planning and part self-discipline.
Planning because we need to set up our work sessions and self-discipline because we need to stick to our planned sessions whether we like it or not.
The final piece, is to begin the day with an objective. What do you want to accomplish today? What one meaningful task could you do today that will leave you feeling satisfied and fulfilled.
Now, this does not need to be related to job seeking. It could be you decide that today’s the day you clean up you home from top to bottom—it’s surprising how good it feels when you’ve spent all day cleaning and you sit down at the end of the day and look at your work.
Related to your job search, you may decide you will apply for seven positions today, or you will complete a summary of your skills. Pick something. That something is going to give the day a purpose. It’s the purpose that will pull you through the day.
Remember, Jesper, losing a job can be awful, it can be stressful, but it also gives you a chance to reflect, reset and rediscover your passions. Don’t let that opportunity go.
When I look back through my career, losing a job has always turned into something very special. It gave me a chance to look at what I was doing, to do some self-reflection and to accept my weaknesses. On the flip side it gave me the chance to reconnect with what I enjoy doing, to learn new skills and to find a job or vocation that ignited my energy.
It was losing my job back in 2002 that caused me to fly to Korea to teach English for a year. Within three months I discovered my passion for teaching and knew, deep down, I would spend the rest of my life teaching. And today, twenty years later, I am more passionate about teaching than I have ever been.
A job loss can be soul destroying, but it can also be a catalyst to something much greater, something more special and a change within ourselves that starts us on a journey that we never tire of.
Good luck, Jesper, I hope you find what you are looking for. Remember to structure your day, make sure you know where your skills are and maybe, you will discover something so much better than what you were doing before.
Thank you for your question and thank you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.
This week’s question is on defeating the habit of procrastination (and I have some rather brutal truths to reveal).
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Episode 233 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 233 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
Procrastination ah the bane of all productive wannabes. No matter how motivated you are when you retire for the night to have a productive day the next day, that pernicious procrastinator steals the day, and you find you’ve achieved very little, but you know how everyone of your friends on Instagram are doing, and you can talk about all the funny videos you saw on Tick Tock as if you were a professor of the subject.
But what is procrastination, and why do we do it? Those are two questions we need to answer before we can start helping move anyone away from those dark depths to a more brighter, focused and productive light.
Now, to kick start things off and before the Mystery Podcast Voice reveals the question, let’s look at the definition of procrastination:
“Procrastination is the action of unnecessarily and voluntarily delaying or postponing something despite knowing that there will be negative consequences for doing so. “
Now I want to give you another definition. That of self-discipline:
“the ability to make yourself do things you know you should do even when you do not want to”
Now the way I see procrastination is that it is the near opposite of self-discipline. Yet, no one wants to admit that—particularly procrastinators. The truth is is a little more complex than that, but it is a good starting point because these definitions can give us some clues on how to defeat procrastination.
Okay, with that part done, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Len. Let asks, hi Carl, I’ve been in full-time employment for over twenty years now, and I’ve always wanted to be more productive, but I’ve always failed. I’m never doing things that are important, instead I do the unimportant stuff. I think I am what some people call a “serial procrastinator”. Have you any ideas you could share that will help an old procrastinator like me stop?
Hi Len, thank you for your question and for being so honest.
Firstly, let’s deal with the “I’ve always failed” part of your question. Failure is not a finish line in itself unless you make it so by quitting. Failure is an education.
Whenever you fail at anything, you learn something—if nothing else, you learn what doesn’t work so you can start again with a different strategy. Failure has nothing to do with you as a person; failure at anything informs you what skills are missing, so you next time you try to can build those skills and strengths, so you don’t fail again.
I remember the first full marathon I attempted. I failed. I dropped out at mile 18. I just couldn’t go another step further. I was devastated. I thought there must be something wrong with me. But a little voice inside me said, this was only my first attempt, and I learned that I needed to set off slower and pace myself better, and I also needed to improve my strength and stamina on hills—you don’t run marathons around an athletics track. You run on streets, and they are rarely flat.
With that information, I spent the next six months learning to pace myself properly and did a hill session every week. The next time I entered a marathon, I finished it—with energy to spare! Did I fail? Of course not; I got knocked over, but I learned why and picked myself up and developed my skills and succeeded.
Remember, you never fail until you quit. You may get a few setbacks because the strategy you were trying didn’t work, but that is not failure. It’s a setback.
Okay, now on to your procrastinating.
I’ve seen a lot of clinical reasons why we might procrastinate, and I see many people in the media who will jump on these clinical definitions and tell every who procrastinates that it’s an illness and if you take this new super-drug, you will be cured. Well, I’m sceptical. I’m sure you can alter the chemical make-up of your brain to stop procrastinating and be more focused, but artificially altering your brain’s chemicals isn’t a long-term solution if you ask me.
But let’s go back to the definition of procrastination—delaying or postponing something you should be doing despite being aware of the negative consequences.
Why are you postponing what you should do? What are you doing instead? That’s where I would start. Let’s say that reading the news or going through Tick Tock or Instagram, is what you do, now here is the dilemma, Facebook (or Meta as they are now called) and ByteDance are big corporations that employ smart people to create a user experience that is designed to keep your eyes on their content. Much like soap operas and TV dramas—they want to keep you watching their content.
You are battling again with professional people who understand human psychology, and unless you remember this, you will always be sucked in.
It’s the same with the news today. The news media companies are in competition for your eyes and attention. They employ people to come up with click-bait headlines so you click their articles. For years journalism schools have been teaching students how to grab and keep your attention, and it’s very effective.
Now we mortal humans have not had any opposing training. There are no classes on how to resist click-bait headlines and the social media algorithms designed to keep us on their site. So, this battle is very much a one-sided one.
However, we do have one thing in our arsenal that is highly effective. And that is self-discipline. And the great thing about self-discipline is that it works very much like a muscle: The more you train it, the stronger it becomes.
By the way, if you want to see how developing self-discipline can transform your life, I highly recommend David Goggins’ book: Can't Hurt Me: Master Your Mind and Defy the Odds and Jocko Willink’s Discipline Equals Freedom: Field Manual. Both books lay it on the line what can be achieved by developing your self-discipline and destroying procrastination.
However, for the last forty years or so, our lives have become more and more easy. When I think back to my childhood and visiting my grandparent's house, whenever they wanted to watch something on TV, they had to be there at the time the show was on. There was no streaming or recording. You either watched it when it was on, or you missed it. And then, if you didn’t like the next TV show, you had to get up out of your chair, go to the TV and turn over the channel. No remotes back then.
There were no robotic vacuum cleaners, and if you wanted to learn something, you had to go to a place called a library. No picking up your phone and Googling something for the answer. If you wanted to read the news you had to go to a newsagent to buy a newspaper—unless you were lucky and you lived in an area where the newspaper was delivered to you.
And if you were hungry, you had to get up and cook something. No home food deliveries in those days.
Back then, every day we had to exercise our self-discipline one way or another. Today, we can run businesses from our sofa with a phone. We don’t have to move anywhere.
All these conveniences have been eroding our self-discipline silently and ruthlessly and it’s no surprise that the word procrastinate has become such a popular word in recent years. I’m betting if I asked my grandmother twenty years ago if she knew what procrastination was she’d have looked at me as if I was speaking a foreign language.
So what can we do to strengthen our self-discipline? Well, one of the best ways is to develop a simple, healthy morning routine. There are three things a good, solid, healthy morning routine does. It first wakens you up. You can start off by doing a few stretches. Begin with your neck, then shoulders, arms, stomach and then legs and feet. Spend around two minutes stretching every morning as soon as you get out of bed. Then drink a glass of water with half a lemon squeezed into it.
You can make yourself a cup of coffee or tea as well. Then sit down somewhere relaxing and do ten minutes of meditation or journal writing. And finally, look at your plan for the day.
Three things. Stretching (and or exercise), reflection—meditation or journal writing and reviewing—look at your plan for the day. Make this not only a routine but something stronger. A ritual. Something you will not miss—ever.
My morning ritual lasts around 40 minutes, although I give myself 45 minutes. Yours might be thirty minutes or even an hour. The time it takes is not important. What is important is that every day, whether you are working or not, you begin each day the same way.
Then, before you start the day, make your bed and clean up the kitchen.
Make no excuses (there are none) for not doing this. Not only will you feel great having a consistent way to begin your day, you are also exercising your self-discipline.
Another way I strengthen my discipline is to always take the stairs and avoid escalators and lifts (“elevators” if you live on the other side of the Atlantic) I do have an exception here. If the floor is above the 10th, I will take the lift. But fortunately, it’s rare I need to go beyond the 10th floor.
Quite often taking the stairs is faster than waiting for a lift anyway and I gamify escalators by taking the stairs and racing the escalator to prove it’s faster to use the stairs.
It takes time to strengthen your self-discipline, but the time and effort is worth it because as you gain strength here, your procrastinating habit will be receding.
The next thing you need to do to stop procrastinating is be aware of what you do when you procrastinate and when you find yourself doing that activity stop immediately. Ask yourself: What am I doing?! In an aggressive voice out loud.
What this does is interrupt the pattern you have wired into your brain that causes you to procrastinate. Interrupting patterns of behaviour is a great way to overcome any bad habit. You could also slap yourself aggressively across your chest as well when you say “what am I doing?!”
This pattern interrupt will begin the rewiring of your brain to remove the bad habit of procrastinating and start reinforcing a new, positive habit.
Finally, always have a plan. Sometimes we slip into procrastination because we do not know what we need to do next. Or, our to-do list is so long, it’s overwhelming and trying to decide what to do next causes so much anxiety we slip into procrastination.
Your plan does not need to be a micromanaged plan. All you need are a few real, meaningful objective tasks to be completed that day. Knowing what you need to get accomplished each day prevents procrastination because you feel the pull of your plan. It’s when you don’t have a plan you feel you are having to “push through” the day and that’s exhausting. Instead, have a plan. The plan will pull you through the day and that is far easier than pushing all the time.
I hope that has helped, Len. Thank you for your question. Remember, you are not failing, you are learning what doesn’t work. I hope knowing that all you need to do is to strengthen your self-discipline muscle and have a plan for the day and you will soon find yourself procrastinating less.
Thank you also to you too, for listening and it just remains for me know to wish you all a very very productive week.
What is your philosophy for life and work? That’s the question we are exploring this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Time Blocking Course
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The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 232 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 232 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
One of the most influential people in my life has been Jim Rohn. Jim Rohn was active in the 1980s through to the early 2000s and taught personal development through changing people’s philosophy on life and emphasising the importance of taking responsibility for your own life.
One of Jim Rohn’s main teaching points was to develop your own philosophy for the way you live your life and do your work. This means having a set of rules for how you will execute your work and be present with your friends and family. For instance, a simple example would be when having a family dinner, you put away your phone and be interested in how your family spent their day.
This week’s question is linked to this as it’s a question based on how I manage to stay consistent with my output. I’m nothing special, I just took on board what I learned from Jim Rohn’s books and videos—which most are available on YouTube now—and built a few simple philosophies into my life.
It’s not easy to do this and it takes time. But if you do not have a set of philosophies (or rules) that you set for yourself, you will find yourself living your life by other people’s philosophies and rules— which are rarely going to do much for your life. There is always something driving our lives. Either we take control or we allow other people or society in general to control us.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Sean. Sean asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been following you for some time now and I’m impressed with how you have consistently uploaded content over many years. How do you do that? Do you have a team of people helping you or is there something else?
Hi Sean, thank you for your question.
Firstly, I should say that I do not have a team of people working with me. It’s all me. I have toyed with the idea of hiring a team to help me with video editing and social media publishing, but so far, I have not seen the need as I can manage to do my work each week without much stress and certainly without overwhelm.
However, I do have a set of ‘rules’, if you like, that I follow that enables me to stay focused on what is important each day.
And this is linked to my 2+8 Prioritisation Method (or what I used to call my Golden 10) this is a process by which I determine what needs to be done each day.
Several years ago, now, I realised I could not do everything in one day. I’m sure you also have discovered that, and having an open-ended to-do list, left me feeling stressed and overwhelmed. It often felt that as fast as I did my tasks, new tasks would be coming in. There was never a net gain.
This had to stop. So, at the end of each day, I began selecting ten tasks that I would work on the next day, two of which were must do’s. Whatever else happened that day, those two “objective” tasks would get done.
It was this methodology that transformed my output. Every morning when I began the day I know precisely what needs to be done and what I would like to get done.
Ten tasks are my optimum number. If I try to add more, I leave myself with no flexibility to deal with anything urgent that may come up on the day.
My rule is, that when I stop and close out the day before I turn off my computer, I will open my task manager and go through the next day’s tasks. I will use the flags to indicate which ten tasks will be my 2+8 for the next day. This is now a non-negotiable rule. And funnily enough, I have been doing this for several years now and it feels very uncomfortable to go to bed not knowing what my ten tasks are for tomorrow.
I noticed on a recent trip, that even though I was not working, I still found myself opening my task manager before going to bed to see what needed to be done the next day. To prevent myself from doing work (I was taking a break), I made my objective task to relax and enjoy the day.
This is probably the biggest most impactful philosophy or rule I have adopted over the last ten years that has seen a dramatic improvement in my daily and weekly output.
Just to give you an example, before I went to bed last night, I made writing this podcast script one of my objectives for the day. When I woke up this morning, I was ready to begin writing. There was no hesitation or procrastination. Writing this script is a must-do today and the sooner I start writing the sooner I could move on to other, possibly more urgent, things for the day.
And that brings me back to what I learned from Jim Rohn all those years ago. “Success is a few simple disciplines practised everyday”. It’s that philosophy that is tattooed onto my brain (as Robin Sharma would say).
And this philosophy works with anything you want to do. Exercise, for instance, takes consistent effort to achieve whatever results you want. You can’t lose weight or run a half-marathon if you only do activities to achieve the result you want when you feel like it. It has to be a disciplined practice to eat less and healthier or do your exercise for the day.
My closing down for the day activities takes around ten minutes, it’s just ten minutes out of 1,440 minutes each day. Is that really so difficult? Now based on how I feel when I don’t do it, it’s not worth missing. I’d rather have ten minutes less sleep and know precisely what needs to be done the next day than run the risk of having a stressful and overwhelming day. It’s a small discipline practised every day.
But there is more that will help you to make sure you are doing the right work every day. I’ve talked a lot about your core work—the work you are paid to do or are responsible for. This is the work that must be done for you to do your job well—and that’s the same whether you are in full-time employment, a stay at home parent or run your own business. There are a number of tasks you must do each day and week to uphold your responsibilities.
These tasks must be scheduled and once scheduled they get done at their scheduled time. Skip these or ignore your calendar and you are shirking your responsibilities. You are in effect doing what Jim Rohn calls practising failure, which is: “a few errors in judgment repeated every day”. And that’s what you need to tell yourself. Nobody wants to be irresponsibly so you need to make sure you are responsibly doing what you know you must do—that could be collecting your kids from school and driving them to their rugby or swimming practice. Or it could be calling ten new prospects each day.
These are the few simple disciplines that if practised every day will ensure you are leading a successful life. You become dependable, and consistent and in a world of inconsistency, that is something refreshing.
A question to ask yourself is what rules do I want to live my life by? Now, this does not mean boxing yourself in so you live a miserable life. What it means is you choose the rules by which you will live a fulfilled life. For instance, I know if I do a little exercise every day, my energy levels remain high, I feel great and it puts me in a positive mood. I also know, that if I do not exercise every day (an error in judgment), I feel lethargic and my mood is bordering on the negative.
Similarly, I feel fantastic when I get to help people. Putting out my content each week, allows me to help thousands of people. Whenever I hit publish, I get a buzz knowing that this piece of content, whether it is a blog post, newsletter or YouTube video, will help someone somewhere become less stressed and more in control of their lives.
But I cannot press publish if I don’t have anything to publish. So the work has to be done. It’s funny, as I write or record, I feel I am having a conversation with someone—someone I don’t know, have never met and possibly never will. But if I help just one person become a little more disciplined, or a little more focused, perhaps I might have helped them achieve the life they want for themselves. Nothing beats that feeling.
So, sitting here at my computer, writing this script, is a must. This is my chance to help someone.
That is why every week, I will sit down and write my blog posts, and record my podcasts and YouTube videos. It’s not only a discipline, it’s my philosophy.
So, Sean, if you want to lead a fulfilled life, the secret is to create your own philosophy. What ‘rules’ do you want to live your life by? What could you do a few minutes each day that over time will build into something very special? What habits, do you need to change?
The thing is, unless you start with what you want, you won’t know what needs to change and what habits you need to develop.
Being a good parent, means you need to spend quality time with your kids each day. What does quality time mean to you and what could you do to make that happen? It’s surprising how little effort you would need to put into it. For instance, it could be you make it a rule you will not work after 6 pm so you can be there to help your kids with their homework or take them out to the park on a lovely summer’s evening.
Not working after 6 pm, becomes your philosophy.
It’s rare that we need to have to do a fundamental overhaul of our lives. Most people, and I guess you listening to this podcast have already made the decision you want to improve aspects of your life. That improvement is a philosophy—it’s what Tony Robbin calls Continuous and Never Ending Improvement (CANI). That is a great philosophy to have. How can I be a better spouse, parent, salesperson, taxi driver, or friend? What do I have to do each day to be more organised, better prepared and more fulfilled?
All great questions and questions that when answered have the potential to become your philosophy.
I hope that has helped, Sean. Good luck on your journey (for that is what life is—a journey) and thank you for your question.
Thank you also to you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, we’re diving deep into prioritisation and learning how to use the Eisenhower Matrix to make it easy.
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Episode 231 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 231 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
One of the most common challenges people face is how to prioritise their work and personal tasks. With so much being thrown at us, not only do we need time to process all that stuff, we need to make sure that we are allocating sufficient time to the tasks that are important.
However, that means we need to also make decisions about what is and is not important and that is where the biggest challenge will be.
So, this week, I will be answering a question on how to do that effectively.
Now, before we get to the question, I would like to give you a heads up that this week, I have launched my summer sale. For this week only you can get 15% off my individual courses, 20% off my coaching programmes and 25% off my bundles. Full details can be found in the show notes.
Don’t miss out on this incredible offer. My sales are rare, so this is your chance to build your skills over the summer so you are ready and prepared for whatever the world throws at us next.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Margarida. Margarida asks, Hi Carl, I recently cam across something called the Eisenhower Matrix. I think I get it, but how does this fit in with how you prioritise your work?
Thank you Margarida for your question.
I first came across the Eisenhower Matrix when I read The Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey a very long time ago.
Now, for those of you unfamiliar with the Eisenhower Matrix, this is a matrix of four squares that divided between urgent and important, not urgent and important, urgent and not important and not urgent and not important.
By the way, if you want to see this matrix, you can head over to my website, carlpullein.com, and my latest blog post has an illustration for you. I’ll also put the link in the show notes for you.
The idea is you spend most of your time in the top two squares. The important and urgent and the important and not urgent.
Now, as with all systems there are difficulties and the Eisenhower Matrix is no different. The second square (or quadrant 2) the important and not urgent tasks is where you need to be dedicating more of your time. The type of tasks in here are planning tasks, anticipating potential problems, taking care of your health and your relationships and getting some rest and relaxation.
Now, I am sure as you listen to those words you know they are important but how often do you prioritise them? The chances are you only prioritise them once they become urgent. A visit to your doctor informs you you are pre-diabetic and urgently need to lose weight and start an exercise programme. This is where a quadrant two task moves into quadrant one (urgent and important).
The same can happen if you neglect your relationships, because maintaining relationships is rarely an urgent task, we tell ourselves we’ll deal with a relationship issue later. The problem is “later” is not defined and when something is not defined it slips down our list of priorities. It’s only when you are served with divorce papers that a task like this gains the urgency it needs.
One thing I learned a while ago is, if you want these important, not urgent tasks to remain non-urgent you must schedule time for them. This means you schedule planning, exercise and time spent with your nearest and dearest. Ie; blocked out on your calendar.
But, here lays another issue, what are your quadrant two tasks? What do you define as a quadrant two task?
Most people never sit down and decide what is important to them and what needs to happen to maintain them. Ultimately, actions speak louder than words. And that means if you are to make sure you are taking care of these important areas of your life you need to know what they are and what you need to do to maintain them.
For instance, I know my relationship with my wife is important. This means each week, I make sure we have at least one day out together. Often we’ll drive over to my parents in law for dinner, or we’ll take day trip to the beach. One thing I do know though is that day spent together is far too important to miss.
We are both busy people, but in the almost fifteen years we’ve been married, our weekly trips have been rarely missed.
I find it interesting that car owners are generally very attentive when it comes to getting their cars serviced and engine oils changed. I know I am. In fact, my car begins to warn me a service is due a few thousand kilometres before the due date.
Now if you don’t get your car serviced on time, there may not be anything that goes catastrophically wrong as soon as it’s late. You may even be able to go another year without any serious harm. But sooner or later, that neglect, will cause trouble and it will be expensive.
The same applies to your quadrant two tasks. Miss doing what needs doing for a week or two, perhaps even a month or two, and nothing will seem wrong. But neglect of any of these areas and you will soon face problems. Now a quadrant two task has become a quadrant one task and that is never good.
This is why not only do you need to know what your quadrant two areas are, you need to know what tasks need to be completed each day or week and get them scheduled on your calendar.
What about quadrant one tasks—the urgent and important? These are tasks related to your core work. The work you are paid to do. If you’ve taken the Time Sector Course, you will know all about these important tasks. These are the essential tasks that need to be done as part of your employed work. Neglect these are you will soon find yourself out of a job.
On a day to day basis, it’s these tasks that take priority, after all, they are urgent and they are important. But here again there are problems. As with quadrant two tasks, most people never define what they are. If you never define what your quadrant one tasks are, your quadrant three tasks (the urgent, not important tasks) will sneak into quadrant one and overwhelm you.
For instance, some emails are quadrant one, most are quadrant three. Yet, if you never define which emails are quadrant one, all emails will become quadrant one. When that happens, you waste a tremendous amount of time on low-importance emails.
Once again, here you need to take a little time out to define what is what. Let’s say you spend three or four hours working out what is important to you and what your core work is. That time investment will be repaid multiple times because once you know what is important, your decision making becomes so much faster.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I can process 100 emails in around twenty minutes. That’s not because I have any special abilities. It’s simply because I know what emails are important and what are not. Customer and client emails are the highest priority. Emails from companies asking me to advertise their products are my lowest priority and are instantly deleted.
Each day, I know what my core work is and I know I have time allocated to making sure that work gets done. Again, that does not take any special talent or ability. All it takes is a few hours establishing what my core work is and what is not and therefore low-value work.
And that’s what you need to do, Margarida, take a little time out and establish what is important to you and what your core work is. Once you know these, you will be able to make the Eisenhower matrix work for you. The secret power of the matrix is to customise it for your life and not try and fit your life into other people’s examples of hoe they use the matrix.
Now the final parts to the Eisenhower Matrix is to establish what your quadrant three and four tasks are. These are generally easy to work out. These are the things that often cause us to procrastinate.
Now there is a warning here. You may find playing video games in the quadrant four list of many people’s examples. This may not always be the case for other people. I know many people who use playing video games as a way to relax. If you do find activities like playing video games are a good way to relax, then they can be a quadrant two task. However, mindlessly going through YouTube videos and aimlessly watching TV, is most certainly a quadrant four task and should be avoided at all cost.
I use YouTube as a way to learn new things. That, for me, comes under self development, and therefore is a quadrant two task. However, if I ever find myself aimlessly watching something, I will quickly recognise it for what it is and stop.
Quadrant three is the difficult one to define. The truth is most emails and meetings you attend are quadrant three, but they are clever as they can disguise themselves as quadrant one. This is another reason why clearly defining what a quadrant one task is is so important. Allowing quadrant three tasks to sneak through into quadrant one will lead you to stressed out and overwhelm.
Here, I cannot emphasise enough how important it is to define what your quadrant one tasks are. Once you are clear about these, your ability to quickly decide what you need to do about something and how much time to spend on it improves. Most advice for quadrant three tasks is to delegate as many of these as possible, and if you can do this, do it. However, for most of us, that is not really possible.
The best advice I can give you is the advice former Israel Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir who said… And I quote:
“Take my advice: take everything you’ve received today and put it away, don’t touch it for a week. Urgent, not urgent—leave it, don’t touch it. Come back to it after seven days, ten days. This is what you’ll see—ninety percent will take care of itself, and the ten percent that didn’t—that’s probably what you need to deal with.”
I’ve always loved that quote and it’s what I have used for dealing with quadrant three tasks. Leave them for a week. I’ve found that it’s true, 90% of them take care of themselves and the remaining 10% I can elevate to quadrant one.
I hope that has helped, Margarida and thank you for your question.
Thank you also to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 230
This week, we’re looking at how to collect more efficiently and, more importantly, more consistently
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Episode 230 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 230 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
When we first start out building a productivity system for ourselves, one of the first things we need to master is collecting. This is how we get ‘stuff’ into our system that gets processed and organised and ultimately done. If you’re not collecting stuff to put into your system, then you don’t have a system at all.
Collecting needs to be fast, with as few steps as possible, and we need to learn to be consistent with it.
It’s not the sexy part of building a system; this is the messy bit in the middle that Robin Sharma often talks about. It’s fine-tuning, stepping back and rethinking and more often than not, we have to repeat this process of testing and fine-tuning before we finally have something that works intuitively and consistently.
And it’s this bit I shall be explaining in this episode. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Baz. Bad asks; Hi Carl, I’ve recently undertaken a project to update my twenty-year-old system to a more modern-day one. Over the last twenty years or so, I’ve always written things down on a notepad I kept on my desk, but now I want to make this digital. Do you have any tips for making this an easy transition?
Hi Baz, thank you for your question.
One of the first things you are going to need to get used to is typing out your tasks, ideas and anything else you want to collect instead of writing things down, and this can be more difficult than you might imagine. You see, it feels very natural when you are in a meeting or with someone else to pull out a pen and notepad and write something down. People understand you are writing something important down.
Unfortunately, because of the bad press our mobile phones, tablets and laptops have today, typing something into one of these devices makes us feel self-conscious. We fear the other person or people think we’re responding to email, checking our Facebook feed or searching for big tractors. (People in the UK will understand that one)
The thing is we need to get over that self-consciousness as quickly as possible. I know when I first went digital I needed to explain to people what I was doing with a “hang on while I write that down”. Typing into your phone and writing on a piece of paper is the same thing in this instance. I know it takes some getting used to, but it’s part of the process of going completely digital.
To lessen this self-consciousness, we need to make digital collecting as fast as we can. How do you do that?
This is where the digital tools we use have a big impact. And this starts with the applications we choose. A mistake people make is to look through YouTube and watch what popular YouTubers are using. Thomas Frank uses Notion, Steve Dotto is a big Evernote user and Matt D’Avella uses Apple Notes.
Now the thing to remember, these people are not you. They are content creators who likely rarely have meetings with customers and clients. Their productivity needs will be very different from you. Thomas Frank, Steve Dotto and Matt D’Avella will make extensive use of notes apps to plan out videos and collect future topic ideas. If you are in sales, for example, your digital notes needs will be very different.
Perhaps you need to keep details of when you last spoke to a customer, have a list of potential customers and information on the products you sell. Information that is very different to a YouTube content creator.
So, before you go out and find a tool based on the recommendations of others, stop and ask yourself what your needs are.
The next thing to consider is where you will do most of your collecting. Prior to the pandemic, most of my collecting was done on my phone as I was travelling to see students and clients. Today that has changed. The vast majority of what I collect is collected on my laptop. It’s here where you need to do some thinking.
Collecting needs to be fast and intuitive. For me, I have a keyboard shortcut to collect a task. It does not matter where I am on my computer: whether I am in full screen or not, whenever I activate the keyboard shortcut, I get an input box in the middle of my screen where I can type whatever task I need to be reminded of. Likewise, if I have an idea, I can initiate a keyboard shortcut which will bring up a quick entry box for getting the idea directly into Evernote. Apple Notes has become even easier if you are on an iPad or laptop, all you need do is swipe up from the bottom right of your screen, and you get a new note ready to collect the idea.
So, whatever digital tools you decide to use, make sure that collecting stuff into those tools is fast and easy. See if you can create a keyboard shortcut on your computer, and whatever mobile device you are using, make sure at the very least the apps you use for collecting are in your dock or home screen. You don’t want to be swiping from left to right trying to find your notes app when you have the next big idea, or you need to simply write down a person’s email address.
The next step is to turn collecting into a habit. Now, the way to do this is to consciously collect everything that comes to your mind. Anything and everything needs to be collected. A lot of this stuff you collect will be deleted when you process, but you don’t need to worry about that at this stage. Hitting the delete key is far better than missing something important.
What you are doing here is developing a habit. You can do your filtering when you process. Just get into the habit of using the keyboard shortcuts or pulling out your phone to collect. It’s this you need to turn into a habit and learn the necessary muscle memory.
Now a quick tip here is if you do find yourself not collecting using your tool of choice, make a point to stop and do so when you remember what you should be doing. This helps to interrupt a pattern in your brain, so next time you will be more aware. It’s developing these habits that can be difficult. We’ve got used to collecting (or not as the case may be), and we have to change that habit. That’s difficult. To do that, you have to break the old habit—interrupt it—and replace it with the new habit. That’s why even if you do write down the task or idea, make sure you consciously take what you wrote down and add it to your digital system.
Once you have set up your system. You’ve got the apps you’ve chosen on your phone—most likely to be your primary collection tool—and you’ve set up your keyboard shortcuts, which you now want to be fine-tuning. To do that you should frequently ask yourself “how can I do this better?”. It’s an incredibly powerful question, but it also helps to make sure your system is at its most effective and efficient.
One thing I’ve learned is the fewer barriers there are to collecting something, I am more likely to collect it. This is why I’m always checking to see what has been updated in my collecting apps when they update their apps. Have they found a faster way to collect?
I do remember when Apple released their Shortcut apps; I spent many an evening experimenting to see if I could activate my collecting using Siri. I never really found anything satisfactory or better than what I currently use, but I have found that the fastest way to get something into my system now is through the use of my Apple Watch. That’s always on my wrist, and so, even if I am out running and think of something, I can still add it to my system quickly using just my voice.
What you will find is as technology improves. There will be better and faster ways to get things into your system. If you have Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s HomePod, that gives you additional ways to collect stuff.
I recently bought an Amazon Echo and was impressed with how I could interact with Alexa so that my tasks could be added directly to Todoist. This means as I am walking around my office, all I need to do is tell Alexa to add something to my to-do list. It’s fast and surprisingly intuitive to talk to a device. Perhaps this is where the future of collecting will grow.
The key to collecting is not to overthink it. Choose a digital tool, set it up so that you have quick access to the inbox and make sure you use it consistently. That part can be hard; you will slip up from time to time; that’s part of the process of learning. Make a mistake, recognise it, and try again. As long as you are persistent, you will soon break through and collecting digitally will become second nature.
Thank you, Brad, for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 229
This week’s question is: what does “Love what you do” really mean?
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Episode 229 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 229 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I received an interesting question the other week about how to love the work that you do. Now, this was sparked from an article I wrote where I pointed out if you really hate the work that you are doing and dread Mondays, then perhaps you need to reconsider your career options.
For those of us past the age of 45, you will have likely come to the conclusion that life is not just short, but brutally short. By 45 you’re about halfway through your life and all those goals, ambitions and experiences you said you would do one day suddenly seem to fade into long lost opportunities.
And life being so short, why would you want to subject yourself to 35 years of misery spending the majority of your prime years doing something that does not bring you any pleasure or satisfaction. it just does not make any sense.
So that brings us back to the question, how do you love what you do? That is what I will try and answer today and hopefully give you some ideas about how to change a career that no longer brings you joy or any satisfaction.
So, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Phil. Phil asks, recently I read an article on your blog that said that if you hate what you do you should change your career. I know that sounds like the obvious answer, but what if you can’t change your job for whatever reason, how can you change the way you think about your job?
Hi Phil, thank you for your question (and for reading my blog)
Now before we get into the heart of this question, I should point out the two versions of this quote or expression: “love what you do” and “do what you love”.
One is possible for all of us, the other is often unrealistic. The unrealistic one is “do what you love”. Now that does not mean it is impossible. I was recently sat next to a pilot on my flight back to Korea and he was telling me he chose to become a pilot because since he was a little boy, he’d been fascinated with all things to do with flying. He was well into his fifties and still loved flying.
So, while doing what you love is often unrealistic, it is certainly not impossible. But if what you love doing is sitting on the sofa watching movies every night while eating ice cream, it’s likely you will struggle to find a career that will support you. (Although perhaps becoming a movie critic for a news media company might be a good path to follow.)
These days, however, doing what you love does have more doors that can be opened. For instance, when I was teaching English, I did have a number of students whose dream job was to become a travel writer. With sites like Medium and SubStack, there are now opportunities to turn your passion for a particular activity into a side project, that over time could become your full-time work. And of course, YouTube has opened up possibilities for people to record and publish their take on any number of topics.
But what about the second one. “Love what you do”?
Now this one is an interesting one. I love writing, I also love recording and producing videos. But, I do not like the admin that comes from running my own business. If I were to spend all my working time writing and recording, it would be ‘perfect’. Sadly, life gets in the way. We still have to do admin. I still need to do my expenses and my taxes. I hate doing that kind of work. But it has to be done.
Now a question that has helped me in the past with doing the things I do not like doing is “what would happen if I stopped doing the work I did not enjoy?” Well, if I don’t do my expenses and my taxes, it would not be long before the tax authorities would be knocking at my door. There is also the other side to this, in that neglecting an important part of life (admin) would leave me feeling unfulfilled. Part of my personal identity is that I am organised and know what’s going on in my life. So, not doing an essential part of my work would leave me feeling guilty and unhappy with myself.
So, I do my expenses, taxes and admin.
However, there is something you can do here. Turn doing the work you don’t like into a competition with yourself. For instance, if you hate clearing your email’s inbox, time yourself. See how fast you can process 100 emails. (To help you here, I recently cleared 120 emails from my inbox while sitting at Paris’s Charles De Gaulle airport in 33 minutes. (Beat that!) I was a little disappointed, though, I wanted to do it in less than 30 mins.
Now it’s rare I would have 100+ emails in my inbox, I average around 80 emails in a morning when I start the day. But next time I get 100+, I will beat that 30 minutes.
What’s happening here is you are taking the emphasis off the boring part of the process—deciding what an email is and what, if anything, you need to do with it—to something completely different—how fast can you clear your inbox?
Now the work I don’t like doing, I’ve turned it into a project to find the most efficient way to complete my expenses. I’ve created my own spreadsheet and I look for ways to automate it as much as I possibly can. My expenses are not the typical lunch or dinner receipts. Most of my expenses are monthly subscriptions for services I use such as iCloud, website hosting and such like. these are recurring, so I’ve managed to set up a system where I can duplicate these payments automatically in my spreadsheet and then the spreadsheet will do the currency conversion automatically. I loved coming up with that idea.
What about a whole job you don’t like doing. Well, first of all, do you hate all aspects of your work? If so, you really do need to stop and ask yourself what you would like to do. If you hate everything about the work you do, then really the best option is to leave that career altogether and find a different one.
But, in my experience, hating everything about your work is very rare. I remember my first job was cleaning the changing rooms in a health club. Not the most pleasant of jobs, but I did find it fascinating seeing the members working out and being able to judge what was needed if you were to be fit and healthy all your life.
I remember one member, who must have been in his seventies, with a body of a Greek god. Not an ounce of visible fat and not overly muscular. I think people would describe him as looking very athletic. I watched his workout routines every day. I noticed he didn’t lift particularly heavy weights at all. His routine was to start on the running machine for twenty minutes or so, then he spent twenty minutes lifting free weights (not machines) followed by around ten minutes stretching and finally he would do lengths in the pool for around twenty minutes.
I remember asking him one day how he stayed in such good shape and he told me he’s been working out every day in some way or another since he was at school. Almost thirty years later I am still inspired by that gentleman.
Another job I did in my early working life was as bar staff in a local pub in England. Being on your feet for six to eight hours a day and coming home stinking of cigarettes and alcohol was not pleasant. But the job itself taught me how to communicate with people. I am not by nature a people person. But working in the bar, taught me to communicate and I met some incredibly interesting people.
Sure, there were days when I got soaked in beer when changing a barrel, I also cut my fingers many times when cutting lemons and many broken glasses. But it was an experience I will never forget and I know how to pull the perfect pint of bitter and Guinness. What a skill to learn.
There are always parts of a job you will not like. You need to identify these areas and ask yourself how you could learn to make them less unpleasant. When I worked in a law firm, I hated dealing with angry clients. But I realised that learning to handle upset customers (clients) was always going to be a key skill in life. So, I offered to help my colleagues if they ever had an upset client. I made it an objective to master the art of handling upset clients. Not sure if I ever did master it, but I no longer fear it.
But if you really are at a loss with your career choice and feel it impossible to change direction now. Stop. There’s absolutely no reason why you cannot go back to school and learn a new vocation. There are so many opportunities now to take online courses reasonably cheaply. You can even do a Masters degree online today.
The first step, though, is to give yourself some time to think about what you would like to do. Perhaps do some reading and research. Discover where your passions are now. That’s your starting point. Then do the research. From there, you will soon find what the next step will be.
There you go, Phil. I hope that has gone some way to explaining what you can do to turn around an unhappy career choice. You have some amazing opportunities today, the only thing you need to do is to take the first step and decide what you want to do.
Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listing.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 228
This week, I have a very special episode for you. It’s all about managing email with Francis Wade.
The guilty article:
Clear Your Email First Thing
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[Follow Francis here >]
This week, we’re focusing on doing the work instead of organising the work.
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Episode 227 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 227 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Most productivity advice, tips and tricks focus on how to organise your work. And while this is important to some degree, it is the least important part of the three areas—collecting, organising and doing.
You see, you can have the best organisation structure and still be unproductive. That’s because in order to keep everything organised you spend far too much time organising and adjusting. You might feel good while you are collecting all your files and notes and moving them into an organisational structure, but you won’t be getting anything done.
Obsessively organising your stuff is another form of procrastination because it means you are not getting your work done.
And that’s what this week’s episode is all about.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jade. Jade asks: Hi Carl, I’ve recently finished your From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days course, and now I feel organised (I now know where everything is), but I don’t feel productive. How do you keep everything organised and get your work done?
Hi Jade, thank you for your question.
Congratulations on completing the Disorganised To Productivity Mastery in 3 Days course. I know with that course you now have everything you need to build a great system.
And you are now ready to move to the automation part of productivity. You see, when we start doing something new—such as having all our files, documents, notes and everything else organised and in a place where we can find them, it will mean that you will need to consciously think before you do anything.
You will need to think about where you will put something and that takes time.
However, this is just a part of the learning process. You’re changing old habits for new ones. The key here is to consistently do some organising each day. This will likely involve processing the files and documents on your desktop into their rightful place. It will also entail clearing your inboxes and making sure everything is in its rightful place.
When you first start doing this, it will take quite a lot of time. However, if you are consistent with this, you will get faster.
Now a lesson I learned years ago when I was in sales. During my induction training with one company, they sent me out with one of their salespeople for a day. That day coincided with the expense reporting day and I vividly remember the salesperson training me pulling up in a car park after lunch and suggested I go for a walk for a couple of hours.
She then opened the glove box and out poured what seemed to be hundreds of receipts. She had to transfer those receipts from that glove box onto an expense reporting form.
That taught me a valuable lesson. Don’t pile work up. Do a little every day and instead of it taking you two to three hours up close to a deadline, it will take you less than ten minutes to add that day’s receipts to the expense report.
To give you another example, many years ago, when I first began using a digital task manager, it could take as much as forty minutes to clear its inbox each day. When you tagged on all the notes I had written, I was spending more than an hour just organising my stuff.
However, I stuck to it. Over time, my clearing time dropped. I learned what to collect, what could be added directly to a project note during meetings and what didn’t need looking at every day. Now, I can clear ten to fifteen tasks in my inbox in around five minutes.
When it comes to clearing my notes’ inbox, I generally do this once a week. Notes are less urgent, so do not need processing as frequently as tasks do. And if I did collect a note that related to an active project, I could easily add that to the project notebook when I next work on the project.
And that’s really what it’s about. Find effective and efficient ways to manage the work that is coming in. Over time, you will also learn what to say “no” to, which will reduce the number of inputs coming into your system.
The biggest benefit to getting everything organised is the time saved trying to find stuff. However, your new organisation system is going to take time to become second nature. It’s only then that you will feel the “system” itself is in the background so you can now focus your attention on what’s in front of you.
However, with all that said, something you could ask yourself now is where do you feel your system is slow? Where do you find you spend most of your time when you are organising? Here we will all be different. For some, how they manage and organise their email is a bump in the road. Getting quick at clearing your inbox and making decisions such as what is it? And what do I need to do with it? Takes a little time to become automatic.
Again, with consistency, you soon learn the patterns and can make decisions about whether you need to take action on an email or not. Likewise with those bigger requests from bosses or clients. The requests that will need an afternoon of deep focus. What do you do with those?
When we first begin, we will hesitate and likely think too much about these kinds of requests. As you apply your system, though, they become much easier to make and, more importantly, you become faster at making those decisions.
Now there is one area I haven’t spoken about and that is learning how to search your devices and your apps. Search has come a long way over the last five years or so. Long gone are the days when a downloaded file would disappear somewhere on your hard drive and would take hours to locate. Now, as long as you know roughly the date you downloaded it, a title or keyword: within a second or two, you’ve found the file. This is again moving you towards automating your system.
It’s always difficult to change old habits, and one of the worst habits to have is to go through all your file folders looking for files and documents. A far quicker way is to trust your computer. It knows where everything is. On a Mac, all you need do is hit the COMMAND key and Space bar, and you get a little search box. Type in what you are looking for, and boom! You have what you are looking for.
I’m not entirely sure how this works on Windows, but I know Windows does something very similar. Learning how to do this will dramatically speed up your work.
Another part of feeling productive is in what you are completing each day. If the majority of what you are completing are low-value tasks, you are not going to feel very productive at the end of the day. This is where daily planning comes in. When you do the daily planning, make sure that you have one or two meaningful tasks on there that will move a project or goal forward.
You do not want to be overloading your task manager with high-value meaningful tasks—that’s likely to leave you feeling stressed out and overwhelmed, and you will not be able to do everything in one day. But, choose a project that needs working on and create a task that says something like “work on Project X”. That gives you a lot of wriggle room. Often you will find all you have done is planned out the next steps.
For instance, if I find a project has stalled for whatever reason, just going into the project note and reviewing my notes, I will soon see what needs to be done next, and I can add that ‘next action’, if you like, to my task manager. It’s a quick, satisfying way to get projects moving forward.
But what are meaningful tasks, and where do they come from? Generally, these tasks will one from one of three places. Your goals, your Areas of Focus or projects. As long as you have a good mix of tasks that comes from these three places, you will find that you get to the end of the day and feel fulfilled and satisfied with the day.
If you fill your days with low-value admin type tasks, you are going to feel unfulfilled and unhappy with what you have done that day.
Now, I’m not saying you fill your days with high-value project or goal tasks, that would leave you with a lot of admin being neglected, and that will always come back and bite you. It’s about the mix. Let me give you an example.
If you made sure you had two to three hours each day for high-value important project work, an hour for dealing with your communications and perhaps thirty minutes for admin, you would soon find yourself being very productive at work.
If you then added forty-five minutes for daily exercise (a good walk is enough), some time for your family and friends and a little time for your own personal development, you would still have time for a good night’s sleep.
You don’t need to fill every hour of every day with activities. You just need to identify what’s important to you and make sure you have sufficient time each day for those activities.
I hope that has helped, Jade. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is on the subject of optimisation and process. Two parts of the productivity mix that rarely get talked about.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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The Time Blocking Course
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Episode 226 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 226 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
There’s a lot of information on creating a system or method for better managing your time and being more productive, but how do you improve those systems and methods once you have them in place?
More importantly, how do you repair broken systems when they fail? (And they always fail in the early days) Because there’s less information about these situations, a lot of people quit trying or wander off looking for another new system.
That’s the wrong way of looking at it. As long as the system you adopt covers the three basics: collecting, organising and doing, then the system can be made to work for you. Your system is a little like when you buy a new mobile phone.
When you first get the phone, there are a number of preinstalled apps. If you tried to live your life with these limited apps you wouldn’t get the most out your mobile phone. You need to customise the phone for the kind of lifestyle you have. It’s no good having the English Premier League app installed when your sporting love is rugby and cricket. So we add and remove apps according to taste and that’s the same with your productivity system. You will at some point need to customise it to maximise the effectiveness of your system.
That’s what I’ll be talking about in this episode.
And so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Andrew. Andrew asks, Hi Carl, I’ve tried a lot of time management programmes and methods over the years, but I can never find one that works for me. There’s always something missing and a lot of features I’m never likely to use. I am curious how you have made things work for you.
Hi Andrew, thank you for your question.
The reality is no system, programme, or method will ever work perfectly straight out of the box. You see the difficulty is all these methods are developed for humans and humans are not machines. We all think differently, prioritise different things and work different jobs.
And even in our own lives, our priorities will change. In our teenage years is all about getting an education. In our twenties, it’s about learning to handle the responsibilities of being an adult and intimate relationships. And as we get older, there’s likely parenthood, career and eventually retirement to manage.
The reality is, a system you developed to manage your education is not going to be as effective when you want it to manage your career and family life. It will have to change and evolve as you change and evolve.
Now the mistake I see most people making is thinking that as their priorities change they need to change their whole system and that’s not true. Rather than changing a whole system what really needs to happen is the existing system you use needs to be adjusted.
So what does that mean?
Well, let’s look at the three parts to a good productivity and time management system. There’s a task manager, a calendar and a notes app. Now the only thing that’s changed here over the last ten to twenty years is we’ve gone from a paper-based system (diaries and notebooks) to a largely digital system.
The biggest change there was the separation of our task list and notes. Twenty years ago, we wrote our to-dos in our notebooks (or on PostIts!). Now, for most people, they are two different apps.
But, the basics still apply. To ensure we are working on the things that matter we need to be clear about what needs to be done. Whether those tasks are written out on paper or in a digital system doesn’t matter.
The same applies for writing out our goals and plans. Whether you write these out on paper or digitally doesn’t change things. You still write them out (externalise them) and review them (hopefully).
This means if you are struggling with “systems” it is not likely to be the system itself, it’s more likely something is not working within the three areas (collecting, organising and doing)
With collecting, the emphasis is on writing down all your commitments and ideas and not trusting your brain to remember them. That’s simple enough. But, the question here is: are you collecting all your commitments and ideas? Do you sometimes skip this part?
Problems here are usually in three areas.
The first is there’s no habit to collect, so we ‘forget’ to write things down or we believe we will remember—which often we don’t. Plus, if you don’t collect everything you don’t get a sense of how much you have to do, so you end up with a false picture of what commitments you have.
The second is there’s a lack of trust in the tools you are using. If you don’t trust that your task manager or notes app will safely store what you put in there, you will continue to try and remember everything in your head.
Trusting your tools is a big step for many people, and it becomes a lot harder for those who are always switching their tools. Whenever you start using a new tool (or app), there will always be an element of doubt that what you collected went where it was meant to go. It takes time to build that trust.
And thirdly, the tools you are using make it very difficult to add new tasks or ideas. If there are too many ‘clicks’ or taps to get something new into your task manager or notes app, you will not consistently add stuff.
It’s important when choosing tools, you test out how easy it will be to get stuff into the app. If there are too many clicks or taps, then stay well away from the app.
What I’ve noticed here is a lot of people are attracted to the latest, shiniest tool, so they are looking at the aesthetics of an app or what popular YouTubers are telling them. Just remember, a lot of these YouTubers are paid to review these apps and they are not necessarily reviewing things objectively.
Now when it comes to organising, I find a lot of people’s organisation system is either their downloads folder or their inbox. There’s no structure and so it’s almost impossible to find anything.
These days you don’t need a complex hierarchical organisation system. The computers we use have fantastic search capabilities, but you do still need some form of basic organisational structure or you will become overwhelmed when you go searching for something you cannot remember the name of.
How you organise your stuff really depends on you. No one person will be the same here. My notes, for instance, are structured around GAPRA—Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and an archive. This gives me a place for all the things I collect.
When I shared this organisational structure on YouTube, I got so many questions about where I think something some be stored. I couldn’t answer a lot of those questions because I didn’t have the kind of notes I was being asked about. In this area, we will all have different types of collected notes. This is where you have to trust yourself and think about how you would naturally look for something.
My file folder structure, for instance, is divided into two parts Personal and Professional. That’s because I use a single computer for both my work and my personal life. I have a lot of clients who have a computer for work and a computer for their personal lives. In this situation, my structure wouldn’t work.
For my professional work, I run my own company. This means I need folders for tax, company regulations, expenses, employees and admin. If you are an employee, things like HR, admin and taxation are likely things you don’t need.
Doctors and lawyers are required to do continuous professional education which means they need a way to keep all of these educational materials somewhere. Project managers may be managing several projects all at once and so need a way to manage these materials.
Hopefully, you get the point. No one person is going to have the same file and note organisational structure. It’s very important to spend some time developing your own so you can find what you need when you need it.
When it comes to how you manage your task manager, here, all you need to see is what needs doing now. Something that needs doing in six months’ time is not relevant today.
I find the problem with the way people manage their task managers is overthinking things. The only thing that’s important today are the things you need to do today. Tomorrow’s tasks are not relevant today.
This means, that the most crucial part of a day is when you ask yourself “what needs to be done today?” Now, ideally, you will do this the night before, not the morning of. You want to be very clear when you start the day what needs to be done. If you leave the daily planning to the morning of the day, you waste so much valuable focus time trying to decide what to do.
When you do the daily planning the night before, you can step back and look at the big picture and anticipate what’s coming at you. You will also find you are more engaged with your family and friends because the next day is planned and you are not worrying about things you may have missed.
I don’t buy into the excuse that there’s no time to do the daily planning the night before. It’s a ten to twenty minute daily commitment. If you cannot find ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day, then you have serious problems. Nobody is genuinely that busy.
No, if you are not doing a ten to twenty-minute daily planning session, you are just being lazy. Pure and simple.
How difficult is it to look at your calendar and your task list for tomorrow? Seriously? You don’t have time for that?
And if you don’t want to look at it because you don’t want to be thinking of work when you are not working, you need to question your career choice. If you hate your work that much, you cannot bear to look at your calendar and task list for a few minutes before you end the day, you’re in the wrong career.
And finally, when it comes to doing, how are you managing your time? Are you maximising your “doing” time or are you spending too much time organising?
Now here it’s about learning when you are at your most focused. Again, we will be different. Some people are more focused first thing in the morning, while others find their focus is better later in the day.
Now, I understand that a lot of people don’t have a great deal of control over their calendars when at work, but you can still look at ways to make sure you are blocking time out for the more difficult work at a time you are likely to be most focused. Okay, you may have a meeting at 10:30am, but what are you doing at 9:00am? That’s still a good hour and fifteen minutes where you have a block of focused time. If you know before you start the day what the big task is for the day, you can get started on that first thing.
So, Andrew, rather than looking at different methods, programmes and systems, look at the three foundations of collecting, organising and doing. How are you in each of these three areas?
Whether you are using David Allens, Getting Things Done, the Franklin Planner or my Time Sector System, if you are not consistently collecting, don’t have a clean, workable organisation system and have no plan for doing your work each day, nothing will work.
You will be constantly looking at different methods and tools and never finding what you are looking for because you are looking in the wrong place. Look at yourself first. Decide what you want to see each day and how you prefer to get things done.
Then build on that.
I hope that has helped, Andrew, and thank you for sending in your question. And, thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, we’re looking at how to identify your most important thing.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 225 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 225 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show.
I’m sure you’ve noticed there’s a lot of stuff flying around in our lives that demand attention right here. Right now. Messages from WhatsApp, email and social media that need responses. Colleagues, family and friends as well as clients and bosses ask us to ‘help’ them. Homes and cars that need cleaning, bills to pay, accounts to sort out and consolidate and, of course, summer holidays to plan. The list is endless.
And because this ’stuff’ is non-stop and endless, the truly important things in our lives get pushed aside in favour of what’s urgent that masquerades as important.
So what can we do about this? Fortunately, there are a number of things we can do that will give us some perspective on things and guide us through the days so that the things that do matter to us, can still take centre stage.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Frank. Frank asks, Hi Carl, thank you for all the valuable content you publish. You’ve really helped me to get a grip on my life.
I’ve completed your Areas of Focus Workbook and followed the guidelines. The problem I have is I have so many other things to do for my work and general chores, that I don’t have any time to do the things I want to do for my areas of focus. Is this normal or am I missing something important?
Hi Frank, thank you for sending in your question.
Now, it sounds like you are in transition. This is quite common when we have spent a lifetime working for other people’s agendas. It’s hard to take back control because we’ve become conditioned to give up all our time for other people. So, when we take some of that available time away and dedicate it to ourselves, we feel guilty and selfish. The truth is, you are not being selfish at all.
Now, I’m sure you’ve heard the analogy from the airline safety announcements at the beginning of a flight—put your oxygen mask on first before helping small children—and there’s a good reason for this. You are not going to be able to help anyone if you are unconscious. The rule is you make sure you are fine first so you can then help other people.
This is the same with life. If you are breaking down if your health gives out and you have to spend a prolonged period in hospital. Or if you are stressed out, burnt out and depressed, how helpful are you going to be to those around you?
If you want to be there for the people that matter in your life, you must take care of your own wellbeing first.
What does that mean?
Well, in terms of time it doesn’t actually involve a great deal. Let’s begin with the basics.
In order for you to keep in touch with your wants and needs, you need some time each day to reflect and think. The best time for this is first thing in the morning. Rather than staying in bed until the very last moment, wake yourself up thirty minutes earlier and make those thirty minutes time dedicated to you.
Make yourself a cup or glass of your favourite morning drink, then find a quiet spot for some time alone. Now, what you do in this time is entirely up to you. For me, I like to spend a little time in my journal and write my thoughts and feelings and review my objectives for the day. The key with these thirty minutes is to spend some time with yourself. Treat it as a time to stop, reflect and think about your needs.
The act of writing a journal gives you a way to empty your head of things that might be worrying you. Or it might highlight some area of your life you feel is out of balance.
Now, in your case, Frank, you have already completed your Areas of Focus workbook so you know what each of the eight areas means to you. This gives you a reference point to refer to that will help you to see where things are going well and where things might not be going quite so well.
By completing the workbook, what you have done is to externalise the things that are important to you. This makes it so much easier to see if everything is going well.
For instance, health and fitness is quite high up on my list and while my diet and exercise have been very good for a number of years, one area I have neglected is sleep. I haven’t been getting enough and I realised I need to make some changes to my day so I give myself every opportunity to get the required seven and half hours of sleep I need each day.
This meant reviewing my calendar, adjusting my available coaching times and moving my daily admin time to earlier in the day.
The funny thing was when I first realised my sleep was not good, I could not see where I would be able to find the time. But writing about it, reflecting and thinking about solutions over a couple of weeks, I soon found a way to accommodate more sleep time into my schedule.
While it was running around in my mind, it became a huge problem. When I sat down to think about it objectively and look at the resources I had available, I soon found the solution was in my own hands and a few small adjustments to my calendar solved the problem.
One of the great things about giving yourself some time for yourself is you have an opportunity to look at what is on your mind and to come up with solutions so they are removed from your mind.
Our brains are incredible things that have evolved to keep us alive over hundreds of thousands of years. And that is where our brains fall down. They are designed to keep us alive and not necessarily evolve and develop us as individuals. This means even the smallest of problems will become amplified until we become stressed out and worse, stuck in a cycle of worry and anxiety.
By giving yourself thirty (or more) minutes each day for yourself, you can occasionally ask yourself a series of simple questions. Questions like:
- What work issue/project is most on my mind?
- What health issues are bothering me?
- What area of focus feels out of balance?
Now, most days, there will likely be nothing, but from time to time, there will be something, and this allows you time to externalise the problem (write it down) and to let your intelligent brain consider solutions.
Now, there are two parts to your brain. There’s the conscious brain—this is where your survival instincts lay. This is the brain responsible for making your stressed, anxious and on edge. Now, this is a good thing because it allows you to stay away from imminent danger. It’s what has kept us human beings alive. It’s the flight to fight part of our brains.
So, running away from your angry boss or upset customer. Or avoiding calling the bank to talk about your unauthorised overdraft is all controlled by your conscious brain. So, is ignoring your expanding waistline, your constant fatigue and the pain in your back that won’t go away. All of these ‘decisions’ are controlled by your conscious brain.
If you never stop to reflect and think about you, you never engage your more intelligent part of the brain—your subconscious brain.
Now, I like to think the subconscious brain is where your knowledge and life experience mingle and develop unique solutions to all your problems. The problem is, that you need to give your subconscious brain time to do its stuff.
Your conscious brain is designed to make quick decisions such as running away from an angry mother bear and avoiding calling that upset client.
Your subconscious brain is where you will find all the resources you need to solve all your problems. It might not be very helpful if you come face to face with a charging, angry mother bear protecting her cubs, but for most of our everyday problems, it is by far the best part of your brain to engage when you want to bring a sense of calm and control in your life.
The reality is, that there’s always something on our minds. Something that doesn’t feel right. The question is: what are you going to do about it?
You can choose to ignore the problem, or you can externalise it and reach into your subconscious mind for the resources that will give you the solution.
Just some of those resources would be:
- Ask someone who has the knowledge to help you. That could be a doctor, a dietician or a fitness instructor. It could be a friend, a boss or a colleague.
- You could read some books or articles or listen to podcasts etc.
- And of course, you have your own experience. What have you learnt in the past about this particular problem that could help you solve it?
All these resources are in your subconscious mind, but if you do not give yourself some time alone to stop and think, you will never gain access to this amazing resource.
Over the years, I’ve leant not to be afraid to ask myself what’s bothering me right now and what can I do to get it off my mind? It’s when I go through that process I find that the things that are bothering me are not as bad as I imagine them to be and that a simple fix is often just a small amount of time away.
On my recent flight back to Korea, I knew I was not going to get any sleep on the overnight bus ride to Dublin Airport, but I reasoned that as I was going to be on an eleven-hour flight from Paris to Seoul, I would have time to get some sleep on the plane. And as I was going to be very tired, I would not have much of a problem getting to sleep.
What I didn’t bank on was to be sat next to two lovable small boys who once the flight attendant dimmed the lights after our meal, would start fighting and screaming. So much for being able to settle down to a few hours' sleep.
Initially, my conscious brain reacted. I began to feel anxious and annoyed. But then I stopped. Externalised the problem—I was extremely sleep-deprived and these two boys were making it impossible to sleep.
Once I pushed the problem to my subconscious brain I calmed down and realised there was still eight hours left of the flight and these boys were not going to be able to carry on fighting and screaming for all those hours.
And sure enough, after about ninety minutes, they got tired and fell asleep. Cue seat back and sleep.
Okay, I didn’t get as much sleep as I had hoped for, but by calmly waiting for the boys to get tired, I wasn’t stressed—one way to not be able to sleep—and I got around five hours. Enough to get me through the long flight.
So there you go Frank. If you’re missing something it’s giving yourself time each day for yourself. To look at the big picture of what’s going on in your life and to externalise (ie write down) any issues or problems you feel you may have.
Your subconscious brain may not give you the solutions immediately, but if you give it enough time it will.
Life was never designed to be smooth sailing. It’s a journey, and they will be plenty of rough seas and storms. The ‘secret’, if you can call it that, is to give yourself time to reflect and use your natural resources to calm those seas and break those storms. This is where you will find the important things, and then you can prioritise them and make sure that is where you spend most of your time each day.
Good luck Frank with your journey and thank you for your question. And thank you to you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, why must we do the so-called backend work if we want to be more productive.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 224 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 224 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Last week, I wrote about the importance of the backend work and why you need to take a few days off to isolate yourself and really go through the process. That was inspired by a question I was asked a few weeks ago about what the backend work involves and why it’s important.
This week, that question is the one I will be answering.
Now before we get into the question and answer, just a heads up that I’ve just released my latest online course. It’s the first of a new series of mini-courses I will be doing this year which takes a single part of time management and productivity and show you, step by step, how you can implement it into your daily life.
The first one is on time blocking. Possible the most effective way to get control of your time and to make sure you have time for doing the things you want to do. Ultimately, everything we want to do will involve some time, which means we need to have complete control over our time. That’s what this course will teach you to do.
Full details of this fantastic course are in the show notes and you can sign up for it right there.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Liz. Liz asks: Hi Carl, I’ve heard a lot of people talk about things like areas of focus and north stars, but I’m not sure what they really mean. All I want is a way to get control of the crazy amount of work I have to do. Is there any reason why I should be worrying about these things?
Hi Liz, thank you for your question.
It sounds like what you are asking is why are things like establishing your goals and the important things in your life a necessity. Now the important things in your life come from areas (or roles) that can often be neglected if all we are focused on is finishing our work or hitting deadlines. It’s not healthy to be stressed out and anxious about the work we have to do and to let other, more important, areas of our life go neglected.
Now, I admit, with my coaching programme, the first thing I need to do with a new client is to get on top of any backlog or outstanding work that is hanging over a client. But if I am to help a person become better organised and more productive in the long-term so they have time for things like their family, relationships, health and fitness and enjoying life, I need to move to establishing what their long-term goals are and what is important to them.
You see, when you build your life on a foundation of long-term goals and areas of focus, you feel less stressed, more in touch with yourself and fulfilled. It means that these areas and goals become the priority in your life as a whole and work, and the associated workload, is just dealt with.
It’s when work becomes the central part of our lives that things will ultimately break down. You’ll burn out and you will feel exhausted.
But, more importantly, when you know what your long-term goals and areas of focus are, you give yourself a “why”. Why are you doing what you are doing?
Most people go into a job and see it as a way to get some money to pay for groceries, mortgages and going out. That’s a very depressing way to see your work. Your work needs to have some meaning, some other reason why you are doing it.
It could be part of your long-term goal—to become a leader within your organisation, or it could be you want to help people improve their lives.
In my case, the reason I turn up every day is because I see it as a vehicle to help people. Helping people gives me a huge buzz. It excites me and leaves me feeling energised and fulfilled. That’s my why and I see my work as part of my life’s purpose area of focus.
Life would be horrible if I was reacting to my to-do list every day. That way my to-do list would fill up with everyone else’s long-term goals and areas of focus and I would find myself being pulled in all sorts of different directions and those directions would not necessarily leave me feeling happy or fulfilled.
So the backend work is what puts you in control.
So, what’s involved in the backend work?
Well, the first place to start is to ask yourself what you would like to be doing in ten or twenty years' time? That can be hard to do if you have never thought about it before, but where would you like to be living? What would you like to be doing every day?
You may feel you are happy where you are today, and that’s fine except that life doesn’t stand still. We get older, societies and cultures change and if we are not changing with them we are falling behind.
Do nothing to stay fit and healthy today and in ten or twenty years' time you will be struggling to move, you will be wracked with pain and your health will be causing you to spend a large proportion of your time in hospitals. Is that what you want to be doing in ten or twenty years?
Do nothing to improve your skills, and very soon, the work you are skilled at today will be obsolete or have been replaced by a computer. In the last twenty years, I’ve seen receptionists, specialised camera operators, secretaries and sales admin disappear. All of which have been replaced by new technology. Receptionists have been replaced by automated telephone systems, sales admin by Salesforce, secretaries by email, Teams and Slack and specialised film camera operators replaced by drones
So the area of focus related to your personal development is important if you want to stay relevant in your industry.
The best way to build a set of long-term goals that inspire you and to learn what is important to you is to step away from your day to day life for a few days and go somewhere outside of your normal environment.
Book yourself into a country-house hotel or a mountain retreat for a few days and get away from your day to day life. Use these days to really think about what you want and what is important to you.
Use this time to expand your areas of focus—what would you like to regularly do with your family and your friends. What skills would you like to learn? Perhaps you’ve always wanted to learn a musical instrument or to play tennis?
I have a free areas of focus workbook you can download from my website that will guide you through the process of turning these areas of focus into actionable steps you can take every day or week.
The problem is most people will never go through this process. It’s as if they are scared to discover what they want or afraid of making a mistake. The thing is you will never make a mistake. You can change your plans at any time. That’s the fantastic thing about being alive. We can change our minds.
Up until I was thirty-five my whole life plan (if you could call it that) was predicated that I lived and worked in the United Kingdom. It never crossed my mind I would end up living and working in South Korea. Well, that’s where I am and that’s where my future plans are focused on. Life is wonderful in the way it throws up opportunities at almost every junction.
But, it is important to have goals because they give you a direction and a purpose. Without goals, you’ll end up helping everyone else achieve their goals (and not in a positive way).
That said, the biggest benefit to know what you want and what is important to you is your whole time management and productivity system will be focused on you and your wants. When you are focused and making progress where it matters, you become a leader and an inspiration to everyone around you. And when that happens, you begin to give back to the people that matter to you. It’s a win-win. You take care of yourself and your needs and at the same time, you contribute to everyone around you.
You will be more positive, more intentional and less stressed. Everything you do will be more meaningful and you will know exactly why you are doing something, even if you don’t find the particular task pleasant.
And when all that happens, you will be energised and that is a great way to improve your overall productivity.
So, there you go, Liz. I hope that has answered your question. Now go and book those three or four days off, get yourself checked into a nice quiet hotel and enjoy the process of designing the life you want to live.
And… Before I finish, this podcast will be taking a break next week. We will be back in two weeks.
In the meantime, thank you Liz for the question and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
How do you plan out your projects? Not just your professional ones, but your personal ones too. That’s what we will be exploring in this week’s episode.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Time Blocking Course
The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
The Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 223 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 223 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In the world of productivity and time management, we often talk about tasks and projects and how best to organise these.
There is also the added complication for those of you who are self-employed and have a greater degree of freedom in what you work on. How do you choose your next project? Sure, sometimes that may be obvious, but often it’s not.
So this week, we’re going to look at how to impose self-assigned deadlines and stick with them and also how to manage projects within the Time Sector System.
Now, before we start, I just want to give you a heads up that I launched a brand new course over the weekend called The Time Blocking Course. This is the first of a series of mini-courses I will be doing over the year that takes a single concept—such as time blocking—and teach you how you can build these valuable productivity skills into your own life.
Full details of this fantastic course are in the show notes.
Okay, time to have you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks: Hi Carl, I am a music producer and I have several projects on the go although non have deadlines but I’d like to start using some. Do you have any tips on sicking to self-made deadlines and working on multiple projects whilst using the Time Sector system? All of my projects (music or life) don’t really have deadlines but was wondering if you can help?
Hi Tom, thank you for your question.
One additional question you asked about was project objectives or outcomes. Now, this is one of the most important starting points. As Robbin Sharma says: Projects (or goals) are exciting at the beginning, messy in the middle and beautiful at the end. The biggest problem with most projects is never the start or the end, it’s the middle bit. Yes, it’s messy, but it’s also where the hard work is. And it’s boring, difficult and often hell.
When you have a clear objective or outcome for the project, it gives you the motivation to keep going when things get very difficult.
The outcome is the vision of what things will look like when you finish the project and it’s that vision that keeps you going when things become boring, hell and difficult. As Winston Churchill said, “When you’re going through hell, keep going”. And to do that you need motivation.
And of course, a clear objective will tell you when you have finished the project.
But… There is another part here. Why are you doing the project? Without your why you will lose motivation. It’s the real motivation behind success at any project or goal. Your why could be anything, the important thing is that your why means something to you. For instance, in music, you could have the ultimate goal of winning a Grammy the reason why you are working on this particular project is it will add to your body of music that will get you noticed.
Now, what about self-imposed deadlines. These can be very difficult to observe because there’s a lack of accountability. There’s no one chasing you or waiting for you to finish the project. This means you can very easily let deadlines slip which does nothing for your focus.
I am in a similar position to you, Tom I have a number of projects I want to complete this year, but as there are no clients directly involved in these projects the onus is on me to stick to a planned completion schedule.
Now, the way I have found to make this work is to divide the year up in quarters on a chart or in a spreadsheet and set them as columns. If you include a “to be assigned” column that gives you five columns to create.
Then, to add all your projects to one of the quarter columns.
Now, that’s the easy bit. The difficult part is creating the right balance. You will not get very far if you put all your projects in the first two quarters. You will have far too many projects. The trick is to understand how many projects you can realistically do each quarter.
When I began this year, I knew that a realistic goal for me was to complete two big projects each quarter. This was based on experience and although it would stretch me, it would mean I will have to work a project every week, but as long as I was working on one of those two projects each week, I knew I would complete those two projects in the quarter. It would stretch, but not overwhelm me.
Now, the next part is to decide which projects you will do in each quarter.
At the time of recording this, we are approaching the end of the first quarter of 2022. And I have just finished my second big project of the quarter.
If you are dividing up your year by project, and you feel you can manage three projects per quarter, then you have twelve projects you can work on this year. Now, I would round that number down. So instead of twelve, I would make it ten projects for the year. That’s still a large number of projects, but by rounding down the number of projects you give yourself some breathing room in case one or two projects don’t go according to plan.
And let’s be honest here, life is never a straight line. Things go wrong, sometimes events beyond our control will interfere with our plans. So, build in some breathing room.
Okay, so now we know how many projects we can work on this year, the next question is what projects will you work on? You may find that projects for the first two quarters will be easy to assign. It becomes more difficult to assign the third and fourth quarters. This is why we have the fifth column: the “to assign” column.
This is really where you start. Write out all the projects you want to accomplish this year. If you don’t know the specifics yet, that’s okay. You can call a project something vague such as “produce album TBC” (TBC standing for To be Confirmed”) It means you have given yourself space to work on an album in say, Q3 or Q4. You can decide what album you will work on later in the year.
I should point out, that this projects list is not exclusively for your work. You want to put your personal projects on there too. Part of the reason we don’t complete our personal projects is that we do not give them the same weight as our professional projects. The reality is, our personal and professional lives are equal. I would argue that your personal life is more important than your professional life, but we’ll save that argument for another day.
To complete any project you need time. This means if you want to complete a personal project, you will have to give it some time. Now, most people do not treat personal projects with the same focus as professional projects. It’s as if personal projects are luxuries and we feel guilty about doing them. This, of course, is ridiculous. You should never feel guilty about working on personal projects.
Let’s imagine you have a personal project to clear out your garage ready for the summer. Okay, you now have the basics required for a project. You know the result—clear out the garage. You also have a time frame—the start of summer. Now all you need to do is work out how long you will need and how you are going to do it.
Now, apparently, the first official day of summer in the northern hemisphere is the 21st of June. So that’s the day you set for the project deadline. That date comes towards the end of the second quarter, so if I were doing this, that would be a Q2 project.
That gives approximately ten weeks to work on this project. If I divide that up I could spend two hours each weekend cleaning out the garage and by the end of the ten weeks, I would have spent twenty hours on that project. That should be plenty of time to complete that project.
Now, in the Time Sector System, all I would need to do now is create a recurring task in my task manager that starts on Saturday 2nd April that says “work on garage clean out” and add that task to my recurring areas of focus (this kind of task relates to my lifestyle area of focus)
I know as long as I spend two hours (out of a 48 hour weekend) on as many weekends as possible during Q2, I will complete that project.
Now, there will be some variables here. There will be weekends when you will be away and cannot work on the garage. That’s fine skip that weekend. There could be weekends where instead of working on the garage on a Saturday, you could reschedule it for Sunday, or a day in the week if you have a free day somewhere.
You can use the same principles for your work-related projects. If producing music is part of your core work—which I guess is from your question, Tom, then this is going to be a little easier. With the Time Sector System, you will already have most of the tasks you need to perform set up in your recurring areas of focus. This is your core work, so having time set aside for doing your core work is vital. If it’s got to be done, you need to have a time assigned for doing it.
You will also have time blocked out on your calendar for this core work too.
Each week, for example, I have five hours blocked for writing and three hours for recording videos and this podcast. This is my core work, so it must be done each week. So, it has time assigned for it.
If the projects you are talking about, Tom, are projects on top of your core work, you will need to decide how much time you want to (or need to) spend on these each week and block the time out on your calendar. I do this with my online courses. I have an afternoon blocked out each week for online coursework. Most of the time it’s just updating websites, or adding the occasional supplemental video. But I do have time set aside for working on these.
Now, here’s a little secret tip for you. If you have set a deadline to complete a project by 30 May, I would block out the 24th and 25th May for solely working on that project. This would be blocked out now.
The reason for doing this is two-fold. First, it gives you a 48-hour window to dedicate yourself exclusively to this one project. And secondly, knowing you have these 48 hours, you can make sure you have no meetings or other commitments on those days. It’s much easier to decline a meeting a few weeks in advance than it is a few days before. You can tell everyone in yours here of influence you will not be available on those days well in advance.
The best way to manage your projects is to first know what you want to accomplish in a given time frame—quarters are usually best, but you can apply this to months if you prefer—then set realistic deadline dates for those projects.
However, the secret sauce, if you like, is to allocate time each week for working on those projects. It’s knowing you have sufficient time each week for project work, that removes the overwhelm, stress and worry that you will not be able to complete the project. Just doing a little bit each week, will keep the momentum going and ensure that you successfully complete the project on time.
The truth is it all comes down to time. And that means whatever you want to accomplish, personally and professionally, you need to set aside time for working on it. That is inescapable. No time, no completed project.
Thank you, Tom, for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is about time blocking effectively.
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Episode 222 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 222 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Have you ever tried time blocking? I suspect many of you have tried; probably with mixed results.
Now for those of you who don’t know about time blocking, time blocking is where you block out increments of time on your calendar for doing work without being interrupted. It prevents other people from scheduling you in meetings and it gives you a sense that you have enough time to do your work each day.
Does time blocking work?
Yes. It does work, but it only works if you build flexibility into it. There’s a lot of conflicting advice around time blocking. Possibly the worst piece of advice is to block out every minute of the day for your activities. I’ve never met anyone who has been able to successfully do that.
There are just far too many things that could go wrong when you micromanage your time in that way. Firstly, meetings rarely start and finish on time, traffic jams can cause you delays and then there are all the potential tech issues.
Time blocking only works if you first know what you need to do and secondly you build in flexibility. Then you only need to add in a little discipline and your productivity AND time management skyrockets.
Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, If you don’t know already, I have a YouTube channel that is full of advice, tips and tricks on time management, goal setting and productivity. So, if you are looking for a place to help you improve your time management and so much more, then head over and take a look. I am sure there will be something that will help you.
Plus, you can get all my YouTube videos, PLUS blog post and this podcast in one convenient place by joining my weekly newsletter. You can join with the link in the show notes.
Okay, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ally. Ally asks; Hi Carl, I’ve heard you occasionally talk about time blocking and I think I know what it means. Do you have any tips or tricks for time blocking effectively?
Hi Ally, thank you for your question.
You’re right I have spoken about time blocking and for me it is a big part of why I can consistently write blog posts, do this podcast and produce YouTube videos every week while at the same time running a full time coaching and teaching business.
However, to get the most out of time blocking is does involve a bit more than simply blocking time out each day on your calendar. You need to know that what you are doing during your blocked time is important and moving the right things forward.
Let me explain.
I’ve seen advice such as block out time for doing focused work each day. Now on the surface that makes sense. After all, if you dedicate two or three hours a day for doing important work without interruptions, you will get a lot done right?
Well, yes and no. You see, if you don’t know what you are going to do in those two or three hours before you start, you are going to waste a lot of time trying to decide what to do. If you want your time blocked sessions to be productive, you need to know precisely what you will do before you start.
And that means doing some forward planning—something most people are terrible at.—I struggle to persuade people to give themselves ten minutes at the end of a day to plan the next. If they also need to plan what to do in a three-hour focused time block as well it’s not going to be likely.
I should point out that daily and weekly planning is the secret weapon of all highly productive people. These are the people who know what needs to be done and when. They are rarely if ever stressed and you will never find them overwhelmed. It’s impossible to be overwhelmed when you know what you have to do and you know when you will do it. And if a crisis happens, you absorb it like water does with a rock and quickly get back on track.
Anyway, I digress.
The first thing you need to know is what is important to you. And that really does mean what is important to you—not your company or your clients. What’s important in your life?
How important is spending time with your family? Exercise? Taking a walk in nature? Meditation? These all need time. Time is not something you can magically pull out of a hat on demand. If you want to do something you must allocate time for it. If that’s not a law of physics it should be.
Now, most people operate on an “if I have time” principle. If I have time I will call my parents. If I have time I’ll go for a run this weekend. If I have time I will clear out the garage.
The problem is the “if I have time” principle does not work. This is why so many garages don’t have any space for the cars they were built for. It’s why almost 60% of the western world are overweight and why so many parents complain they rarely hear from their children these days.
We never have ‘spare’ time. If you want to do something you have to schedule it. You have to make a commitment to yourself to do it.
Your garage would get cleared if for the next three Saturdays you scheduled 10 am to 1 pm for garage cleaning and it was blocked in your calendar. You would get control of your health if you scheduled 30 minutes every day for exercise and your parents would be a lot happier if you made 7 pm on a Saturday night the time you call your parents.
So the first step to time blocking effectively is to schedule time for doing the things you want to do. Start with yourself. That way your work is not going to dominate your life.
Next, your work. Here we need to ask the question: What is my core work? This is the work you are employed to do.
Now a salesperson is not employed to spend 80% of their time filling out CRMs and documents for the benefit of lazy sales managers. A Salesperson is employed to sell. So, at least 80% of their time needs to be spent selling or doing work that is likely to result in a sale—follow-ups, calling customers and meeting prospects.
A salesperson’s core work is to sell. So any activity that leads to a sale, needs to be blocked out on their calendar.
This applies equally to teachers, designers, architects, real estate agents and doctors. Time spent doing the work you are trained and employed to do needs to be blocked out on your calendar.
Now, of course, teachers and doctors are likely to have some kind of rota system (a kind of time blocking if you think about it) where they are either teaching or on duty. When I taught at the university, the university gave me my teaching schedule and I entered that into my calendar.
When it came to marking exam papers, that was time I needed to block out, but the university told me the date they wanted the papers returned, so it was easy for me to find the two or three days I needed to mark and evaluate the papers.
Whatever work you do, you will have some core duties that are your responsibility, It is these core duties you need to find time blocking for each week.
Now, a little tip here. If you can fix these time blocks for set times per week you will find your life is a lot easier. For instance, I write one blog post and two newsletters each week. In total, I need around five hours each week to do this, so I block three hours out on a Monday morning called “writing time” and two hours on a Tuesday morning. This ensures that I always have time each week to do my writing.
Likewise, I need three hours for doing my YouTube videos each week, so I have three hours blocked out on a Friday morning for that.
These times are fixed and it makes life so much easier. When I begin the week, I know I have time for my writing and video recording.
Now, I know it might not be possible to fix time like this, but see if you can. It makes planning the week so much easier.
Here’s a tip for you.
Design your “perfect” week. To do this create a new calendar in your calendar app and call it “Perfect week”. Then from a blank calendar sketch out how you would lie your week to be with all your personal work time blocks.
You want to include how much sleep you want by putting in you're going to bed and waking up times. Then how long do you want for yourself in the morning for morning routines etc? Make sure you have plenty of blank spaces for the unexpected.
This gives you a good idea of how your week would look if you had everything you want to do on there and will help you decide if it is possible. Often you might find what you want to do and the time you have available is not realistic and you can make some modifications.
Time blocking is a very effective way to get control of your time and ensure you get the things you want to do done. But, you need to commit to it and treat your calendar as sacred territory. It’s no good spending time building your “perfect” week and then ignoring your calendar. If you do decide that time blocking, or some form of it, is for you then commit to doing it. This is not something you dabble at. It’s something you commit to.
I hope that has helped, Ally. Thank you for your question. And before we finish, I have just finished recording a new course on time blocking. Details of this will be on my website in the coming days if it’s not already there.
Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s podcast is about identifying your purpose—possibly the most difficult area of focus to define.
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Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Episode 221 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 221 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
One of the parts of life I talk about is areas of focus and there are eight areas we all share. These are:
Family and relationships.
Lifestyle and life experiences
Career/business
Finances
Self-development
Health and fitness
Spirituality
And life’s purpose
Many of these areas are easy to define and establish what they mean to us. However, most people struggle with their life’s purpose.
Now, I suspect this is because we think our life’s purpose needs to be something grandiose and world-changing when in reality life’s purpose is nothing more than helping other people and contributing in some way to our society and that can take form in multiple different ways.
So, this week, I am exploring how you can establish and develop your life purpose so you can work on bringing balance to all eight of these areas.
Now, before we get to this week’s question, have you joined my free weekly newsletter yet? This is a weekly newsletter that comes out every Friday and brings you all the content I produced that week including my YouTube videos, podcasts and blog post as well what I have been reading and watching from others.
Additionally, you get a weekly productivity or goal setting tip. It's tremendous value and will give you something more constructive to read and watch over the weekend.
All you need to do is use the link in the show notes to join.
Okay, time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jamie. Jamie asks: Hi Carl, I’ve recently been working through your Areas Of Focus Workbook and have most of the areas worked out. The one I am struggling with, though, is life’s purpose. I really don’t know what my life purpose is. Could you give me some ideas about what I should be writing here?
Hi Jamie, thank you for the question and for downloading and working through the workbook.
Before I begin, I should mention, if you want to get a copy of the Areas of Focus Workbook. You can download it for free from my downloads centre on my website.
Okay, as I mentioned in the opening, we all have eight areas of focus. We all have them, the only thing is what these areas mean to us will be different and how important they will be. For me, health and fitness is higher up than finances. For others, their self-development could be high up and spirituality low down.
For the most part, these will be easy to define. Family and relationships, for instance, is likely to be the easiest to define and, as Jamie mentions, life’s purpose is very difficult.
So, what does life’s purpose mean?
Now, this may be different for many of you, but the way I see life’s purpose is in contributing back to society. It’s in giving and helping.
Now, let me ask you a question; how do you feel when you have helped someone out of a difficult situation? I know I feel great. I get a buzz from helping people.
When I was in my early twenties, I did not really think about how I felt about it, but now, as I look back through my life I realise the most fulfilling moments in my personal and professional life are those moments when I have helped someone or contributed to a worthwhile cause.
There is something special about using your skills and knowledge to help someone in need. This is why I don’t really believe anyone should retire. Sure, by all means, leave your job, take some time out for yourself, but if you really want to be happy, you should use the knowledge and skills you developed over your professional life to help your community. You could write about your experiences, help out at a community centre or go to a local college and teach.
If you have taken care of your financial area of focus, your life will no longer be about earning a living, now your life should be about giving back to society.
Let me explain using my own life experience. When I was in my twenties I did not really know what I wanted to do. I tried all sorts of jobs, from hotel management to car sales. And while I liked all those jobs, they really were just ways to earn a bit of money so I could go out clubbing with my friends on a weekend.
I hated Monday mornings and I remember sitting in my living room on a Sunday night dreading going back to work. I lived for the weekends and it was a miserable existence. If you are living your life for the weekends then 70% of your life is going to waste.
The funny thing is, as I look back now, any additional work given to me was always a pain. I always felt overwhelmed and client problems caused me stress and worry. While I loved law and enjoyed working with the people I worked with, I was not really happy inside. I was still going to work to pay the bills.
Things changed for me when I took a year out to teach English in Korea. I knew I need to think about my future, I couldn’t bear to feel I was going to spend the rest of my working life living for a salary.
It was when I began teaching I discovered that helping people was incredible. Life no longer became about me, it became about my students. I was consumed with finding betters ways to build their confidence when speaking English. I stopped hating Sunday evenings—in fact I was often so excited to get back into the classroom I struggled to sleep.
Now, I found myself still going out with my colleagues and friends on a weekend, but my life during the week was no longer about living for the weekend. I got to live life every day.
What changed? The biggest change was my professional life was no longer about me. It became about my students. And this is really what your life’s purpose is all about. It’s about using your skills and knowledge to help other people. When you have that shift in mindset, your whole life changes.
The first change you will notice is you no longer worry about the clock. When I worked in an office, I arrived a few minutes before my start time and I left as soon as I could at the end of the day. Now, I have no problem spending a few extra minutes helping a student or client with a problem.
My relationships have improved too. Now, when I am with my friends and family I am no longer worrying about work and having to go into the office the next day. I am more positive, a better person to be around and when I am with my family and friends and really am with them—instead of my mind still worrying about work.
When you think about it, working 9 till 5 (or what every time you work) is just a concept from industrialisation. Before we industrialised, we didn’t worry about the clock. We woke up at sunrise, we went out into the fields and did our work, returning when the sun went down. Because our only goal was to provide food for our families through the unproductive winters, life was much harder, but it was also a lot simpler. Spring, summer and autumn were about growing, nurturing and harvesting our crops. Winter was about doing the repairs and preparing for the coming spring.
We got more rest in the winter because the days were shorter. We worked long hours in the summer when the days were longer.
We essentially worked with nature. Now we work against nature, and that causes us to feel anxious, stressed and leads to all sorts of dangerous lifestyle diseases.
So to really understand what our life purpose is, we want to ask ourselves: how can I help and contribute to society?
From that question, you can look at your profession—how does your work help other people. If you are in sales, you are solving people’s problems by providing them with a tool or service that will solve their problems. If you are in customer service, you provide answers to customers’ problems and, of course, teachers and doctors help people develop themselves and stay healthy.
When you think about it, your life’s purpose will always be about giving back. Writers bring joy and entertainment into people’s lives. Actors and comedians also. Scientists develop new ways of improving people’s lives and find better and cleaner ways to heat our homes and fuel our cars.
So, Jamie, think about how you help others. What is it about your work that solves other people’s problems? Change your perspective about your work from one that provides you with an income to one that gives you the opportunity to help people who need your skills and knowledge to solve difficult and stressful problems in their lives.
Last week, I wrote in my Learning Centre’s Learning Note, that your work needs to change from being just a job to become your mission to help. When you wake up in the morning knowing that what you will do today will help someone, you are going to start the day with a lot more energy and purpose than if you wake up focused on writing reports, responding to emails and attending meetings.
As I wrote in my learning note:
“Your job is a vehicle that allows you to help people. There is nothing more satisfying than being able to help someone in some way. To solve their problems, help them overcome a difficulty, or give them support when they need it.
Whether you are an author, a financial advisor, a doctor, or a real estate agent, your job is to help people. When you see your work from that perspective, you will never worry about how much time you spend doing your work. You will be present when with your family, you’ll be happier, less stressed and will be a pleasure to be around.
Surely, that is better than worrying about how much time you spend doing work? “
I hope that has helped, Jamie, and thank you for your question.
Thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, we’re entering into the realm of personal identity and how successful and productive people think and I explain why this is important.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Script
Hello and welcome to episode 220 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
When you think about it, being better organised and more productive is quite straightforward. Knowing what needs to be done, by when and how doesn’t require a lot of effort or special skills. It just requires application and a little self-discipline.
But if it is that simple, why do so few people do it? Well, that’s what we will be answering this week and I hope I will be able to give you some tips that will help you not only improve your overall productivity but improve other areas of your life.
Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, just a reminder if you want to get all the content I produce each week in one place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter.
It’s full of useful tips, plus you get a weekly essay with tricks and ideas you can use to improve and optimise your own system. It’s free and it comes out every Friday—perfect for your weekend reading. All you need do is sign up using the link in the show notes.
Okay, time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Caleb. Caleb asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the videos you have put out. I have watched most of them. I want to be more organised, but I’ve never been that kind of person. Ever since I was at school I’ve always been messy and I’m always late for appointments and I can never stick to a productivity system (and I’ve tried them all). Am I a hopeless case or is there something I am missing?
Hi Caleb, thank you for your question.
I certainly don’t think you are a “hopeless case”. Nobody is. I believe that if one person can be organised and productive, so can anyone else. To me, the interesting thing is why can one person keep everything organised and another person can’t?
One thing, it is not mechanics. There’s nothing difficult about looking at a to-do list and a calendar at the end of a day and deciding what you will do the next day—you don’t need special skills to do that. All you need is ten minutes and everyone can find a spare ten minutes.
Similarly, there’s nothing difficult about moving files to their rightful folders, processing email or clearing a to-do list’s inbox. You don’t need a special talent or a PhD for any of that. Just a mixture of time and a little discipline.
The problem most people experience is often in their own identity. Let me explain:
I see from the way you wrote your question, Caleb, that you use the phrase “I’ve never been that kind of person” and “I’ve always been messy and late for appointments and I can never stick to a productivity system”.
If that is what you believe, Caleb, then that is what will be true… In your mind. This means that if you ever arrived early to an appointment you would feel uncomfortable. You would sense something is wrong. And when that happens, you will self-sabotage yourself and ensure you are late for your next appointment.
Another thing that will happen is you will not tidy something up or keep your folders organised because you believe that you are not that kind of person. You in effect give yourself permission to not be organised and so you are not.
Let’s be honest here; we are all born untidy and disorganised. When I was little I never put my toys away, I didn’t make my bed and I never understood why I had to be ready to go to playschool at 8:30 in the morning. No matter how much my mother shouted at me, it just never occurred to me to put my toys away or get ready for playschool.
Over time, I learned how to put my toys away. I learned that if I did not want to lose things—my favourite toys for instance—it was a good idea to put them in a safe place after I finished playing with them (the amount of times I took my toy tractors Starsky and Hutch car to bed with me is laughable now).
Putting things away so you can find them again the next day is a learned skill. You learn, if things are where they are supposed to be, it makes your life that little bit easier.
So, if a child can learn to be tidy, so can an adult.
It’s also about saying the right things to yourself. In your case, Caleb, it’s going to be about changing your identity. Instead of saying things like “I’m always late for appointments” you need to change that to: “I’m always on time for appointments” and backing that up by taking concrete steps to make sure you will be on time.
Start with something simple. If you are always late for a specific type of appointment, then make it a commitment to always be on time for that appointment from now on.
Changing our thinking—our identity—begins by changing our approach to something and deciding that from now on you will take the necessary action.
We all know exercise is good for us. Yet, very few people consistently exercise. It’s probably the one thing we all know we should be doing, yet it’s the one we are pretty good at coming up with excuses for. Not today, I have too much work to do. It’s raining, I’m not in the mood, I’m tired etc etc.
But what if you told yourself: “I’m the kind of person that exercises every day” and you back that up by having a set of exercises you could do in fifteen to twenty minutes every day? Could you find fifteen to twenty minutes each day? I’m sure you can.
Just to give you a sample. My go-to exercise when I am tired, busy, not in the mood etc is fifty push-ups, 3 sets of 90-second planks and 3 sets of lower back strengthening exercises. I give myself three or four minutes of basic stretching before I begin, and then I begin. On average these exercises take me around twelve minutes to complete and I finish it off with some squats.
Doing these exercises every day is so ingrained now, I do them every day even if I have been out for a run or I do additional weights on top of these.
To me, it would inconceivable not to do them because I am the kind of person who exercises every day. It’s now a part of my identity.
You can adopt the same approach to your daily planning. If you do want to be better organised, more productive and better with your time management, it all starts the day before. You must plan your day.
Now, here, the important part of planning is knowing what you will complete the next day. I knew when I woke up this morning that today I was going to prepare this podcast, write my learning note and get my coaching feedback written. Three things. It meant when my morning calls were completed, I opened up my writing app and I began writing. I did not need to look at my task manager or my calendar.
When I went to bed last night, I knew my morning was clear from 9:00 AM. I also knew I needed to start at 6 AM because my calls began at 7 AM. There was no time wasting when I woke up trying to decide what I needed to do. It was wake up. Make my coffee, drink my lemon water, write my journal, clear my email inbox and prepare for my first call.
And that’s all it takes to be better organised, productive and good with your time management. Ten to fifteen minutes before you end the day make a decision about what you will do the next day. If you tell yourself that this is what you do. It is who you are, and you never forget that, it soon becomes a habit.
Now you also say, that “I can never stick to a productivity system”. If you believe that, you’ve failed before you start. Instead of looking to make any productivity system work for you, you will be looking for reasons why this new system won’t work for you.
The interesting thing about productivity systems is they need customising for your needs. I don’t get many phone calls distracting me throughout the day, and I don’t get a lot of messages through my messaging system. I do get a lot of emails, but I have a system in place for managing that. However, someone else may have Slack or Teams open all day and a boss that demands you respond to her email before she hits send.
You need to develop strategies for dealing with that. But you can develop a strategy within an existing system. Let’s take my approach to email. I process my email in the morning and reply later in the day either between five and six or after dinner between 7 and 8.
Someone else who works in an environment where quick responses to email is expected may need to spend thirty minutes or so at 11:30 am responding to mail and messages and again at 4:30 pm. You develop a process that works for you.
Some people can block out two or three hours every day for focused work, others who have meetings every day, may not be able to do that, but instead, perhaps they can find two days a week where they can squeeze a two-hour block for doing focused work. It’s about taking a system, implementing its foundations and philosophy and then modifying it to work for your special set of circumstances.
My Time Sector System is perfectly modifiable. You can set that system up in pretty much any task manager. You can use tags if you wish, you can create customised folders for projects if you wish (although I don’t recommend you do so), but the key point is all productivity systems will work for you. But they only work if you are committed to making them work.
Before I finish, I should point out that the one trait you need to make any of this work is self-discipline. You need to take full responsibility for all this. Without a commitment from yourself to make things work, they will not work. Changing you identity from believing you are a disorganised mess to being a highly productive, organised individual begins by believing you are that person already and making a commitment to following through.
These days this analogy might seem a bit old fashioned, but if a smoker quits smoking and tells everyone how many days they have gone since their last cigarette, you know they are going to fail. In their mind, they are still a smoker. You know they will begin smoking again. But if that same person tells everyone that they are now a non-smoker, they have begun the journey of changing their identity and they are likely to successfully kick that habit.
I hope that has helped, Caleb. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 219
This week’s question is about the tyranny of the to-do list. Something I’m confident we’ve all felt at times.
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Episode 219 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 219 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Have you ever felt your to-do list is controlling your life and not allowing you the freedom to get on and do the things you want to do? I think we’ve all felt this before and it can be demoralising. The feeling our to-do list is running our lives and we cannot escape. This week, my goal is to change that and to show you that rather than your to-do list controlling your life, it is you who ultimately is in control.
But first, if you want a convenient place to receive all the content I produce each week, sign up for my weekly newsletter. It’s full of useful tips, plus you get a weekly essay with tricks and ideas you can use to improve and optimise your own system.
It’s free and it comes out every Friday—perfect for your weekend reading. All you need do is sign up using the link in the show notes.
Okay, time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Adam. Adam asks: Hi Carl, I started using Todoist about a year ago when I saw one of your YouTube videos and I loved it. But recently, I feel my life is trapped by all the tasks I have to do each day. It’s becoming difficult to motivate myself to look at my list and I am always rescheduling tasks. How do you keep your list from becoming demotivating?
Hi Adam, thank you for your question.
I know how you feel. I’ve been through that forest many times and it can be disheartening to feel trapped by becoming better organised. I’ve recently felt it since we moved house and I got a new office and studio. I want to keep my workplace clean and tidy and everything in its place. The trouble is, to maintain that, it feels I am always cleaning and tidying up.
However, I’ve learned strategies to overcome that. The first is to treat cleaning and tidying as a way to step away from my desk. What I do, is between sessions of sit down work—like preparing this podcast script—I will get up and wipe down the kitchen surfaces, or I might pull out the vacuum cleaner and vacuum the studio. These tasks don’t take very long to do on their own, so they are a great way to keep me moving through the day and consistently done, they keep my office and studio clean and tidy.
When it comes to your task manager this can be a bit more difficult. Part of the problem most people face is in the enthusiasm for building a productivity system. When we start we enthusiastically put all tasks into our task managers. It does not matter whether they are important or not, we just throw everything in there and we then process these into the system.
Now, when you first start, this is an important part. We need to develop the habit of automatically putting our commitments, event and ideas into our system. If we never develop that habit, we fall at the first hurdle. Not getting stuff into our systems, means we never learn to trust the system we create and if you don’t trust your system, it will never work.
However, once you are in the habit of dropping all your tasks, commitments and events into your system, you need to become very protective of what actually gets processed into your system.
I treat my inbox for both notes and tasks as a filter. Nothing moves from there until I have made a considered decision about whether I need to do something or not. I would say, around 60 per cent of what I add to my inbox gets deleted later in the day when I process my inbox because either I have completed the task or I decide I don’t have the time or resources to do the task.
One thing I can assure you, is if you delete something that later becomes important, you will find out and you can add it back in. It’s better to add less and delete more. You can always add something later if it becomes important, but if an unimportant task gets into your system, it can be very hard to find it and remove it later. Who has time to go through all your tasks cleaning them out? Better to spend a few extra minutes making decisions about tasks before they get into your system.
However, I should stress, if you are new to using a to-do list, focus on developing the habit of adding everything to your to-do list or notes first. Once it’s automatic to pull out your phone or open your to-do list when something comes up, you are then ready to move towards filtering tasks before they get into your system.
Although I am pretty good at filtering my tasks and notes, I do still go through both every three months or so and clean them up still. Unimportant things do still get through and into the system.
Now, on a deeper level, Adam, another reason why to-do lists become overwhelming and uninspiring is because they fill up with other people’s tasks and ideas.
One thing I will always stress on people is to develop three areas. These are your long-term goals, areas for focus and core work.
These three parts are where your passion, motivation and focus will come from and should always be your priority.
To give you an example of this, Dwayne The Rock Johnson will always prioritise his gym and family time over everything else. We might not be aware of it, but part of an actors contract is a period of time where they must promote the film or TV show they have been working on.
The promotion tours are not just turning up in London or Los Angeles for the premiere—they involve hours spent in interviews with the press, travelling between countries attending premiere parties in those countries and photoshoots. It’s very time consuming and tiring. Yet, Dwayne Johnson will still be in the gym first thing in the morning (even if that means waking up at 3 AM) to do his gym work and spending time with his family via FaceTime if he is not in the same country.
These activities come from his areas of focus Health and fitness and family and relationships. Your areas of focus will always be a priority.
It’s interesting to see people who are not achieving success in what they do. They don’t have any core areas of focus—instead, they wait for their boss or customers to tell them what to do and then complain about how little time they have for other things.
To have time for “other things” you have to make time for them. Dwayne Johnson does. So do all happy, fulfilled, successful people. There is no other way.
But before you can make time for these, you need to know what they are. I know it’s hard to think about what you want. How and where you want to spend your time. It also takes a long time. It took me over a year to develop a set of long-term goals and areas of focus that motivate and inspire me every day.
But… If you want to be inspired and motivated every day, then it’s non-negotiable. You must do it.
If you haven’t already done so, you can download my free areas of focus workbook to help you develop these.
Now, your long-term goals and core work can be easier to develop. Your core work is simply the work you are employed to do. If you're a salesperson, your core work is selling. This means your daily work tasks need to be promoting sales and avoiding and reducing, the amount of time you spend doing admin. Doing admin is not selling. Same for teaching. A teacher’s core work is teaching. Making sure the majority of your work activities each day are focused on teaching and preparing teaching materials is your core work. Again, student admin is not core work. You want to be minimising the admin.
Long-term goals do not have to be absolutely clear yet. After all, they are long-term. But you do need to know where you want to go.
My long-term goal is to help millions of people to become better organised and more productive. I know that by helping people do this, they will live a life with a lot less stress and anxiety and will free up time to spend it doing what they want to do. Every day, I wake up thinking about how I can achieve that. Growing my business, doing these podcasts, writing my blog posts and recording my YouTube videos does this. This means my core work and long-term goals converge.
Once you know what your long-term goals are what your areas of focus mean to you, the actions and activities you do that develop them become the core of your day. One of your areas of focus is going to be your career and business. Each day you work, it’s likely eight hours of those days will be spent focused on that area of focus. Doing your work better, learning and developing your skills. Making sure that the work you are paid to do is done to your best abilities will form part of your core work and areas of focus related to your career and business.
I saw a meme the other day where the employee says because they are paid below average wage they do a below-average performance. It’s funny on the surface. But it does miss a point. As Jim Rohn pointed out, you are paid the amount of value you bring to the job. That’s the nature of the market. If you want to be paid more, you need to develop your skills and abilities so that your value increases.
We can argue about the pros and cons of the employment market, but the point is, you may not have much control over your salary, but you do have absolute control over the development of your skills. When your skills grow, so does the value you bring to your job.
One of the most motivating sentences I read in a Seth Godin blog was: “If you need a resume you’ve lost”. Meaning, when your skills and abilities rise you get noticed. When you get noticed, you no longer need a resume because people want to hire you.
If 75 to 80% of your tasks are related to your long-term goals and areas of focus you will never have a problem with motivation. You’ll be waking up excited for the day ahead. Sadly, most people will not reach that. Instead, 75-80% of their tasks will be tasks given to them by other people. If I were waking up each day to spend the majority of my day working on other people’s goals and areas of focus, I’d be pretty unmotivated.
So, my advice to you, Adam, is to begin by asking yourself what you want. What do you want to be doing in ten and twenty years time? Once you know that, you have a direction for your life. You can then direct your work activities to develop the skills and abilities to get you to where you want to be. When you are given a task, you can look at it through the lens of your long-term goals. By working on a project for your boss, what skills can you learn? How will it improve your abilities?
I remember when I worked in a law office, I loved dealing with angry clients. I was always afraid of dealing with upset people. I realised I would not go very far in my career if I always ran away from dealing with difficult and upset clients and customers. So I read books on communication, I watched my bosses deal with clients and volunteered to call clients who were not happy.
I soon developed skills that have been so valuable to me and to the companies I’ve worked for. I know how to calm down angry people now.
It’s very similar to the answer Warren Buffett gives to the question what was the best investment you ever made? He says; a Dale Carnegie communication course he took at university. Before that course, Warren Buffett was so afraid of speaking in public he was physically sick. So he enrolled in the course and learn the skill (and art) of communication.
Once you know what you want and where you want to be in the future. Be very clear about what you are employed to do and get very good at doing that work. And make sure your areas of focus are in balance.
When you make these the core of your daily to-do list, you will no longer fear looking at your list. It will be a place to go and get motivated.
I hope that helps, Adam, and thank you for the question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is about how to balance your work life with your professional life.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Episode 218 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 218 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I’m sure you heard of Work/Life Balance and how this is the goal for living a balanced life. Well, is it? Does trying to balance your personal and work life really give you a balanced life?
You see, if you place hard barriers between your personal and professional life you create an unnatural barrier to living life on your terms. If you are up against a tight deadline and you have a very important meeting the next day, what will you be thinking about as you sit on the sofa with your family in the evening? You won’t be thinking about your family. Your mind is going to be on that important meeting that begins in ten hours time.
But because you have a hard rule that states after 6 PM you do not do work, you are now causing yourself a lot of unnecessary stress. The better thing for you to do is to excuse yourself for the evening, go to a quiet room and prepare for your meeting. You’ll feel a lot better, be much more in tune with your needs and you can make it up to your family the next day by taking them out for dinner somewhere nice.
A lot of our time management and productivity problems come from trying to box ourselves in when if you give yourself greater freedom, you’d be a lot happier, less stressed and considerably less overwhelmed.
Now before we get to this week’s question, if you would like to receive all my weekly content, including this podcast as well as my blog posts and YouTube videos in one place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. It’s completely free and each week you get a productivity tip plus get to see what I am reading and watching.
This newsletter is a great productivity and time management resource for your weekend reading. The link to join the newsletter is in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Anna. Anna asks: hi Carl, what do you think of work/life balance? I’m really struggling with this. I have two teenage boys and a full-time job. I worry that I am not able to spend enough time with my boys. Do you have any tips on having a better work/life balance?
Hi Anna, thank you for your question.
There is a lot written about work/life balance and it certainly used to be possible. Back in the day when we worked shifts in a factory where the only action we needed to take was to put widgets on devices, it was easy to leave work behind when we clocked out for the day. We were not coming up with solutions to problems that came up throughout the day.
But for most of us, we do not work that way anymore. That kind of work has been farmed out to machines and robots. We’ve moved into an age where our physical labours are less in demand and our mental abilities have become the in-demand skill.
The great thing about using our physical skills and labour is we can turn off at the end of the day. The only thing we need to worry about is where do we need to be tomorrow.
Being employed for our mental skills makes it a lot harder to turn off at the end of the day. You can still be working on a client’s problems while driving home from the office. It’s much harder to turn off at the end of the day.
We also live in a very connected world. I have clients who live in California and manage teams in Asia and Europe. There’s a seventeen hour time difference between Seoul and San Francisco. How do you do one on one team meetings with that time difference and maintain a work/life balance?
The solution is in something called work/life integration. Rather than seeing our work and personal life are two entirely different things, we combine the two.
Now, anyone who runs their own business will likely already be living a work/life integrated life. It’s a necessary part of building a business. As a business owner, you can’t simply turn off at the end of the workday. You will be constantly coming up with ideas, dealing with customers at all times of the day and having to do admin and other such tasks late into the evening.
So how does work/life integration work?
Well, the first step is to see your day as a whole rather split into work and home. This means if one of your boys is playing in a school rugby match on a Wednesday afternoon and he wants you to come and watch him, you schedule the match in your calendar like you would schedule a business meeting.
Now, because you spent three hours watching your son play rugby, you can catch up with your work later that evening say between seven and ten. To your son, it was far more important to him that you were there at his rugby match, rather than skipping the rugby match and sitting down in the evening watching TV with him.
It’s being there in the moment when it matters that counts, not going through the motions believing that you are doing the right thing every evening.
Now, I accept not everyone can take a Wednesday afternoon off to watch their kid play sport, but the way we work is shifting towards this more flexible way of working. Knowledge work doesn’t naturally conform to strict timelines anyway.
If we take the team leader in California, she is going to have to do meetings in the early morning or late at night if she wants to communicate with her whole team anyway.
So, let’s say our team leader wants a weekly team get together to review current and future projects. She might schedule a meeting at 11 pm for her. That would be 4 pm for her team in Asia and 8 am for her European team. This is one hour per week, where she gets the chance to communicate with her team as a whole.
She could schedule a later start to her day the next day or another day to compensate for the late time for the meeting. There are endless possibilities to reclaim the time back.
An alternative approach is to split your days. Now, this has worked for me, but it is not for the faint-hearted. I live in the Far East. My clients are either in Europe or North America. My clients are active late at night and early mornings in my time zone. So, all my coaching calls are scheduled for either morning or evening.
My afternoons are quiet. I rarely get emails and I have no coaching calls. So, I do my errands and exercise in the afternoons. I can take our dog for a walk with my wife and do any shopping that needs doing.
Now, for most of my working life, I have worked split shifts. I began in the hotel industry and I regularly did the morning and evening shift getting the afternoons off as a break. Then when I came to Korea I taught English for fifteen years where my classes were both early morning and evening classes. So, taking a break in the afternoon somehow feels natural to me.
The key to work/life integration is to do what needs doing in the moment. If you have a young child that needs your help with his homework in the afternoon, then you stop working and help them with their homework.
When your children are on half-term break, with a work/life integration approach, you will free up your calendar as much as possible to spend time with them. When they return to school you can make up time on your work projects or do any time-sensitive work in the evenings when your kids are in bed (or playing video games)
I follow a lot of successful entrepreneurs and read many biographies on tremendously successful people. People like Gary Vaynerchuk and Michael Dell will always be at home for their family dinner in the evenings so they can spend quality time with their families. After dinner and when their kids are in bed, they will do some more work.
I remember seeing a video on how Casey Neistat manages his day. Now, Casey Neistat is a very successful YouTuber and creator. He’s an incredible storyteller. He’s also a bit of a workaholic. He’s a runner too and running every day is a non-negotiable part of his life. So, he wakes up early, does his run, returns home for breakfast with his family, then goes to the office and spends most of his day there. He will return in the evening to spend time with his wife and child and then at 11 pm he will work on editing his videos until 1 am.
Now while Casey works a lot, he still gets five to six hours a day of quality time with his family. He is totally present when he is with them. Knowing he has another two-hour block later in the evening allows him the freedom to forget work for the five hours or so he’s with his family.
People trying a work/life balance approach might be there in person, but they are mentally worrying about all the work that’s piling up because they will not allow themselves a couple of hours to get on top of it.
There will be times when your work is busy and you need to spend more time on your work life than your personal life. I work weekends and so I try and take Wednesdays off. It doesn’t always happen. If I am putting together a new course or preparing for a seminar, I will use that day for recording or preparation. But on those days I do take off, I will make sure my wife and I do something special.
This week, we are going to Seoul—about a three-hour drive away—to have dinner with my parents in law and get our dog’s haircut. (My wife only trusts a specific dog hairdresser in Seoul) This means we have six hours of driving time for conversation and I get a few hours for doing errands in the big city. It’s pure family time.
We will get home around 10 pm and I will go to my office and spend an hour or two doing a little admin, responding to my emails and planning the next day. I’ve still had well over ten hours of quality family time and got my most important work done for that day.
So, Anna, don’t try and live a work/life balance. You won’t be able to do it and will cause you unnecessary stress. Instead, live a work/life integrated life. This way you will always be there for your boys when they need you and when they don’t, you can return and do some work. The sense of freedom you have when you do this will bring you a lot more happiness.
Thank you, Anna, for the question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s episode is a question that came about because of my recently updated Time Sector System course.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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The Working With… Weekly Newsletter
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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 217 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 217 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So, many of you already know that my productivity system is called The Time Sector System. This system is based on managing my work by when I want to do it rather than by project.
Around three or four years ago, I discovered that when I managed my tasks by project, I was spending too much time organising and reviewing and not enough time doing the work. It was leaving me with a lot of work that needed rescheduling at the end of the day. Not a good place to be when you want to feel you are becoming better at managing your time. Too much rescheduling and you lose confidence in your system.
That’s when it dawned on me that, really, the most important part of any system is having the time to do the work, not how you organise your files and projects. That was my light-bulb moment.
Now, I do get a lot of questions about this system. It goes against the grain of many of the more popular systems out there and naturally I get a lot of questions about it. So, I have selected one of those questions to answer this week.
So. Without further ado. Let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Eric. Eric asks, Carl, You used to write and talk a lot about GTD but I notice you no longer use it. Why is that and what do you use instead?
Thank you Eric for your question.
Let’s start by dealing with the elephant in the room. Getting Things Done, a book by David Allen. This is the standard text by which all productivity and time management systems are judged today. There’s nothing wrong with GTD, as it is called. It’s a solid workable system.
However, there are two issues with GTD that caused me problems. The first is this is a book that was first published in 2001 and its concepts are based on what David Allen taught in companies as a productivity and time management trainer in the 1980s and 1990s.
Now, I remember working in the early 1990s and in those distant days it did matter where you were and what tools you had with you. If you wanted to respond to your mail, you needed to be in a place where your mail was because, for most people, there was no such thing as email. And even in the late 1990s, when email became more prevalent, you needed to be at a computer set up for your email.
If you were lucky enough to have a personal email account, you needed to be at home with your “personal computer” in order to reply. For your work email, you needed to be at your office and sitting in front of your work desktop computer.
So, for a simple task such as responding to your mail, you had to be in a specific physical location (home or office) and be in front of your computer (the tool).
The second issue I was struggling with was how the digital task managers were created. For some reason, task managers were set up by project, not context as it should be in a GTD system.
For those not familiar with GTD, in GTD your task lists are organised by context. This means you create lists based on a tool, such as a computer, a phone or car. Place, such as your office or home or person, such as your boss, spouse or colleague.
The idea is you choose what to do based on where you are, with which tool or person.
Now, when I went digital, I fell into the trap of believing the most effective way to manage my tasks was to organise everything by project and to use tags or labels for my contexts. Big mistake.
In GTD, a project is defined as anything requiring two or more steps. This meant, theoretically, arranging for my car to go in for a service was a project or even arranging to have my haircut (I did once have hair that needed cutting). So you can imagine how many projects you end up having on your list.
David Allen mentions that an average person is going to have between seventy and a hundred and fifty open projects.
That’s a lot of projects for an individual like you and me to manage.
Now the glue that makes GTD work is the weekly review. This is where you sit down at the end of the week to go through all your projects to make sure everything is up-to-date and current.
Well, for me, by the time I switched to using the Time Sector System my weekly review was taking almost two hours to complete each week. Yes! Two hours.
No, I don’t know about you, but giving up two hours of my weekend to review all my projects and get current is not really the best use of my time on a weekend.
However, let’s not be too hard on GTD. It’s a great system and it does help you get very organised. All your projects are kept in project folders—originally, paper-based project folders you kept in or near your desk, now digital folders you keep on your computer. It is easy to find what you need when you need it—if you are willing to maintain your system and keep it up to date.
And that’s really the problem with GTD today. Maintaining the system takes a lot of time. Time that could better be served to do the work you are creating lists for.
If you look at the very basics a productivity system needs; it’s a way to collect all your inputs such as calendar events, tasks and notes. You then need to organise those inputs in a way you can find them when you need them and you need to be maximising time to do the work.
GTD crosses the first two boxes. It teaches you to build a collection system. When the GTD book was first launched that meant purchasing a physical inbox that you had on or around your desk. And it organises your documents and relevant materials into projects or reference materials that are easy to find.
However, because of the time, it takes to manage those first two parts, you are taking away a lot of time for doing. And if you want to be more productive, you need to maximise your doing time and minimise your organising time.
That’s why I eventually got to the point where I realised GTD was not working for me. I wanted to free up my organising time so I could focus on doing.
That led me to analyse what was really important about getting my work done. That was when I realised that the only thing that really mattered about a task was when I was going to do it. After all, it does not matter how important or urgent something is, if there are no hours left in the day it is not going to get done that day. Period.
And, I’m sure you are aware now, contexts have become a lot less important. You can design presentations, do work on a spreadsheet, email and make phone calls from a handheld device you carry with you everywhere you go. You no longer need specific tools to do a lot of the work you need to do.
I have been told that contexts are a personal choice. You can create contexts around energy levels. For example, if you feel energetic, you can do some of the more difficult work. If you feel tired you can do some of the less strenuous tasks. That true. But I cannot predict when I will feel energetic or when I feel lethargic. I cannot control how I will sleep tonight. For energy level contexts, there are far too many variables outside my control for those to be effective.
In the end, I realised that all I wanted to know was what tasks were important this week. Which ones did I want to do and which tasks could I do that would move a project or goal forward.
So, I created a folder structure in my task manager that focused on when I would do something. That means I have: this week, next week, this month and next month folders for tasks I am reasonably certain I want to get done in the next eight weeks or so. And I have a long-term and on hold folder for tasks that I’d like to do sometime, but I am not sure yet when I will do them.
What this means is when I do my weekly planning, all I need to focus on is when I will do something and more importantly what will I do that week.
Using this method means instead of spending two hours or so doing a weekly review, my weekly planning sessions last around twenty to thirty minutes. They are a little longer at the end of the month because I am looking at more folders.
It also makes processing what I collected in my inbox much simpler. I have far fewer decisions to make. Really all I am doing is deciding what something is and when will I do it. I don’t have to worry about what context to add and which project to put it in.
Now, all my projects notes and resources are kept in my notes app. Tasks that relate to these projects are hyperlinked to the relevant task so all it takes is one click and I am in my project notes. This makes it so much quicker to get down to work. I can quickly see what’s been done and what needs to be done. I also have access to relevant emails, meeting notes and files all in one place—which is not something you can do if you are managing your projects from a task list manager.
The most important thing for me though, is how I spend very little time managing my projects and reference materials and I am spending far more time doing the work that matters. And this has given me much more free time to do things outside of work. The more time I have available for doing the work the more free time I get at the end of the day.
And, I no longer skip my weekly reviews as it did when I was doing GTD. I’d probably do a proper weekly review once a month. Now, as I know a planning session won’t take longer than thirty minutes, I love doing them. It’s got me a lot more focused on what’s important and I no longer lose anything.
But the most important thing for you to remember is, the best productivity system is the one you design for yourself. I strongly believe that you need to take parts of the many different systems out there and build them into your system. I have elements of Tony Robbins’ RPM (Rapid Planning Method) system, Ivy Lee’s method and the Eisenhower matrix in my system.
Tony Robbin’ RPM is how I plan out my projects and goals. The Ivy Lee Method is how I prioritise my day when I do my daily planning and the Eisenhower Matrix ensures I am working on the things that reduce the urgent work.
It’s taken me a long time to develop a system that works seamlessly. It began with the Franklin Planner in the early 90s, through GTD in the naughties and eventually to my own system I call the Time Sector System.
Always remember, you are a unique individual and what works for one person will not necessarily work for you. Take elements from one and merge them with something else. You will find a system that works best for you and that one will be the one for you.
Thank you, Eric, for the question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is about deciding what to work on and prioritising
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Episode 216 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 216 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
We’ve covered prioritising before in this podcast and it is an important part of being more productive and ensuring that what you are working on is meaningful and moves the right things forward.
However, for those of you who have created a good solid system, you are likely struggling with deciding what to work on. If you are collecting a lot of inputs—tasks, events and ideas—at some point you will have to make a decision about what to do about those collected inputs and, more importantly, when you will do something about them.
And those decisions can be very difficult. So, that is what we will be exploring in this week’s podcast.
Don’t forget, if you want to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Not only do you get a summary and link to my weekly blog post, YouTube videos and this podcast, you also get a free productivity or goal-setting lesson each week.
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Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question:
This week’s question comes from Shelly. Shelly asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the work you produce each week, I have a question about choosing which tasks to work on. I usually begin the day with around thirty tasks in my to-do list and I never complete them all. I feel guilty about rescheduling a lot of tasks. How do you choose which tasks to work on each day?
Hi Shelly, thank you for your question.
This is a great question because it touches on a hidden aspect of productivity and time management.
All productivity and time management systems focus on collecting and organising stuff. Writing everything down and then organising it in a way that means something to us. What often gets forgotten is finding the time to complete these tasks we collect. And, more importantly, deciding which is important and which is not. How do you do that?
Well, time sensitivity is one way. Due dates and deadlines are great motivators for getting things done. If you have a deadline for something, you are going to be more likely to complete it. This becomes even more important if the deadline was given to your by your boss or someone in authority over you.
Your life would be easier if you spent a little time each week doing your taxes—organising your receipts and income and expenditure—rather than leaving a year's worth until a few weeks (or days) before the tax assessment deadline. But, hey, when I don’t have to submit my tax information for ten months, why would I spend an hour every weekend pulling together everything I spent and earned this week? There’s no imminent deadline, so there’s no urgency and therefore it’s not a priority.
So we leave it until a week or two before it’s due and now it’s not an hour, we are talking days if not a whole week doing work on submitting taxes.
If you want to stop the tyranny of tax assessment time, then do a little each week (or month) to keep it organised. It’s not about making it a priority, it’s about making it something you do regularly.
A bigger problem you will be facing each day Shelly, is a phenomenon called “over-choice”. Basically, what this means is when we are faced with a lot of options to choose from, we find it very difficult to decide. We become overwhelmed and anxious about whether we are making the right decision or not.
If you were to wake up tomorrow morning and have one item to do. You would do it. No matter how big or difficult the task was. You would do it. First of all you would be focused and secondly, there’s no decision to make. You are doing that one thing. So you get on and do it.
But we don’t do that do we? We see how easy it is to add things to our task managers and then, so we don’t forget something, we add a random date to a task that roughly equates to when we think it needs doing.
Unfortunately, this strategy leads to tasks coming up on our daily lists that don’t actually need to be done that day but clutter up your today’s task list. When you look at that list in the morning, you have far too many decisions to make.
We try and rationalise that by looking for the urgent tasks—but you often find even that filtering approach leads to too many tasks to complete in one day. We think everything is urgent and the problem there is if everything is urgent which one do you work on first?
What we end up with is a list that gives us too much choice and then we face the paradox of choice—as Barry Schwartz wrote about in his book by the same name.
You make have heard of the studies into choice. When we have a limited number of choices of a particular product we are much more likely to buy one than if we are faced with too many choices. I believe the statistics were when faced with a limited choice 80% bought. When faced with a lot of choices, only 3% chose something.
This is the same for your daily task list. Too many items on that list and you will waste so much time trying to pick something. More often than not you won’t and will stop looking at your to-do list and instead do whatever someone else tells you to do. It’s easier and you delegate choosing to someone else.
It’s why we procrastinate. We have far too much choice.
So, if you want your to-do list to become more effective; you must reduce your list of tasks for the day.
How do you do that?
Well, first look at how you are writing your tasks. Make sure it is very clear what you need to do. I see people writing things like “Paul 353 2458 3579” and expect to know instantly what that task means. It looks like the name Paul and a telephone number. So you may deduce you need to call Paul. But why do you need to call him?
You’d be far better-writing something like: “Call Paul about expected shipment date for Yorkshire Tea”. As soon as you read that you instantly know what you need to do.
The key to writing your tasks is to make sure there is an action verb in the sentence. If you make it very clear what needs to be done with a task you reduce the number of decisions you need to make. And that is really the secret here.
Reduce the decisions you need to make.
And this can be done in another way. Let’s take email. We all get it, some more than others. If you are not staying on top of your email daily, it builds up to a point where you become swamped and overwhelmed.
There are two parts to managing email. Processing; where you decide what, if anything, needs to be done with an email. And doing email—where you respond or act on the email you have decided needs action from you.
Now if you are randomly looking at your email throughout the day, you lose focus on what you were working on. You get dragged away from what you decided to do that day and can quite easily spend a lot of time just responding to email. If you set aside some time each day for processing—say thirty minutes before lunch or first thing in the morning and then a set amount of time each for responding to your actionable email, you reduce the decisions you need to make.
If, for example, you set 4pm to 4;45pm for responding to your actionable email each day, you now no longer have to decide when you will respond. You know you have time for that later in the afternoon. All you need to decide, when an email comes in, is whether or not you need to action it. You’ve simplified your decision making.
With this method, you no longer need to be sending emails to your task manager. All you need now is a single time block in your calendar that tells you when it’s time to clear your actionable email.
What about all those follow-ups and calls you need to make? I find these are often the cause of a lot of clutter in a task manager and are likely to be the tasks that get put off again and again.
Rather than randomly adding these to a task manager, you could group them together as subtasks in a recurring task that tells you to do your calls. Or, if you are in sales and need to follow up with clients regularly to see if they need something, you could put them on a spreadsheet. That way you can record information like when you last called them and any information that would be useful when you do call them.
All you need do then is have a single task telling you to review your calls list.
This is the reason why I stress the importance of knowing what your core work is. This is the work you are paid to do, not the voluntary work you have committed yourself to by using the word “yes” too often.
Once you know what your core work is, you can make sure you block time out on your calendar for doing that core work. Again, once you have done this there’s no decision to make. You look at your calendar and you see what you must do. The decision is already made.
I write a blog post each week. It’s part of my core work. I have set aside Monday morning, once my early morning calls are complete for writing. It’s non-negotiable. It’s what I do. So now, I don’t have to try and decide when I will write the blog post. I know I will be writing the blog post on Monday morning. The only decision I need to make now is what will I write about? I’ve reduced my decisions by 50%.
The key to building more manageable to-do lists, Shelly, is in reducing your choices. The less you have to choose from, the easier that choice will be to make.
This can be achieved by making sure you are very clear about what you want to get accomplished each day and the best time to do this is the evening before.
When you give yourself ten to fifteen minutes before you end the day to make decisions about what you will work on the next day, you no longer have to waste time picking a task. You wake up with a clear set of objectives for the day and you can get started.
The strange thing is once you start to see that most of our productivity problems are caused by the decisions we have to make each day you start to find ways of reducing those decisions. I am a bit extreme here. A couple of years ago I decided I hated having to think about what to wear on my videos each time. So I decided I would wear a navy blue t-shirt. Since I made that decision I have accumulated about twelve navy blue T-shirts. I have six long-sleeve for the winter and six short-sleeved ones for when the temperature gets warmer.
I’ve also been eating the same thing for breakfast and dinner each day for around eight years. This means I don’t have to worry about calories because I eat roughly the same amount of calories each day and I don’t have to decide what to eat. I already know that when I have breakfast today I will have Greek yoghurt with blueberries and mixed nuts. For dinner, I will have chicken salad and a bowl of fruit to finish.
Now, I don’t expect people to follow my lead here. I am not a foodie. So eating the same thing eat day doesn’t worry me. I don’t get bored. And I do have a free day every Saturday where I can eat anything I want. And as for my clothes, I rarely meet people in person these days—certainly not since the pandemic began—so wearing the same kind of clothes each day isn’t an issue for me.
Finally, I would recommend you build as much structure into your day as possible. Doing the same kind of things at set times each day and week isn’t boring. It prevents procrastination. It reduced the number of decisions you need to make and it keeps your task manager clean and tight. You will find you no longer have to reschedule as many tasks are you are doing now and with consistency, life will become so much easier and less overwhelming.
I hope that has helped, Shelly. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is about finding new goals when you have achieved many of your life’s gals already.
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Episode 215 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 215 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Now, we often hear about how to achieve goals, what habits to develop and change our lives. But what do you do when you have achieved many of your long-term goals and what remains no longer inspire you?
Not much is written or spoken about that. It’s as if the assumption is people struggle to achieve goals. Well, that’s not entirely true. It is hard to achieve goals, that as it should be. But it doesn’t mean we don’t achieve them. We do.
So. I’m going to tackle that question this week.
Now before we get to the question, if you would like to receive all my weekly published content in one single place, then subscribe to my newsletter. Not only will you get links to my content, you also get a FREE productivity tip plus notice of any special offers before anyone else.
It’s free and if you want to grow your skills in productivity, time management and goal setting (and achievement) then go ahead and subscribe today. The link to sign up is in the show notes.
Okay. It’s time to hand you over to the Mystery podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question is from Tim. Tim asks: Hi Carl, I have been fortunate in that I have achieved many of my life's goals. Those that I haven't achieved . . . well, they're just not attractive to me anymore. The problem is I now feel lost without having some goals. How do I find new goals?
Hi Tim, thank you for the question.
One thing humans need is to be continually growing. That does not necessarily mean physically grow, but grow mentally. When we stop growing, we can feel depressed and down and lost. What keeps us moving forward is something to achieve. That could be a certain lifestyle, a new knowledge or even a business.
No matter what it is, our minds (and bodies) need exercising and that exercise is how we grow.
When we are young, fresh from school, it’s likely we will have a lot of ideas and ambitions. We are a little naive then, and we think we are immortal and can achieve anything. Then life punches us in the face and we realise that all the things we’ve dreamed about accomplishing is not as easy to achieve as we first thought.
Apparently, statically, 97% of people will stop at this point and just accept life as it is and give up their dreams and ambitions. It’s easier to blame life and our circumstances than to stand out and be different and go after our dreams—the things that other people around us say are crazy or impossible to do.
The three percent who do go after their dreams and goals and accepts that their life is 100% their responsibility, are the ones who are goal driven, focused and never stop growing their skills and abilities.
But there comes a natural point where most of those goals and dreams have been achieved. Then what? What do you do then?
I remember, the first time I completed a marathon. It was amazing. The sense of accomplishment was incredible. There was this smile on my face. I felt I could achieve anything. Those feelings lasted all of about an hour. After that I began thinking now what?
You see, achieving your goals will not give you a lifetime of fulfilment. That sense of pride and fulfilment doesn’t last.
A goal, as Damon Cart talked about in this podcast a few weeks ago, is just a stepping stone to something much bigger. And I mean much much bigger.
The real question to ask yourself is what do I want out of life? Who, or what do I need to become to accomplish that?
Now, one place you are likely to find the answers to these questions is in your areas of focus. These are the eight areas of life that are important to us. Some are obvious such as health, family and friends and finances. But the other five are just as important. Your career or business, your spirituality, your self development, lifestyle and life’s purpose will all come into the mix at some point.
I’ve recently finished reading a new biography of Ian Fleming, my writing hero. For those who don’t know, Ian Fleming was the creator and writer of the James Bond novels.
Throughout the 1950s, Ian Fleming achieved everything he desired. He attained all his goals. At the start of the decade he built his dream home in Jamaica, he married the woman he loved and he published “a spy novel to end all spy novels” when he published Casino Royale in 1953.
Throughout the 1950s, Ian Fleming achieved all the goals he set out to achieve. The success of the James Bond novels made him a multi-millionaire, it allowed him to become an independent writer and live the lifestyle he had always dreamed of.
At the end of the decade, was he happy? No. His marriage was breaking down, his health was failing him and he became embroiled in a legal battle involving his book, Thunderball.
Towards the end of his life, Ian Fleming had one remaining goal. That was to become the club captain at the Royal St George’s Golf Club in Kent, England. He finally achieved that goal when he was announced as the club captain on the 12 August 1964—the day he died of a heart attack.
Despite all the success the James Bond novels brought Ian Fleming. The fame, the fortune and lifestyle, the one thing he valued most was his golfing friends. Golf was a big part of his life, but it wasn’t until towards the end of his life he came to realise that the friendships he developed on the golf course and in the club house and writing—whether that was books or articles for The Sunday Times newspaper—were the most important things in his life.
If you look at the eight areas of focus, friendships and career / business were important parts of Ian Fleming’s life. Career or business because his career was spent largely in journalism and writing.
Two years before his death, Ian Fleming, wrote a book called Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It was a children’s book about a flying car. It was going to be the start of a new career—writing children books. He decided he wanted to become famous not just for writing spy fiction, but also to be a children’s book author.
Often even though you may have retired from your professional life, the skills and abilities you learned during your career, hold a part of you that you love doing.
My father is a great example of this. My father’s a farmer. He has been all his life. He retired in 1999, sold the family farm in the UK and promptly bought a small farm in Ireland. There’s little pressure for him to make money, now it’s a labour of love.
He still wakes up reasonably early to go out and feed the animals. He’s an avid poultry shower—he raises hens to show in events around the country each year and that is where most of his goals come from each year. Winning the all Ireland Championship.
So, Tim, Where are you interests now? That’s where I would start. What interests you?
If you have most of your areas of focus covered, are there any areas you feel need attention? Often you will find new goals and ways to grow in there.
But that’s not all you can do. I would suggest trying new things. Go to a mountain retreat in a far off country, learn to surfboard, take a rally driving course, learn to horse ride or do archery (or both!)
You could set a goal to try ten new things over the next ten years. Commit to learning something new for twelve months. I have a friend who did this in her mid-thirties. She decided she would learn ten new skills over the decade. The first one was to learn English fluently—she did that, the second was to learn to swim. One of the goals was also to write a book.
When she embarked on this ten year journey, the energy and excitement in her eyes was there for everyone to see. To her, failure was not an option.
And yes, she did learn ten new things between 2005 and 2015. The funny thing was by the end of 2015, she’d already written a list of ten new things to go after in the next ten years. Can you imagine the life she’s living?
But the most important thing about my friend’s ten year goal, was the amazing positive change in her. Once she’s achieved her first goal, her confidence was sky high. I remember the celebration we all had when she finished learning English. Not only was she pretty much fluent, but she was now surrounded by people from all over the world. Twelve months previously the only friends she had were from Korea. Now she had international friends as well .
Goals do not have to be high and lofty. They can be small little things you could do on a weekend. I have a former client who after retiring decided to restore an old car. The car he bought was around $700. I cannot remember the name of the car, but I do remember the excitement in his voice when he told me he’d picked up the car and put it in his garage.
The car didn’t run, it was over forty years old—I remember it was a car he’d always wanted when he was in his early twenties. He had to learn how to rebuild an engine, repair rust damage and so much more.
That’s like me finding an old Ford Escort RS Cosworth and restoring it. WOW! Just thinking about that excites me. The fact that the Escort Cosworth was never sold in Korea, doesn’t deter me. I’d find a way to get one.
So there you go Tim. I hope these examples have given you some ideas. There’s a lot you could do. A lot you could try. Perhaps start with a country retreat somewhere special. Take a notebook with you and write out all the things you could do over the next ten years that would excite you.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, it’s all about how to stop overthinking and just get on with the work.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Episode 214 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 214 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Do you occasionally find yourself paralysed by decisions? Having too many choices and not knowing where to begin? I think a lot of us find ourselves in this situation and it can have negative effects on our overall productivity.
One of the things I have conditioned myself to be able to do is to quickly decide what needs to be done and where something should go. This takes quite a lot of practice but can be speeded up with a few simple questions.
Now before we get to the question, I want to give you a heads up about my weekly newsletter. If you want to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter. This newsletter goes out every Friday and contains my YouTube videos, blog posts and podcast all in one convenient email.
In addition to my content, I share with you a couple of articles of interest from other people as well as some of the videos I have been watching that week. AND, I also share with you a short essay on a productivity or time management tip that I am sure will help you to develop your out systems.
The link to my weekly newsletter is in the show notes.
Okay let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks: Hi Carl, I follow the Time Sector System and it has really helped me to process my inbox much faster. However, I do still find myself not being able to decide where to put a task. How do you process your inbox so fast?
Thank you Alan for the question.
One of the reasons I developed the Time Sector System was because I found myself wasting so much time trying to decide where a task went. When I managed my tasks by project I would have twenty to thirty open projects in my projects list and while tasks related to specific projects were quite easy to process, there were a lot of tasks that didn’t neatly fit into a project.
Then I had to decide whether a new task was a project or not—based on the principle that anything requiring two or more steps was a project—if it did require two or more steps, I created another project to add to my already overwhelming project list.
It was crazy! I found myself spending so much time deciding what something was and precious little time doing whatever that something was. And don’t get me started on the time it took to review so many projects each week.
That’s how the Time Sector System was born. It came about because of frustration and when I analysed what was important about a task, I realised the only important factor was when I was going to do it, not what project it was associated with.
Basically, I removed a step—a step that was taking up a lot of time each day and week. Now the only decision I need make when I get a new task is when am I going to do it. There are no more grey areas because I’m not thinking about how many steps are required. All I am deciding is when I am going to do it.
My thoughts and ideas about a project are kept in my notes app. If I want to add information, ideas or a checklist of things to do on a project, I can jot them down in the project note and not worry about dates, labels or anything else you need to think about when you manage projects from a to-do list.
Many of the old style task management systems require you to make a lot of decisions, and as we now know, our ability to make decisions each day is limited. As the day goes on, our capacity to make good quality decisions diminishes. And, as most people are processing inboxes at the end of the day, it’s at that time when our ability to make decisions is at its lowest. This is why we struggle in this area. We get caught up in overthinking a simple decision: What to do next.
So what about those decisions I alluded to earlier? Well when you are processing your inbox—whether that is your task manager’s or email inbox, the first question to ask yourself is:
What is it?
If you are processing your email, there are many different types of email. There’s spam that got through your spam filter—of course you delete these immediately. Then there are those emails you were CC’d on, but you have no action to take personally and there are emails that do require you to take some action.
I’ve found this one question can eliminate as much as 50% of the email in my inbox because knowing what something is, tells me what to do with it. If it’s spam or has no interest to me, delete it. If it’s something I need to know, but not take action, I archive it and if it’s something I need to reply to, it goes to my action this day folder for replying to later in the day.
I apply the same question to my task manager’s inbox. Here is a little different because anything going into this inbox has been put there by me. There’s a reason it’s there. However, again, I am looking to eliminate and as I process my inbox, I am thinking: do I really need to act on this?
Often, as time has passed my enthusiasm for doing something has gone and I can delete it. That a positive result for me.
However, after deciding what something is, and that I will do something about it, the only question I need ask then is when will I do it? And with that a lot of the time the decision is already made. If I’ve been asked to send an invoice or receipt to a customer, I’ll do that within the next twenty-four hours. If I’ve added an idea for a future project, I will transfer that idea to my ideas list in my notes app or, if it relates to a current project, to the existing project note.
Deciding which projects to work on and what to do with those projects will likely form a major part of your daily decision making and certainly when it comes to managing projects, you will be making those decisions when you do your weekly planning.
The best criteria for deciding which projects to work on is time sensitivity. When is the project due? When’s the deadline? If the deadline is imminent, then that project needs to be worked on this week. If the project is a few months away, I can add it to my Next month folder. No need to be thinking about that project just yet.
However, the secret sauce in being able to process inboxes quickly is practice. The more you do it, the faster you become. When I am processing any of my inboxes it’s automatic. The questions about what it is and what needs to happen, can be answered very quickly.
But it wasn’t always like that. It was slow at first and it will be slow for you when you begin doing something new. Don’t expect to be fast immediately. You will be asking yourself what something is and when will you do it consciously at first. But over time, those decisions about a task or email will be almost automatic. You begin to see patterns in the different types of tasks and then you will be making decisions very fast indeed.
Now that should take care of basic decision making process for you. The next decisions you will need to make are what do I want to accomplish this week and what will I do today?
Now a quick tip here. Deciding what you want to accomplish next week, is best done Saturday morning before you do anything else. Remember our capacity to make good decisions diminishes throughout the day, so if you leave doing your weekly planning session to late Friday or Sunday, you will certainly not be in the right mood to plan next week and you won’t be making good decisions.
The best time to do a weekly planning session is Saturday morning. Get, make yourself a cup of coffee or tea (or whatever you favourite morning beverage is) turn on some of your favourite music and sit down for thirty minutes or so with your calendar and task manager open.
Then go through and decide what you want to accomplish based on how busy your week is going to be. You may need to refer to your project notes to see where projects are, but all in all you only need to move tasks from your Next Week folder to This Week, give them a date based on when you are going to do them and make sure you inboxes are clear.
Do that Saturday morning and you are going to get a lot more enjoyment from the weekend. Your week is planned, you do not need to think about your work and you can really settle in and enjoy the weekend.
But the most important thing about doing the weekly planning session is it makes the daily planning sessions so much easier. Because you did the hard work on Saturday morning, when you do the daily planning sessions, all you are doing is confirming what you planned is still the right things to be working on and adding in anything new that you picked up during the day.
Now how do you stop overthinking tasks?
Here, you need to ask yourself what is the result you want to accomplish from this task. Focus less on how you are going to do it, first ask what result you want.
More often than not, once you are clear on the outcome, the ‘how will I do it?’ Will take care of itself.
For instance, if you want to employ a new staff member, what’s the outcome you want? To get a fantastic new team member for the department. Okay, how will you do that? Now in this case if you work for a large organisation you may be lucky and have an HR department who can do a lot of the leg work for you. So the first step is to request assistance from your HR department.
If you are not so fortunate, and you have to do all the work yourself, then the next step would be to draft out a job description and what the ideal candidate will be.
From there, the next steps will take care of themselves.
You see the idea here is to only focus on the very next step. You don’t climb mountains in one step. You climb one step at a time. That’s also the way to complete your projects and goals; one step at a time.
I think of it this way, never leave a project without first deciding what the very next step is. You can then move that task to your task manager or leave it in your project note.
So there you go, Alan. I hope that has helped. Try to make your processing and planning as automatic as possible: what is it and when do I need to do it?
When it comes to individual projects, don’t focus too much on the process. Decide what the result is you want and then make sure you know what the very next step is.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 213
This week’s question is about habits and more specifically the best habits to have for greater productivity and time management.
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Episode 213 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 213 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Over the years I have been obsessed with time management and productivity, I have tried and tested multiple ways of better managing my time and my productivity. And from all that testing, I have learned that there are some hard and fast rules that, if followed, guarantees improvements in these areas.
I’ve spoken before about things like developing workflows, about making sure you plan the day the day before and keeping your task manager and calendar clean and tight. But of all the best methods, there is is one that stands out more than the others and that is the development of the right habits.
And that is what this week’s question is all about. What set of habits should you adopt so that better time management and productivity becomes a habit, rather than something you need to think about.
Now, before we get to this week’s question, if you would like to receive all the content I produce each week in one convenient place, then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. Every Friday, I send out a newsletter that gives you all the links to things like my Youtube videos, my blog post and of course this podcast. Plus, I include one or two articles written by others that I have enjoyed reading as well as a couple of videos I have watched that have helped me develop my systems.
PLUS… I also write a short essay each week that is exclusive to my newsletter that will give you tips and tricks to optimise your own productivity set up. And of course, it’s all FREE. All you need do is sign up, which you can do from the link in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question
This week’s question comes from Julia. Julia ask, Hi Carl, I read Atomic Habits by James Clear over the Christmas break and that got be thinking about the best habits to help me become better at managing my time and getting more of my work finished. Do you have any thoughts on this?
Hi Julia, great question! Thank you for sending it in.
Firstly, may I just say, Atomic Habits is one of the best books you can read if you want to transform your life as a whole, not just your productivity. I remember a few years ago I was struggling to fix my morning routine and make doing it consistent. After reading Atomic Habits I discovered the piece I was missing—something called “habit stacking” which was the missing piece to making it consistent.
Essentially habit stacking requires a trigger—in my case turning on the kettle in the morning to make my coffee, and then a sequence of little actions steps. So in the case of my morning routines, the turning on of my kettle leads to me doing my shoulder stretches while the kettle boils, which then triggers me drinking a glass of lemon water while my coffee brews, and once I have my coffee, I sit down either at my desk or on the sofa and write my journal for ten minutes.
I’ve got to say it really does work.
Now, let’s look at some habits you can develop that will massively improve your productivity.
Let’ start with a simple habit. The habit of consciously closing out your day.
What do I mean by “closing out your day”? This means that at a specific time each day you stop and close down the day. It’s where to put a hard border between your work life and your personal life.
While technology has done a lot to make our lives eminently more convenient and comfortable, it has also blurred the lines between our work life and personal life. This is not good for our mental and emotional wellbeing. There needs to be a time for work and a time for our personal activities. That could be doing some exercise or meeting up with friends. It’s often these essential parts of our lives that get sacrificed on the alter of career development and business growth.
So, closing out your day is about drawing a line underneath your work and projects for the day so you can move to giving yourself some time.
A good closing down habit is to stop working on whatever it is you are working on. Then clearing your task manager’s inbox. Then spending a few minutes planning out what needs to be done the next day. That involves looking at the tasks you have scheduled for the next day and your calendar for your appointments. You can prioritise your tasks and make sure you have sufficient time to accomplish everything you have planned for the day at this point.
Now, the benefit of this habit is you avoid worrying about what you have missed and what you have to do tomorrow. Just a few minutes at the end of the day going through what you collected in your inbox and looking at what you have scheduled for tomorrow calms your mind and allows you to properly shut down the work side of your life for the day.
What I notice about not closing out the day and planning the next, is your brain will randomly throw up thoughts about your work long into the evening and if you are particularly busy, it can have a negative affect on your sleep. You try to sleep but you are worrying about what you may or may not need to do the next day.
It’s far better to get that sorted out before you finish the work day.
So habit number one - get into the habit of closing down the work day. That one habit alone will massively improve your productivity AND your focus.
The next habit I would recommend is to start the habit of journaling. A lot has been written about the benefits of journaling, but the biggest benefit for me is the focus and clarity I get from writing out what’s on my mind.
If you include ten minutes of journaling in your morning routine you will get several benefits. The morning is when you are likely to be at your most creative—even if you are a night person—because as you begin to write you create a connection between your subconscious mind and the page. I cannot count the number of great ideas I’ve had from those ten minutes I write.
Now, I must confess, great ideas do not come every day—perhaps once or twice a month—but when they do, I often find myself switching from my journaling app to my notes and collecting the idea there.
But, perhaps the greatest benefit is the way journaling focuses you on the day. If you use a dedicated journaling app such as Day One, you can create a daily template. For me, my daily template includes a place where I can put my two objective tasks for the day—these are the tasks that I must complete that day, it also gives me a place to track my morning routines. For that I have a checklist to confirm I have completed my morning routines.
The benefit of this is I have record of what I have done, AND not done, so if I ever feel out of balance, I can go through my journal and see where the imbalance may have occurred. It’s usually because I am not doing something important to me.
My journal is also my accountability buddy.
Last year was a torrid time for my exercise consistency. I really struggled to get back into my exercise routine after a Christmas break. Things did not start well. I strained my calf while out on my annual New Year’s Day run which stopped me from running for two weeks. And we had moved house and the new environment caused me to drop out the habit of doing exercise in the afternoons.
I found I was berating myself almost every day and promising I would get back into my exercise routines the next day. This constant reminder eventually pushed me to solve this problem and by April I was getting back into the habit. By July I was back to where I wanted to be.
So habit number two; start journaling. It can be a little strange at first, but if you stick to it, eventually you will find you always have something to write about. Don’t worry if in the early days you only write out the weather forecast or some news item. We all start there. Once you start doing this consistently, you will soon start writing out your thoughts.
Habit three is to write everything down. This has saved me so many time from missing something important. How many times have you agreed to a meeting and not written it down believing you will remember and at the appointed meeting time you get a call asking where you are? It’s so easy to forget these things if we are not writing them down.
But it’s more than that. If we don’t have a trusted method of dealing with information our brains will try and do the job for you. The problem is our brains were never designed to store factual information in this way. Our 200,000 year old brain evolved to recognise patterns—it’s what kept us alive on the open savannahs thousands of years ago. We recognised the pattern of some predatory creature stalking us for lunch. The crack of a twig or the russell of long dried grass.
If you think about all the information coming at us every second of the day through sounds, smells, sight and touch. It’s impossible to be consciously aware of every information input. Pattern recognition is a far more effective way to alert us to danger or opportunity. Our brain automates the process and if a number of informational inputs come together at the same time that corresponds to a known danger or opportunity, you brain will make you consciously aware of it.
One the best things our ancestors have left us are their journals and notebooks. From Leonardo D’ Vinci to Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin. People who changed the world captured every little idea and hypothesis into notebooks. We can go and see these notebooks and see how amazing ideas and inventions developed over time.
Now whether you collect everything in a paper notebook or a digital notes app doesn’t matter. Choose something that works for you. Just make sure that you develop the habit of collecting everything. You can discard things later when you close down your day and clear out your inboxes.
I think of all the productivity tips and tricks I’ve learned over the years. Developing the habit of capturing everything has been the one that has had the biggest impact on my overall productivity. I would say I probably delete around thirty or forty percent of what I collect, but it very rare I miss something. If I do miss anything it was because I didn’t write it down.
I’ve set up my phone and Apple Watch to be little collection tools. I use an application called Drafts which is a very powerful collecting tool available on all Apple devices (I’ve even done a series of videos on using Drafts for collecting)
Anything from my shopping list to tasks and notes are collected using Drafts or Siri in the case of my shopping list.
So the third habit I would suggest you develop is collect everything. Once it’s written down and in a place your brain trusts you will look at later it will relax. Once you are in this habit, I can promise you you will find your stress levels reduce and you feel a lot more relaxed.
So there you go, Julia, three habits worth developing as we begin this New Year. Create a habit of closing down the day, begin journaling and collect everything in place you trust you will see later.
Those three little habits will give your productivity, mental well being and overall sense of accomplishment such aa positive boost.
Thank you, Julia for the great question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 212
This week’s question is all about getting your task manager clean and tight and ultimately more functional.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Download the Annual Planning Template
Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 212 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 212 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
One of the problems many people face with their task manager is the volume of tasks that appear on their today lists. And even if you are vigilant about when you add a date to a task, there often is still far too many tasks on the daily list.
So, this week, I want to address that and share with you a few ways you can eliminate rather than accumulate tasks.
Now before we get to the question, this will be the final episode for a couple weeks. Don’t worry, we will be returning on the 10th January.
And, if you don’t want to miss out of all the productivity and time management content I produce each week, sign up for my weekly newsletter where every Friday you will receive all the content, PLUS a short essay with a tip on improving your overall productivity, time management and goal setting.
The link to sign up is in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Gary. Gary asks, Hi Carl, I saw your recent video on how you have Todoist set up. I noticed you have very few tasks on your today list. Is that for real or was that just for show?
Hi Gary, thank you for your question and yes, that was for real.
Twice a year I show how I have evolved how I use Todoist, and in this videos I share my real Todoist account. Normally, I use a demo account.
So, how I achieve that is by focusing on elimination and being very very strict about what gets into my system.
Now, I should be careful here because I still collect a lot of stuff into my inbox. However, I am very strict on what goes from my inbox into my time sectors. This is where I practice the art of elimination. Let me explain.
Firstly, I am obsessed with avoiding duplication. I hate it if there is a piece of work or a task in one app and I copy it over to my task manager. That act of copying it over to my task manager creates a duplicated task.
For example. Like most people a lot of my tasks come from email and in the past I would forward these to Todoist’s inbox. That would easily generate fifteen to twenty tasks per day in my inbox. This meant I had the original email in my email system and a task for that email in my task manager which created duplication.
Then when it came to processing my Todoist inbox, I had all the other tasks plus those emails to process. This meant those email tasks had now been processed twice and I still had done nothing about acting on them—which is crazy.
I realised, if I created a folder in my email called “Action This Day” and any email that required me to do something was put in there, I only needed a single task in Todoist that recurred every day to remind me to clear that folder. This meant I no longer needed to go from Todoist to email, back to Todoist and then email again. It was a lot of unnecessary extra steps just to reply to a single email.
Moving email within the email app itself is a lot easier and faster and I eliminate a complete step. It also means now all I need do is allocate a block of time later in the day to clear my action this day folder and all my email commitments are dealt with for another twenty-four hours.
Another area where accumulation and duplication appears is throwing all your project tasks into your task manager. A lot of what needs doing on a project is obvious. If you’re preparing for a big important presentation, adding tasks such as: decide theme, get figures from accounts team, find images etc are superfluous. None of these really get the presentation done.
Opening up PowerPoint or Keynote and laying out the outline of your slides and and, once the file is complete, rehearsing it are the only really important tasks.
So for me, I have tasks such as: Continue working on presentation file and practice for tomorrows presentation.
My thoughts, ideas and sample slide layouts will be in a project note and that is also where the deadlines, milestones and instructions from the event organiser and anything else relevant to the project will be. You really don’t need to duplicate all that in your task manager. Again, all you have done is wasted a lot of time moving things around but done nothing to actually move the project forward.
It’s obvious what needs doing next once you open the document or the project note.
This is also why I am not a big fan of waiting for labels or tags. If you are waiting for something you have an incomplete task. For instance. If I create a task such as “Get last month’s sales data from Jeff” and I send Jeff a message asking him for the info, all I have done is ask Jeff for the information. I still do not have the information, so the task is not complete.
As the task is not complete and Jeff tells me he will send it tomorrow, then I reschedule the task for tomorrow.
If I decide to buy a new video camera for Zoom or Teams calls and I order it from Amazon, the act of ordering the camera is not completing the task. The task is I want a new video camera. So I order it on Amazon and the confirmation email is added to a waiting for folder in my email. I then have a single task in Todoist that comes up every Saturday to remind me to check that waiting for folder.
If you are buying three or four things on Amazon every week, adding three or four tasks to follow up on something seems superfluous and you can easily replace those with a single task reminding you to check you waiting for folder in email.
I should say, though, if you’re ordering things and you need a reminder about everything you’ve ordered, you’re probably ordering far too many things.
Another area I look for is what I call natural triggers. Natural triggers are objects or events that will naturally remind you that something needs doing. Simple examples of this would be you know when to take out the trash because your trash bin is full. Likewise you know when your car needs refuelling because the fuel warning light will come on, or if you leave it long enough you run out of fuel—probably the best reminder to do something.
I’ve also set up a shopping list in Apple reminders so I can use the convenience of my Home Pod Mini and tell Siri to add something to my shopping list while I am showering or cooking. I only need look at this list on days I go to the supermarket, which is usually Tuesday and Friday. I don’t need to be reminded to go the supermarket. It is just something my wife and I do.
Another reason why I am able to keep my today list clean and tight is because I know what my core work is. I know what needs doing each day. For instance, today, I have a task telling me to record this podcast. I also have a task that tells me to edit my YouTube videos and write my coaching clients’ feedback. These three tasks are my important tasks for the day and they are at the top of my list.
Anything else that comes up will not take priority over my core work unless it is a genuine emergency—and genuine emergencies are rare. I’ve only had one in the last five years.
Underneath these tasks are my routines for the day including clearing my email action this day folder and daily admin. Clearing my action this day folder takes around forty minutes and my daily admin around thirty minutes. These tasks are performed every day, and although I probably don’t need them on a list for the day, it does act as a reminder on those days when it has been chaotic or I have been away from my office.
In total, if you include my routines, when I begin each day I will have between fifteen and twenty tasks for the day and the important tasks are at the top. If I see I have more than twenty tasks during my daily planning session, I will eliminate the less important ones. And again, I am very strict about this.
If you do not know what your core work is—the work you are paid to do, or in you run your own business, the work you do that generates your income, then everything will be a priority and you will feel compelled to add everything to your task manager.
I’ve seen things like iron shirts, take dog for a walk and take medicine on a task manager. Seriously? Ironing shirts should be a part of a home cleaning routine—it doesn’t need to be in a task manager. And as a dog owner myself, you should never need reminding to take your dog out for a walk. That is a part of the commitment you take on when you decide to have a dog—and dogs have a way of telling you it’s walkie time.
For medicines, use your phone’s reminder system if you must. Setting a recurring alarm reminding to take your medication will work far most effectively than using a task manager.
Ultimately, if you are putting everything on your task manager it means you don’t trust yourself and you need to start trusting yourself. Daily and weekly planning sessions are a key part to this because it ensures you do not miss anything. Skipping these prevents you from trusting that your system will work for you.
When you do a daily and weekly planning session you gain the confidence that you have everything under control. You know nothing has been missed and if it has it’s unlikely to be important. Not doing these is like trying to push a wheelbarrow with a square wheel up a steep hill.
So there you go, Gary. The trick is to have the mindset of elimination not accumulation. Remove the unnecessary and what’s left will naturally be the necessary. You can then focus all your attention on getting those done and not worry about everything else—you don’t need to because they inevitably will not be important.
Have a wonderful week, a fantastic Christmas and I’ll talk to you all again the New Year.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, we are cleaning up our productivity systems and getting ready for the new year.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Download the Annual Planning Template
Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template
More about the Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 211 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 211 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Something I’ve been doing for a long time is cleaning up my productivity system during the end of year Christmas break. I’ve found it’s the best time of the year to do this as there are very few new inputs coming in. Most of my work comes to a screeching halt because, while not everyone celebrates Christmas, most companies and people do have an end of year holiday.
So while it’s quiet over the final two weeks of the year, you can take advantage and clean up your system so it’s ready and waiting for you when your new year starts.
So where do you start?
The best place to begin is with your task manager. Over the year you will have added tasks that have disappeared into the deep dark depths and there are likely to be tasks you have completed but have not checked off. Go through all your folders or projects and make sure all the tasks in there are still relevant. If not, delete them or check them off.
Next up, is to review your routines and recurring areas of focus. By the very nature of these folders, you don’t spend much time in there because they are set up to recur. However, through the year it’s likely some of these will have become irrelevant while others may have become a little boring. Now’s a good time to remove the irrelevant ones.
Now, these irrelevant ones are the ones that you have turned into a habit. For instance, I used to have a recurring task in my areas of focus to do my exercise. This was added at a time I was being inconsistent with exercise and I needed the prompt to make sure I was at the very least reminded to do my exercise.
Once I got the consistency back, I just added a single task as part of my weekly planning session to schedule my exercise for the week on my calendar. I no longer needed the daily prompt.
Now for the boring ones, what I mean by these are you have seen the tasks every day for a year and you’ve become a little numb to them. Find ways to change the verb. To give you an example here, I used to have a task in my routines that said “Empty my Action this Day Folder”—this is the folder I have in email for all my actionable mail. The goal is to empty that folder each day.
Earlier this year, I changed the verb from “empty” to “clear”. It’s a very small change, but it keeps things fresh. You can change this to things like: “reply to all actionable email” or something similar. It is a small change, but it helps to prevent things from becoming boring.
Now before you finish with your routines folder, ask if there are any other things you really should add in here. Do you need any reminders to clean different parts of your home or car? Do you need a reminder to renew any subscriptions—or consider renewing subscriptions. Setting up tasks to remind you about upcoming renewals can help to keep you on top of your commitments. The thing with these is don’t set them up on the day of renewal. Set them for a few days before so you have time to make sure there’s sufficient money in your account.
The final action to take on your task manager is to make sure you are happy with its structure. Over the course of a year, you are likely to have experienced folder creep. You may also have tested new apps but found you don’t really use them. Clear these off your computer and mobile devices. They only take up digital space and can be a distraction.
Hopefully, you are using the Time Sector System and with this, you should really only have six folders—your inbox, This Week, Next Week, This Month, Next Month and Long-Term and On Hold folders. If you’ve added temporary project folders or anything else, now’s the time to consider their value to your overall system.
If you are not using the Time Sector System, and have a more traditional setup with projects, clean these up. This is one area where folder creep can become overwhelming and you are likely to find you have a lot of projects that either have been completed or are unlikely to complete for whatever reason.
Now, before you finish with your task manager, ask yourself if it is working for you. Does it show you what you need to see when you need to see it? If not, make any necessary changes to make sure it does. For me, I want to make sure that what comes up on my today list are tasks I will do or must do. I don’t want tasks coming up that I know deep down I am going to push off to another day.
And, if you are taking a holiday at the end of the year, go into your routines and recurring areas of focus and forward date tasks you know you will not be doing over the holidays. I will be setting a lot of my routines and recurring areas of focus to stop coming up until the 3rd of January when I return to my full working schedule.
Now, what about your notes app?
This is likely the place where you have a lot of stuff you no longer need. After all, it’s your notes app that you open quickly to capture those little ideas that come in a flash and when you look at them later you wonder what you were thinking at that time.
Now it does depend on how much time you are willing to spend here and how many notes you have. I have around ten to twelve thousand notes in Evernote and to go through all of those would take days if not weeks.
So, I do a search for all notes created in the last twelve months and start there. Then I change the order of the notes collected to the oldest first and that way I can begin in January and work my way through. I usually make sure the note is held in the right place and is appropriately tagged as I go through them.
I find doing this I will delete around 20% of what I collected and it only takes an hour or so.
If I want to go further, I just filter notes to any note created in the last five years and repeat the process. Fortunately, I’ve been doing this every year for around six or seven years, so this deeper clean up is very quick. Anything older than a year will already be tagged correctly so all I am doing is making sure the note is still relevant.
A final exercise with your notes is to review your structure. Is the way you are structuring your notes still serving you. These days it’s rare I would change the way I structure my notes, but in the past, I’ve played with multiple ways and found a lot of them didn’t really serve me. Now’s a good time to do any restructuring.
Okay, so that’s taken care of your productivity apps. What about the folders in your cloud storage system and your computer. Well, hopefully, you are not using your computer to store files. Aside from the risk of losing everything if your computer died (and they do still die) flies stored on your computer’s hard drive are not available on your other devices.
It’s really up to you. I keep files and folders for up to two years. So, anything I created this year will be stored in a parent folder called 2021. Then anything new will be created as and when required. I do have some folders that stay around for instance my company’s certificate and VAT documents which I need quite frequently.
I also go into Pages, Keynote and Numbers and clear out anything I no longer need. If you use Google Docs or Microsoft Office online, then take a. Look and clean up anything you no longer need.
Okay, that’s a good annual clean up of your productivity tools. Now for the final step: dealing with app creep.
Let’s be honest, we are all sucked into trying new apps and forgetting they are still on our phones and computers. The end of the year is a good time to purge these and to also look at what you are using and make sure the apps you use are still doing the job you want them to do.
It’s funny, if I am being honest, over the last two years Evernote has been on my “at-risk” list, but as I was never able to find a worthy replacement, I stuck with it. This year, Evernote is off the “at-risk” list. It’s vastly improved over the last eighteen months and while this year they have brought out a lot of features I don’t need or would use, it still does the job I want it to do reliably and with speed.
But I did look at Obsidian this year and was underwhelmed by all the fuss. It’s gone—I’ve already deleted that one, and that was the only one I was tempted to look at this year. However, in years gone by, I have looked at a lot of apps and forgot they were taking up space. So I purge.
One final area to clean out is your to-read list. Let’s honest here, if you have a list that’s well over a hundred articles to read, you’re not going to read them all. Purge that list, my friends. Clean it out so you start the year with a list of things to read you are going to read.
And that’s it. If you spread this out over the end of year break, you will begin the year with a refreshed set of productivity tools ready to see you through another year.
Have a fantastic week and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, why your system or process is more important than the apps you use.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Download the Annual Planning Template
Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template
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Episode 210 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 210 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, we’re talking about the system versus app and why with the right system it doesn’t matter what apps or tools you use, you’ll always be productive.
I remember when I first read David Allen’s Getting Things Done book many years ago, I salivated at the chance to learn what apps would be recommended and where I could buy them from (there were no app stores in those days). I was disappointed after reading the book to learn that David Allen didn’t recommend anything other than a label printing device for all the folders I would be creating for my projects.
Then in 2015, the revised updated version of Getting Things Done came out and I rushed to buy my copy believing this time, as we were well and truly in the new digital world of apps and app stores, David would be recommending some new apps I hadn’t tried. Again I was disappointed, The same label printing device was recommended, but no apps or tools.
And yet, David Allen was teaching me a lesson. Being productive has nothing to do with the apps or tools you use. They are just cosmetic and do nothing to make you more productive. Everything that makes you more productive comes from the system and daily process you use. And that is what this week’s question is all about.
So, with that in mind, it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Philip. Philip asks; Hi Carl, I’ve recently come across your content on YouTube and this podcast and hoped you could help me. I’ve been searching for the best apps for managing my daily to-dos and notes. I feel I’ve tried them all but I still feel like I am burning out trying to get everything done. Do you have any app recommendations?
Hi Philip, thank you for your question.
I think a lot of people struggle with this one largely because there are a lot of applications and tools now that promise to make you more productive and organise your life for you. The truth is no application or tool will ever do that. No matter what application you are using, you are still going to have to put the work in. You still need to input your information, your tasks, and collect all your files together and organise them in a way you can find them later.
I’ve seen some apps try and do some of this hard work using machine learning or AI, but technologically we are not there yet. For that to work, a machine or app will need to know how your mind works and for most of us, we don’t even know how our minds work, so there’s little chance an app or piece of complex software is going to be able to do that.
At best, these apps guess based on algorithms and, as we know from US congressional hearings into Facebook and Google algorithms, these are not exactly perfect by a long way.
And that is really where you need to start. Understand that whatever tools you choose, you will still need to input your data.
Now, When I created my system I began with the question: what do I want to see each day?
What this question is does is elicit the information I need on hand for me to complete my work to a satisfactory level each day. It also implies that there is quite a lot of information I do not need to see. For instance, I do not need to see tasks or appointments I have next week. I might need to know I have a workshop to prepare or if I have a holiday coming up, but I only need to see that when I am planning the week.
For instance, if I have a workshop to deliver on Monday, I will need to know that this week, because I will need to prepare for it. But that is just a single task that says “prepare for next Monday’s workshop”. Once that is is on my list for this week, I don’t need to know anything else.
From that, I can open the Keynote file or the Pages document for the workbook and get on and do the work. I may have a few notes related to the workshop in my notes app, and that note will be linked to my task.
So, let’s say on Wednesday, I see I have a task that says “prepare for Monday’s workshop” that task will be linked to the project note in my notes app and all I need do is click the link, and I’ll be taken to the project note and I can do a quick read through to see where I am and decide what needs doing next.
So, within five seconds I am ready to begin work.
However, to get to that point, I first need to make a number of decisions. First, when am I going to work on the workshop—I decided Wednesday—and what work will I do that will ensure I have the workshop prepared for.
This means I need to input the data at some point. I will need to input the task, and collect my notes and ideas and create a presentation file.
None of these things requires expensive, complicated applications. In practice, all of this could quite easily be done using a pen and piece of paper. The Keynote file and workbook will need software, but the process of knowing what to work on and when does not need anything elaborate.
Over the last ten years or so, I’ve played around with a lot of different tools. From Evernote to OmniFocus and in recent months Notion, ClickUp and Obsidian. And yet, while many of these apps may be pleasing to the eye very few of them actually help to get my work done any better or faster. In fact, I found Notion and ClickUp actually stopped me from maximising the work I got done each day because I wasted too much time trying to get the app to look nice.
So a question to ask yourself is what do you need your productivity apps to do for you?
Well, the answer to that question is you want them to tell you what needs working on and why and then to get out of the way except when you need to collect something into your system.
This means, the best productivity apps—the ones that will help you become more effective and allow you to focus on your work—are the most boring apps. Boring because you will not be tempted to keep rearranging things: changing fonts, colours and layouts. All these are distractions. They stop you from doing your work.
In many ways, Apple Notes is possibly the best notes app today. I know it’s only available for those who work in the Apple Ecosystem, but when you look at it, it has everything you need and nothing else. It has folders to organise your notes into categories and it allows you to collect notes very easily whether that is by using Siri or using the new Quick Notes feature. Its search is phenomenal and you can tag notes for fine-tuning your organisation.
When it comes to customising things. Nope. Not a chance. While it is possible to change text colours and fonts on macOS, you cannot do that on an iPhone or iPad. Apple Notes does what a notes app is designed to do. Manage your notes and nothing else.
The way to look at this is, the less time you spend inside your productivity apps and the more time you spend doing the work that needs doing, the more productive you will be.
This means you want to be optimising your system and not looking for another app.
To optimise your system look at how easy it is to get your tasks and appointments into your task manager and calendar. Make sure the task manager you use has some form of quick entry and for your calendar you should be able to type something like “meeting with George on Monday at 9:30 am” and your calendar will know to add that to the right place whether it is typed or spoken via Google Assistant, Alexa or Siri.
Once you have your to-dos into your task manager, you want to be able to quickly decide what needs doing and when and then to be able to add dates (if necessary) and move the task to its appropriate folder. If you cannot drag and drop a task on a desktop from your inbox to the right folder, your task manager is not fit for purpose.
This rule applies to your notes app too. Whatever app you choose, make sure there is some form of quick entry on all your devices. You should also be able to add relevant emails to notes and collect websites, PDFs, images and such like. I found when I tested plain text notes apps, they fell down when it came to that part of the process. While some could do it, it was fiddly and time-consuming and that defeated the purpose. Quick entry is vital.
The final part of any good system is down to planning. If you are not planning the week and your day, you will always feel overworked and busy. Not planning your day leaves you at the mercy of other people’s demands.
If you are not making a commitment to work on specific projects each day, you will find yourself saying yes to anything that comes your way. When you know when you start the day what you want to get accomplished, if anyone asks you to do something else, you are much more likely to say no.
For instance, today, preparing this podcast was one of my objectives. However, this morning, I got an email asking if I could jump on a quick call to discuss a “great new proposal”, and it was easy for me to say no. I had already decided that the most important use of my time today was to prepare this podcast, do my exercise and get all my writing done. Talking about how I could help someone else with their ideas was not a priority for me today. I have times available for that, and today was not one of those times.
Not having a plan for today, I would likely have said yes because I would then feel I was doing something.
When you begin the day with a clear plan, any new commitment requests can be assessed based on what you have planned. When you begin the day with no plan, you have nothing to assess, so you’re likely to say yes to the new commitment request and then find yourself overwhelmed with everything you didn’t do.
So, Philip, forget the tools and apps. Pick something you like and stick with it. Focus on making sure you collect everything quickly. Organise what you collected at the end of each day and make sure you have a plan for the day. When you do that, you will soon find yourself being more productive and a lot less stressed.
Thank you for your question, Philip and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, as we begin the final month of the year, it’s time to lay down your plans for 2022 and to set yourself up for a very successful year.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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My 2021 Holiday Season Sale
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Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template
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Episode 209 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 209 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
If you have followed along with this podcast as well as my YouTube channel, back in October, I recommended you begin a two-month brainstorming session where you gave some thought to what you would like to accomplish next year. Well, that two-month session is almost over and it’s time to turn your attention to what you WILL do next year.
Now, before we get to the meat of this week’s podcast, just wanted to give you a heads up to let you know that my 2021 holiday sale is currently on. This year, you can save 20% on all my coaching programmes as well as up to 25% off selected courses. Full details of the savings are in the show notes or can be found on my website: carlpullein.com.
Okay, let’s get back to turning ideas into reality.
Now, a lot of what you will have written out during the brainstorming session will not be possible next year. And that’s okay. The purpose of the exercise was to open up your thoughts to possibilities. For instance, one of the questions to think about is what would you like to change about yourself? Now, most people tend to think about their weight, or their relationships, but you may have gone deeper and felt you would like to change your attitude to events outside of your control.
I remember, back in 2016, when Donald Trump was running for the Republican nomination for president, the media seemed to turn very negative and tribal. It felt the media sucked any remaining positivity out of the news and focused only on denigrating, lambasting and doom-mongering. Reading the news every day, as I had done since I was in middle school, no longer felt like an education. Instead, it felt like media organisations were trying to trigger me into a negative mood.
I decided that from 2017, I would no longer read the news and instead subscribe to my favourite blogs on topics I was interested in and to get a news summary email every morning from the BBC to let me know what was going on in the world.
This was a small change, but one that left me feeling a lot more positive about the world and people.
Another example, at the end of 2017, I decided that I could become more productive if I could reduce the number of private classes I was teaching face to face and instead focus more on digital classes. This was before the pandemic, but through 2017, I wanted to move towards a more working from home arrangement and learned how to use Skype and FaceTime. Now, of course, most of us are using Zoom and Microsoft Teams, but that change in the way I did my work, enabled me to produce more content and still continue to teach.
So the purpose of brainstorming ideas through October and November isn’t to develop a list of things you feel you must do next year, it’s about developing ideas about how you want to live your life and then choosing a few of those ideas and looking for ways to make small changes to your daily life.
And that’s the point I really want to share with you this week. It’s not about making big changes as the more traditional New Years resolutions would have you do, it’s about looking for those small tweaks to your habits and way of going about your day that will, over the course of a year build into significant changes in your life.
I remember in the days when I was teaching English here in Korea I often would have a student telling me they wanted to lose weight in the new year. I would ask them how they were going to do that and the answers typically involved joining a gym and some elaborate new diet fad.
Now, in Korea, it is common for people to each a bowl of rice for breakfast lunch and dinner every day. I suggested that instead of eating a full bowl of rice, they could reduce that to half a bowl each time and move a bit more. Take the stairs at work instead of the lift. Go for a twenty-minute walk after lunch instead of gossiping in a coffee shop etc.
Making these small changes would bring some dramatic results after only a few months, yet they would not be asking too much of themselves. You could still do the things you like to do, you can still eat with your colleagues and all you would be asking of yourself is to commit to a twenty-minute walk every day.
And that’s the thing. When you give yourself enough time to consider what you want to change and improve, you have the time to come up with some action steps that will not be such a drastic shift in the way you have always lived your life. It’s when you try to change things too much that you fail.
Humans are change-averse. We like routine. This is why we generally wake up at the same time each day. It’s why we eat at the same time and why we come home and do the same things each evening. We feel safe with a familiar structure to our day. When we try and change that too dramatically, our whole psychology will fight to return to the familiar.
Often, if you really want to make big changes, the best time to do it is when you move house or change your job. It’s then that a new environment will help you to make other big changes.
But for most of us, we do not have the luxury of being able to move house or change our jobs every year. Instead, if you want to succeed at making changes and successfully achieving your goals, making small changes to the way you run your day are the best way to stick to your goal and to come through successfully.
One of the best things you can do to become better organised and more productive is to give yourself thirty minutes before you close out the day and clean up your desktop. Delete old screenshots, move files to their rightful folders and then allow yourself ten minutes to look at your tasks for tomorrow and your calendar to sketch out a plan.
It’s just thirty minutes a day, but those thirty minutes will do so many things for you. First, you will begin the day knowing exactly what you want to get accomplished and secondly when you do start the day, you begin it with a clean desktop, and a distraction-free work environment. You get all that from twenty to thirty minutes. It’s really a no-brainer.
What about your bucket list? Are there any things on there you could do next year? Now, I know for many of us there is still the uncertainty of the pandemic, but that will end soon. What could you do next year from your bucket list?
Now usually, the things we have on our bucket lists are things that excite us, are a little far outside our comfort zone, and yet, if we picked something, thought about how to make it happen and then took the first step, you would find it happens. Let’s take one of my bucket list items. I want to take my wife to Goldeneye, a resort in Jamaica where all the James Bond books were written.
Now, Goldeneye is an expensive resort, and we would need to save a lot of money to make it happen. But what I can do is go to the bank in the new year, open a new bank account and call that my Goldeneye account. Then each month, send any spare money over to the account. I could set a monthly target, let’s say $1,000 a month, and that way I know if I curb my spending in the early part of the year, that would begin the momentum. If I found by June I had saved $6,000, I would start to believe that with a little push, we could very easily have sufficient money saved up to be able to go in September or October.
The only thing I need to focus on is making sure I am sending money over to the account every month how much time does that take? Five minutes?
You see, whatever it is you want to accomplish or change in 2022 doesn’t require a lot of time to do. You first need to identify the habits and behaviours you will need to adopt and make sure each day or week you schedule sufficient time to make sure it happens.
Developing habits requires an extra effort to start with. For instance, I drink a glass of squeezed lemon juice in water every morning. When I first began doing that, I had to consciously think about it every morning. I even had a little alarm set on my phone to remind me every day for the first month. After about two weeks I no longer needed the alarm.
What you will find is you make a few modifications over time too. For my lemon water, I used to squeeze a lemon into a glass of water every morning. I found that wasn’t the best approach. Now, I prepare a bottle of lemon juice every three days and keep that in the fridge. That way, when I wake up in the morning, turn on the kettle to brew my coffee, I can reach into the fridge, pull out my bottle and pour my lemon juice and drink it while. Wait for my coffee to brew.
The same goes with changing your diet or building exercise into your life. There’s a lot of experimentation in the early days while you find the best approach. That’s fine. If you keep tweaking and modifying you will soon find the right approach for you.
I have spoken about the time I followed Robin Sharma’s 5 AM club routine. That’s where you wake up at 5 AM and do 20 minutes of exercise, 20 minutes of planning and 20 minutes of studying. I was able to do that for eighteen months, but I began doing coaching calls between 10 PM and midnight and it became exhausting to do those calls and wake up at 5 AM.
In the end, I realised it wasn’t so much about the time of day you woke up, it was all about what you did in the first hour that mattered. So, I adjusted my wake up time. I now wake up around 7 AM and use the first hour of the day to work on myself. I write my journal, do some light exercise and stretching and review my schedule and plan for the day. It works fantastically, and I get enough sleep.
So, as we head into December, start thinking about what you would like to do and change for yourself in 2022. Then work out what small steps you could take each day that will gradually build up to you achieving whatever it is you want to do in 2022.
It works, it’s a great way to feel fulfilled and successfully accomplishing these goals will generate incredible momentum to achieving things you currently think would be impossible.
Have a wonderful week and thank you for listening. Remember, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast all you need do is email me: carl@carlpullein.com and I’ll be happy to answer it for you.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
What’s the difference between a project and a goal? That’s the question I am addressing this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Download the Annual Planning Template
Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template
More about the Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 208 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 208 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
With the introduction of my GAPRA notes organisation system—GAPRA stands for Goals, Areas Of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive—I’ve received a number of questions about the difference between a project and a goal and on the surface there is little difference. Both have a desired outcome, a deadline and a set of actions that need to be performed before the outcome is achieved.
However, there are a few subtle differences that I will explain this week as well as explaining why I began organising my notes using GAPRA.
Now, before we get to this week’s answer, just a heads up to let you know if you are enrolled in my Apple Productivity course, you now have the 2022 update ready and waiting for you. It’s a free update and this year, it has extra lessons on GAPRA and how to build that into Apple Notes.
If you are not already enrolled in the course, you can still do so at the early bird discount price of $49.99 for just 12 more hours. The early bird discount will be ending at midnight today (22 November)
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Johnny. Johnny asks: HI Carl, I’m struggling to understand the difference between a goal and a project. Could you explain how you distinguish between the two?
Great question, Johnny and thank you for sending it in.
Okay, let’s start off with the similarities. Projects and goals share a lot in common. There’s a desired outcome. For instance you may have a project to redecorate your bedroom and a goal to lose 10 pounds in weight. You will also have a deadline date for both of these. So in this example, you may have a deadline to complete the redecoration of your bedroom by the 24th December and to lose ten pounds by the end of the year.
So far, very similar.
However, where they differ is in what happens once you have completed these. Once your bedroom is decorated, you have completed the project. It’s over. There is nothing else for you to do except to enjoy the freshly painted room.
With your goal of losing weight, the next step is to keep those ten pounds off. That means you need to change the way you eat and move. There’s no point in losing those ten pounds only to put them back on again right?
Goals are about changing you as a person for the better. They are about improving yourself and moving towards a higher purpose.
How did you feel when you last successfully achieved a goal? Happy? Ecstatic? How long did you feel like that? A few days? A few hours? Minutes?
You see the problem with achieving a goal is the satisfaction that comes from achieving goals is short-lived. All goals by their very nature are just one step towards a higher purpose. For instance losing that weight, is about becoming healthier. If you lose those ten pounds and within a few weeks regain the ten pounds, then you completed a project. You did not complete a goal. A goal would be to keep those ten pounds off or go further and lose another ten pounds.
Let me give you another example. Each year I set my company an income goal. This is a goal because the purpose here is to establish a new standard. The underlying goal is to continue to grow and improve my company. So, ultimately, the goal of the company is for constant and never-ending growth. However, each year I need to set a new goal to accomplish to achieve that.
By pushing the goal further each year, the company grows, I get to help more people while at the same time I improve as a teacher—after all, for my company to grow I have to also improve as a teacher. For me to help more people become better organised and more productive, I also have to improve my skills.
I remember watching a Jim Rohn seminar on YouTube a few years ago and he said you should set the goal to become a millionaire, not for the money, but for who you have to become to achieve that goal.
To become a millionaire, you will have to change your mindset and your habits. Most people limit themselves because they believe their income is set by the company they work for. And in the past, if you chose to be an employee, that was likely to be true. The only way for anyone to become a millionaire twenty years ago was to start your own business. Today, that is not true. We have unlimited opportunities to build side-incomes. Creating online courses, or a YouTube channel. Even writing blog posts now can earn you income through sites like Medium.
But, to do that, you will need to break free of your 9 til 5 mindset. You will need to change your thinking from consuming entertainment to consuming education. Learning, growing and being obsessed with generating income. That’s how you become a millionaire. You will learn that if you spend all evening going out with your friends or watching Netflix, you will not change anything. You will stay stuck where you are.
If you spend your evenings on your side project—write, produce videos, sell products through Amazon or Ebay, then you put yourself in a position where becoming a millionaire becomes possible.
I remember back when I was in my early 20s I worked in our local pub as a bar tender. One of the regulars was a gentleman called Albert. Albert had been a millionaire three times and lost it three times. I remember talking with Albert one quiet Monday evening and he told me making the first million is the hardest thing you will ever do. But once to have achieved your first million, earning a million a year is easy.
I didn’t understand what he meant back then, but over the years, I’ve realised that once you know the mindset and develop the skills to earn your first million, if you ever lose it, you don’t need to worry. You know what it takes to become a millionaire and you can repeat the process over and over again.
The key to understanding goals is to know that the goal is less important that the changes you have to make in order to achieve that goal.
A project is static, it does not move. Once you complete the project it’s over. You archive the project and move on to the next project. A goal is fluid, it moves with you. As you improve your abilities, develop new skills, strengthen weak areas you, as an individual, are improving. When you complete the goal, the question becomes what next? How can you continue to grow and improve?
And that leads me nicely onto why I developed GAPRA. All GAPRA is is a way for me to organise my notes by importance. I want my goals at the top because they are the drivers of my continuous improvement. If I am in any doubt about what I should be working on today, I know my priorities will always be with my goals.
Then comes your areas of focus. The eight areas of life we need to keep in balance. These are your family and relationships, your health, your finances, personal development, career or business, spirituality, lifestyle and life experiences and your life’s purpose. These are all important to us but their importance changes depending on where we are in life.
Then your projects. For most working people, our projects are likely to come from our work. But as we move through life, become home owners, parents and take on more responsibilities we will be adding more and more personal projects.
Then we have resources, this is where we keep important information. I keep things like where I buy my clothes from and my sizes. I have a note called my “Anchor Note” where I keep important links and other useful information.
And finally we have the archive where old project notes and other stuff I have finished with but are not ready to delete yet go.
When you organise your notes in this way, you have everything organised by importance. In the past, I’ve found I’ve ignored my goals because often my work projects take up a lot of time. But if I want to grow as a person, become better at what I do and feel fulfilled, I know I will only find that in my goals. So, when I open my notes app in a morning at the top of the folder list is my goals folder, I am reminded every day of what is really important.
It also makes doing my weekly planning session easier. I start at the top and work my way down to projects. So, I can ask myself what I can do to move closer to my goals first, then check my areas of focus are in balance and finally make sure I have sufficient time each week for keeping my projects moving along.
If you want to learn more about why the goal itself is the least important part of the goal planning process, I recommend you listen to my interview with Damon Cart. Damon did a fantastic job explaining that our goals are a vehicle to attaining what we really want. For instance, when someone tells you they want to earn a lot of money, earning the money might be something measurable, but really what people want is the thing that they think money will give them. A nice car? And nice home? Well, again, it’s not really the car or the home they want, it’s the feeling they think a nice car or a nice home will give them. That’s the ultimate goal.
Now the problem with material things is they never bring you the feeling you think they will. Nice houses and cars don’t impress people as much as you may think. But if the goal is to put yourself in a position of financial security so you have the freedom to do the things you want to do, you are setting the right kind of goals.
So there you go, Johnny. I hope that answers your question. The reality is goals and projects are very similar. The difference is that once a project is complete it’s done. Finished. A goal, on the other hand, is about changing and improving you as a person. It’s just a step towards a much higher purpose.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 207
This week, I have a question about how everything should be working together and why when you do bring everything together, your daily life will seem so much more focused and, more importantly, relaxed.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Download the Annual Planning Template
Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template
More about the Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 207 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 207 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I’ve been writing and producing videos for a few years now and over the years I have introduced a number of concepts that are designed to help you better manage your time and become more productive in what you do.
It can be quite confusing if you picked things up a little ad hoc. This week’s question is about how to bring it all together so it is seamless and logical.
Now before I get to the question, the 2022 edition of my Create Your own Apple productivity course is now available, If you are enrolled in the course, this is a FREE update for you and if you are not, but would like to enrol in the course you can do so this week for an early bird discount price of $49.99 (it’s normally $59.99)
This course will show you how to build your own productivity system using only Apple’s Productivity tools: Reminders, Notes, Calendar and iCloud. It’s a great course and one, if you are in the Apple ecosystem, that will give you so much benefit. And the course includes how to set up the Time Sector System as well as my new GAPRA notes organisation system.
All the details are in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Beth. Beth asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed your podcast for a while now and I know a lot of the things you teach. I was wondering if there is a particular way you apply would use each of those ideas? I get a little confused sometimes about the differences between some of them.
Hi Beth, thanks for the question.
There is a logical sequence for many of the principles I teach and when I saw your question I thought this would be a great way to explain how they all fit together.
So. Let’s begin with COD, that's Collect, Organise and Do. This is the foundation of all great productivity systems. If you are not collecting stuff—things like your tasks, your events and ideas, you are going to keep them in your head and that is when you will find yourself swamped and stressed out by the number of things you are trying to remember. Our brains are not very good at remembering things like that.
You will then need some time, preferably each day, to organise what you collected. Asking some straightforward questions such as what is it? What do I need to do about it? And when will I do it? Are all parts of this process.
When I describe organising in this way it seems like it will take a long time, but you soon become very quick at processing tasks using these questions. Just to give you a benchmark, I will collect around ten to fifteen things each day, and to process those at the end of the day takes me about five minutes. If a task, for example, doesn’t need doing this week, all I need do is drag it to my Next Week or Next Month folder.
My focus each day is then on doing the work I have assigned myself for that day.
So where does the 2+8 Prioritisation fit? This is the daily planning process. The average person will have around twenty to twenty-five tasks per day including routines and regular work. If all of those had the same level of importance you would freeze. There’s no way you can do that many tasks each day unless they take less than fifteen to twenty minutes to do.
So, we need to get smart and choose the ten most important tasks for the day. Now the 2 parts of this refer to your two “MUST DO” tasks for the day. These are the two tasks you will do everything you can to complete. Now What these depend on the day and what you are currently working on. For instance, when I prepared this podcast, preparing the podcast script and doing my exercise were my two must-do tasks for the day. Yesterday, I had upload the videos for my Create Your Own Apple productivity course update and clean out my office (it really needed it).
What you’ll notice is that my objective tasks are not exclusively work-related. Sometimes they are, but I try to balance things. Now you might argue that cleaning out an office is not a priority, but we have a 12-week old puppy running around the house and I wanted to make sure there were no bits of paper or other such things hiding away on the floor. Puppies have a bad habit of chewing everything.
The eight other tasks are the tasks I should do that day. These tasks come from my core work and my recurring areas of focus. For instance, posting my social media posts and responding to student questions are a part of my core work. Every day these tasks will come up here. There can be other areas where tasks drop into here. The most likely place would be project work.
Again, to give you a benchmark figure, I will complete these ten tasks 90% of the time. It’s usually weekends where I occasionally don’t manage to complete them all. But, the two objective tasks have been completed every day. That is just what I do. It is who I am. I do my objectives every day.
And that is the way you need to look at your two objectives. They are non-negotiable. You just do them.
So when do you do your 2+8 Prioritisation planning? This is done before you end the day. Now, again when you first start this it will take longer than normal. For me, it takes around five or ten minutes. But that is likely because I never miss doing a weekly planning session. It is during the weekly planning session I set out what needs to be done that week and when I will do it. More often than not I will just be confirming that things are still relevant when I do the daily planning.
Why the evening and not the morning? That’s because what you want to be doing when you start the day is the most important work for the day. You do not want to be trying to plan in the morning—this is when you are at your freshest so knowing what you are going to start the day with is going to set you up for a great day. It starts the momentum.
Now for me, I’ve been doing many of these actions for over ten years and on those days when I have not been able to do them, I feel very uncomfortable. For instance, I cannot go to bed without knowing what I need to do tomorrow. I just wouldn’t sleep well.
I know when I fly to Europe—a ten-hour flight—but with travel to the airport, and then catching my connecting flight I am travelling for around 18 hours, it throws me out. However, my flight from Korea to Amsterdam is at 1 am, so once we have taken off it’s sleep time and when I arrive in Amsterdam I have a three-hour wait for my connecting flight, so I find myself a quiet corner, get a cup of coffee and do my planning and processing. Of course, when I am travelling it’s rare I would have anything important to do. Often it’s just to process my email’s Action This Day folder and answer student questions. But, I still do it. It brings a sense of control to my day.
I see it as who I am. It is just what I do.
So when you look at it, a well organised day doesn’t really involve a lot of additional work. The problem for most people is getting things organised in the first place. Often when someone embarks on building a productivity and time management system they have a lot of things all over the place and the hard part is getting that organised.
Then there is developing the habits of collecting everything and giving yourself a few minutes each day to organise that stuff. That can take a few weeks.
But, if you want to feel in control of what you are doing each day and would like to live a more intentional life, you will have to change some things. Living an intentional life where you have time to do all the things you want to do, will not happen by accident. You have to change, your habits have to change and change is difficult.
I remember learning to drive a car, when I first started I had to think about every step to get the car moving forward. Now, when I jump in the car, there’s no conscious thought at all. I just open the door, sit in the driver's seat and before I know it we are moving. How did that happen? It was all habit.
And that’s where you want to be focusing your attention. Building the habits. Set a time for doing your daily planning, make sure you automatically collect everything that comes your way into your inbox and make sure at some point over the weekend you do your weekly planning session. Once you have these habits embedded, it’s easy. You just do it.
I can promise you, Beth, that once these habits are embedded, you’ll feel so much more in control and when you begin each day you know exactly what you will be doing.
Thank you, Beth, for the question and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 206
This week’s question is about managing overwhelm and stress.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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Download the Annual Planning Template
Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template
More about the Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 206 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 206 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I’ve received quite a lot of questions over the last few weeks about feeling stressed out and overwhelmed. Not just the occasional feeling, but a general, constant feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it.
If this state lasts too long it can turn into something very bad, so it is important to recognise it and take action. Nobody wants to be depressed or experience a breakdown. Fortunately, if you do recognise the signs, you can do something about it.
Now, before we get into this week’s question, I’d like to remind you that we are now almost at the halfway point of November. We have around three weeks left to brainstorm ideas about what you would like to do next year.
If you haven’t already downloaded my FREE annual Planning Template, you can do so from my downloads page on my website. carlpullein.com/downloads. This is a wonderful time of year to evaluate what you did, and didn’t do and what you would like to change and do next year.
Okay. Time to welcome back the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tom. Tom asks: hi Carl, every day I feel stressed out and feel helpless when I look at my to-do list. There is so much on there and I know I cannot get it all done. It feels like every day the list gets longer, not shorter and I am at my wits end about what to do. Can you help?
Hi Tom, thank you for your question and I am sorry you feel the way you do.
The first thing I am going to do is tell you to step back. You are going to fight me and tell me you don’t have time to step back, but I can promise you this is the only way you will regain some control and get on top of that to-do list.
You cannot go on doing what you are doing right now. If you do not step back, take a breath and spend some time going through that list, you are going to find your feelings of stress will continue to climb and that is not going to lead anywhere nice.
So, stop for a morning at the very least. Or if you can, take the next weekend, gather up everything in your to-do list and hide yourself away for two days while you get on top of what you need to do.
What this is going to do is to put a stop to new things coming in. You need this to breathe and to take stock of where you are with everything.
Next up, do a run through your task manager and delete any task you do not need to do. You will find there will be a lot of these. We have a habit of throwing stuff in there that we would “like” to do but don’t need to do. We need to clear these out.
In the past, I’ve suggested people move these tasks to their notes app as a single note, but I realised this does not fix the problem. It only moves things from one place to another. Instead, I find if we delete these tasks, if they are important at some future date they will come back up on your radar and you can re-add them to your list.
Doing this pass through on our task manager will clear around 25% of what’s in there. You’ll also find a lot of tasks that are well past their due date and completed tasks. We need to eliminate these.
Watch out for those emails you have been meaning to respond to for over a month. Sorry, but it’s too late. Delete these. Seriously, if you haven’t responded for over a month, it’s going to look very unprofessional to reply now. What does that say about your priorities?
I should tell you I’ve had people do this and they’ve removed well over 50% of their tasks. That brings a huge sense of relief.
Next up we are going to have to do some thinking. What are you actually employed to do? This relates to your core work. The work you are evaluated on and are paid for.
This needs to take priority in the short term. We must reengage with what we are paid to do, and that means we need to remove the work that we have volunteered for. I know this can be difficult because we will feel we are letting others down. But you have to remember, you don’t have time to do all this stuff. Something’s got to go and unless you want to lose your job, the first place to look is at is the stuff you have volunteered for.
Any committees you’ve allowed yourself to be on, any outside work commitments such as parent/teacher associations or community projects. If you want to get your life back, start to feel more in control of what you are doing each day, then these have to go.
Now for the next six months, you only allow yourself to focus on your core work. Do not allow yourself to be pulled into anything else.
This, by the way, also applied to those of you who are self-employed. You have core work too. What is that work? Make sure you strip away anything additional to that core work. You don’t have to do this forever, but we do need to do a reset to get things back on track.
If you are self-employed, one of the things you can do is look into employing a virtual assistant to deal with the admin. Admin can very quickly build up and take a disproportionate amount of time to deal with. Your talents and time need to be spent elsewhere.
Now, once you have taken these first two steps you will start to see some light at the end of your task manager. You will have not only slimmed down your task manager, you will also have freed up some time.
The next step is to re-establish what is important to you. Often when we get bogged down with tasks, we lose sight of what is important to us. We often think family and friends will always be there when we need them, and while that may be true, to some extent, the last thing you need right now is problems in your relationships.
Likewise, your health and fitness need to be taken care of. Neglect that and you’ll no longer have the energy required to do a great job, be there for your family and if your health fails, your task manager and everything else no longer matters.
With health and fitness, you don’t have to be going out for a run or join a gym. All you need do is move. Humans are designed for movement and when we move we improve our overall mood. We feel less stressed and a lot happier. So make sure you are moving. Take walks at lunchtime and after dinner. Get up and walk around for ten minutes or so between periods of focused work. And the best thing… Always take the stairs. Never take escalators or lifts (elevators for my American friends) Escalators and lifts are the enemies of your health and fitness.
Okay now you have taken these steps, it’s time to turn to your calendar. With all the remaining work you have to do, the question is: when are you going to do it?
Now, this is likely to be dictated to us by time sensitivity. What’s due next? Do that.
Time blocking is a great way to make sure you have sufficient time to get your work done. However, all too often people misunderstand what time blocking is. It is not micromanaging your time each day. Elon Musk might do that, but most people do not need to do it.
What time-blocking means is you look for gaps in your calendar you can block off to do focused work. That means working on the projects or tasks that MUST be done. For me, that usually means two to four hours per day for focused work. And, while I have meetings and calls each day, I can usually find those two to four hours no problem.
One way to do this is to block out 9 to 11 am for your focused work. I’ve found that to be the best time. You are still mentally fresh and it’s a lot easier to focus when you are mentally fresh. This means, where possible, you avoid meetings and other commitments at that time. Turn off email and notifications on your phone and computer and focus. Don’t worry, nobody will be upset with you if you do not reply for an hour or two. If you think they will try it out. If they get upset explain what you were doing and why it is important you do it.
Now, the only thing you need to think about is what you will get done this week. Next week does not matter today. You might need to prepare for a meeting or a presentation next week, but this week that’s all you need to find time for; preparation.
The final piece of this fix is to commit right here and now to do a weekly planning session at the end of the week. You need time each week to stop, look at what needs doing and plan when you will do it. As long as you are doing these weekly planning sessions, the only things you need to concern yourself with are the things that need doing this week. Next week can be taken care of when you do the planning session.
Taking these steps, Tom will go a long way to putting you back in charge of your tasks and commitments. Once you know what you need to do this week, just do one thing at a time, take a break then start the next thing. With that focus, you will soon find yourself feeling a lot less stressed.
Now, of course, if your work is causing you stress not because of the volume but because you are unhappy at work or you have a bad boss, that’s a different thing altogether. I would still recommend stepping back and looking at that and then thinking about what you could do to change things. Perhaps you could get a transfer to another department with another boss, or maybe you need to search for another job. Only you can decide that though.
I hope that helps, Tom and thank you for your question.
And thank you for listening too. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 205 / Interview with Damon Cart
This week is the second part of my chat with NLP Expert Damon Cart and in this part, we dive a little deeper into setting goals and making sure that whatever goal you are achieving is growing you as a person and leading you towards a greater sense of long-term fulfilment.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Damon’s Website
Damon’s YouTube Channel
Download the Annual Planning Template
Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template
More about the Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 205 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 205 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This episode is part two of my chat with Damon Cart.
Damon Cart is an NLP specialist who has studied NLP or Neuro-Lingustic Programming for over ten years. Damon has a very successful YouTube channel, which I have linked to in the show notes, as well as a thriving coaching business where he helps senior executives and high achievers build fulfilling lives.
There’s a lot of valuable information in this episode, so get your notebooks ready and let’s go.
Well, there you go. I hope you got a lot of valuable information from this episode. Thank you so much to Damon for doing this with me and …
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, NLP Expert Damon Cart joins me to talk about how to create long-term goals that inspire you and ultimately brings you fulfilment and happiness.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Damon’s Website
Damon’s YouTube Channel
Download the Annual Planning Template
Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template
More about the Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 204 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 204 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I am honoured to bring you a very special guest to help you with your 2022 goal planning and to build goals that are not only achievable but sustainable and keep you motivated.
Damon Cart is an NLP specialist who has studied NLP or Neuro-Lingustic Programming for over ten years. Damon has a very successful YouTube channel, which I have linked to in the show notes, as well as a thriving coaching business where he help senior executives and high achievers build fulfilling lives.
I am sure you are going to get a lot out of this episode, and I highly recommend you get your note books ready as there is going to be a lot of gold in this episode.
________________________________________
Well, there you go, That’s part one. Part two will be coming next week where we go a little deeper into identifying your values and you can use these to build your long-term goals and measure you achievement over time.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 203
This week, I have a question about how to stop feeling busy all the time
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Download the Annual Planning Template
Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template
More about the Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 203 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 203 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
How many times did you say “I’m busy” last week? How many times have you said it today? If you’re like most people probably a lot. Why is that? Why are you so busy? I wonder if you have ever stopped and asked yourself that question.
The truth is, being busy is just a feeling. It’s not real. We feel busy, but that’s only because we have no idea what needs doing and we just feel there is a lot to do. Now I’m sure those of you listening to this podcast are doing so because you have an interest in being more productive or want to become better at managing your time, so it is likely you have a to-do list too.
And what do to-do lists do? They show you all the things you haven’t done so that just adds to the feeling of being busy.
Don’t feel bad. Most people claim to feel busy all the time and there are a lot of things you can do to remove that feeling and to start feeling a lot more positive about your days and to feel much more relaxed and in control.
Now before we get to that, I want to remind you that we are now well into October and that means it’s the time of year to start thinking about what you would like to accomplish next year. Don’t worry, this is not more to do. This is the fun time of the year where you can let your imagination run wild and create a list of all the things you would like to do and accomplish next year.
To help you with this, you can listen to last week’s podcast where I go through the four questions and three lists and you can download the Annual Planning Template or Evernote template. It’s all there to help you.
Remember, this needs to be fun. Don’t put yourself under pressure. Have fun with it, the decision-making time comes later. Right now, you want to open up your mind, let your imagination do what it’s best at—giving you ideas.
Okay, it's time now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Darius. Darius asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been trying to be more productive and better with my time management for years. I follow you, David Allen and Thomas Frank and you all have such great ideas. But even though I read all the books and watched the videos, I still feel so busy every day. I never have time to do anything I want because when I finish work I am so exhausted. What do you do to stop being busy every day?
Hi Darius, thank you for your question.
Well, the first thing to do is to stop using the phrase “I’m busy”. It’s not true because as I said, being busy is just a feeling. It’s like being angry or bored. It’s just a feeling. It’s a state of mind constructed by your brain and it is not a very helpful state.
The problem with using a phrase like “I’m busy” is you condition your brain to start believing it to be true and then on those days when you don’t have very much to do, your brain will keep telling you you’re busy, so you start to feel busy when in reality you have nothing to do. So make a commitment to yourself to stop using “I’m busy” today.
Instead, make a joke out of it. Laugh at all the things you think you have to do. That way you retrain your brain to put you in a better state. A state of readiness to deal with whatever needs dealing with.
Okay, once you’ve stopped using that phrase—which after all was just a lie you told yourself right?—we can start developing some strategies that will put you in control of what you do each day.
First up is to make sure you have a plan for the day. Now, in the perfect world, you would do that before you finish the previous day. But failing that, make sure before you start your day, write down the two to three things you must do today. These are the big things that will move things forward whether that be a project at work or one of your goals or to spend some quality time with your loved ones.
Having a plan for the day will help keep you focused on what is important that day. The trouble is, you see, we don’t live in a perfect world, do we? No matter how well we construct our days, unexpected events and crises will always come up. A traffic accident may cause you to arrive at work late, your internet could go down or a customer calls you with a big issue. None of these can be planned for and are likely to derail your day.
By having just two or three big things you want to complete that day, you will have the flexibility to manage any of these unexpected events.
You see, most people’s problems start with their to-do list. Having twenty to thirty things on there without any form of prioritisation, is going to leave you feeling you have no time to deal with these inevitable events. And yet, the majority of the things you have on your to-do list will not be important. They might be nice to do, but they won’t move anything important forward. They are just the “busy-work” tasks we like to think are important, but are not really.
Let’s imagine your role at work is in business development. Bringing in new business is part of your core work. To do that you need to make sure prospective new business or clients are sent a proposal. So, if your target is to submit five proposals each week, these will always be your priority for the week. Following up on those proposals will also form part of your core work, so you need to schedule enough time each week to write the proposals and follow up on submitted proposals. So, you could block two hours each day for proposal writing and an hour for following up on submitted proposals. That’s just three hours a day.
For your planning, you start the day with a clear objective to write one proposal and follow up on three submitted proposals. You need to know who you will be writing the proposal for and who you will be following up before you start the day.
Now, remember, this is your core work. It’s what you are paid to do. So this is the work that gets prioritised. Arranging your next holiday or scheduling a meeting with your team, is not a priority. These tasks can be done if and when you have time in between doing your core work.
Now, remember, if you are doing your core work each day and it becomes almost automatic, you will immediately stop feeling busy. You will be very clear about what needs doing and you get it done. It becomes non-negotiable and when you do that, your important work is getting done every day.
The great thing about this is that the more you do it, the more efficient you get at doing it. Which means you will need less and less time to do it. That frees up more time to do some of those less important tasks.
Which leads me nicely to the next strategy. In any successful business its results that matter, not obedience. Now that does not mean you break laws and rules, what it means is if you need to spend an extra thirty minutes on doing work that will get the result you are employed to get, then not responding to a message from your boss or client for thirty minutes will not matter.
If you are getting the results, no boss is ever going to be upset with you. You get results. That’s what matters.
So, what can you do that will get you the results you want? Thinking about doing something will never get results. If you want to do a great presentation on Friday, setting aside time to prepare properly will get you the result. Finding excuses about how busy you are will not.
The same goes for starting a blog or podcast. Thinking about doing it will never get you the result you want. You get the result by writing a blog post or recording a podcast and publishing it. Telling yourself you are too busy to spend time writing or recording is just giving yourself an excuse. The question to ask yourself is: what are you busy doing? And, is what you think you have to do more important than your future goal to be a blogger or podcaster?
So, before you start the week, spend some time thinking about what results you want from the week. And as you start each day, ask yourself: what result do I want from today? When I started today, I wrote down the results I wanted:
I wanted to write this week’s blog post, learning note, and podcast script. I also wanted to interview a friend of my wife’s for an assignment I need to complete for a course I am taking and to exercise.
Now there are a few other things I would like to do today, but my writing, completing the assignment, and exercise are the results I want from today and as long as I do those, I will have had a great day.
And that’s the way I see my day. Writing, interviewing, and exercise. Three things. I’ve almost completed my writing targets today, I did the assignment interview over lunch and I will be exercising once I have finished my writing. If I broke all that down into little steps, my list would be huge. It would give the illusion I was busy, but I have enough time to do everything I want to accomplish today and more. I am not busy, I am focused on getting the most important work done and that is the result I want today and I will get it.
The way to stop feeling busy is to shift your mindset from tasks to results. Do you have ten calls to make today? Then make it a part of the result you want today to do those ten calls. Don’t treat them as ten different tasks. Think of it as one task to complete ten calls. Do you want to exercise today? Then don’t think about having to leave work at a specific time, drive to your gym, get changed, do your work out, shower, and go home. Think of it as one task. Do exercise. You already know what time to leave and to get changed. Just do the exercise.
Are you behind with your email? Then the task is to get up to date with your email. Not to reply to thirty emails. That will give you the illusion you’re busy. The result you want is to get your email up to date. So do that. One task.
So there you go, Darius, being busy is an illusion—it’s just a feeling and we have complete control over our feelings. First, get to know what your core work is. What are you employed to do and make sure you do that work as a priority. Next, stop looking at tasks, group them together and treat them as a single task. You have twenty emails to send today, then getting your email done is one task. The real question is, how much time do you need to get the results you want?
I hope that helps and thank you for the question, Darius.
Thank you too to you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 202
As we enter the final three months of the year, now’s the time to start planning next year and I have a special way of doing this, and today, I’m going to share that with you.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Download the Annual Planning Template
Evernote link for the Annual Planning Template
More about the Time And Life Mastery Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 202 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 202 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Now, I know a lot of people think the best time to begin planning next year is around about the middle of December, but there is a problem with that. It doesn’t give you enough time to think.
A lot of our desires and wants are buried deep inside us—hidden underneath a lot of the battle scars of failed goals we have picked up from past experiences and daily life and we need time to let these ideas surface and develop.
Before we dive into this, I want to let you know that I have a few free materials you can use to help you. I have an annual planning template you can download from my downloads centre on my website—carlpullein.com, and if you are an Evernote user, I have an Evernote template you can get—the link for that is in the show notes.
I should also say, if you are enrolled in the Time And Life Mastery course, now would be a good time to redo that course to get you motivated and lit up ready for the next eight weeks.
Why eight weeks? Well, that’s how much time you have to spend letting your mind go wild. And that’s what you want to do. Just let your mind go wild and write out as many things as you can think of that you would like to, or might like to, do next year.
Now, don’t worry, you don’t have to do all of them—that is likely to be impossible anyway—but for the next eight weeks, you want to be building a formidable list so that when we reach December you can start the second process—filtering the list into something smaller, yet incredibly inspiring.
Okay, so why a template? Well, there are four questions and three lists you want to be building over the next eight weeks. These are:
Ideas: This is a list you use to just throw stuff into. They can be goals you missed this year (or in previous years), things you think you might like to have a go at such as learning a foreign language, or to paint or things you’d like to start such as meditating, a minimalism project or taking up a new sport.
Some of these items will naturally fit onto some of the other lists in this template and when that happens you can move them.
Next up comes the first question. What would I like to change about myself?
Now this question is about looking at yourself and asking if there is anything you would like to change. Have you gained a few extra pounds over the last eighteen months or so and would like to lose them? Do you have a bad habit you want to change? Or something else?
One of the things I’ve added to my list for next year already is to have the three wisdom teeth my dentist told me need removing, out. I’ve kept putting this dental work off because I hate going to the dentist—I associate these places with a lot of physical pain—yet I know I must face up to my fears and just get the work done.
So look at yourself, and see if there are anything areas you would like to change.
Next question is “What would I like to change about my lifestyle?”. Here you want to be thinking about where you live—would you like to move to another place? Are you happy with your present lifestyle? If not what would you change?
Or it could be something material such as a new car, a bike or even having a new kitchen put in. Whatever’s been on your mind about how you live, get it onto your list. Remember, you don’t have to do any of these things, but getting them out of your head is likely to lead you down many different paths.
The second question is: What would I like to change about the way I work? Are you happy with your work today? Is there anything you would like to change?
One thing that has been on my mind this year is moving my home office out to a real office space. Commercial property rentals are very cheap where I live these days and so I’ve added to my list to look into moving into a purpose build office and studio. This would help me to improve the quality of my videos, allow me to build a place where I could do webinars and so much more.
Another area of your work life you may consider is your current position. Would you like to try for a promotion? Change your job or your company or even start your own business? With this question, there are a lot of possibilities.
The final question is: What can I do to challenge myself? I love this question because it is asking you to step out of your comfort zone.
It can be very easy to get stuck in a way of living our lives and lose the excitement of something challenging. My dental treatment idea would fall under this category because what’s put me off from getting the work done has been my fear of going to the dentist. Facing that fear and doing something that will bring me better health and comfort later is something worth doing.
What if you have found yourself becoming a little too attached to your sofa over the last few years and you know deep down this is damaging your long-term health? Perhaps challenge yourself to do something like the from the couch to 5k challenge.
Having two or three things you could do next year that would challenge you would do wonders for your energy and vitality.
Next up we have our goals list. What goals will you set for yourself next year? Again, remember this is a provisional list. You don’t have to actually do anything about these goals. All we are doing is stimulating our brains to come up with ideas. The more ideas you can come up with the easier it will be to filter the list down to something more achievable in December.
Are there any goals laying around that have been dormant for a while that you know deep down with one big push you could accomplish? Sometimes these goals may take multiple years—which could be why you’ve done nothing about them—perhaps next year you could do something that will get you started by breaking the goals down a little.
If you’ve ever run a full marathon, for instance, we rarely go from nothing to running 26.2 miles. The goal is achieved step by step. Perhaps running a 10k in the first year then a half-marathon in the second year and finally a full marathon in year three.
If you are a business owner, what goals do you want to set for your business next year? What will be your revenue target? How much growth do you want? This is the place to write these down.
Finally, are there any things on your bucket list you would like to go for next year? We all have a bucket list. For some it may be written down, for others it could be in your head, but is there anything you’ve always wanted to do that you could do next year with a little bit of focus?
Bucket lists are only useful if you are knocking things off from the list each year. Perhaps 2022 would be a great time for you to finally do something about it.
The whole purpose of this exercise is not to come up with a definitive list for next year now. The purpose is to engage your imagination and open yourself up to what is possible. Now it is not about how or why, it’s about “what”. How and why comes in December.
This is a great exercise and you will enjoy doing it. There’s a sense of freedom you get with this exercise because you are not committing to anything. All you are doing is creating a list—a list that will energise you.
Now, if you did this exercise last year, there is another step. Pull out last year's planning template and go through what you wrote out last year. I find this is a great place to start because things I put on the list last year, that didn’t make the final list could be put on this year's list. It’s also a great place to go to see how much you have progressed this year. That too can add a bit of motivation. You start to see how effective this little exercise is at moving your life forward.
All great productivity systems are built on a foundation of long-term goals. When what you do each day is contributing towards what you want out of life and is not full of low priority, mundane stuff you have to do, or other people’s emergencies you start to feel more relaxed, happy and fulfilled. You have a greater sense that your life is going where you want it to go and that is what energises you.
You’ll also be amazed at what you accomplish—just externalising what you want and doing something about it leads to you doing a lot more than you ever thought possible.
So, go get your templates. You can download it from my website or Evernote users can get the template from the link in the show notes. And remember to have a lot of fun doing this. You’re not committing to anything just yet. All you are doing is opening up your mind to possibilities.
Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s episode is the second part of my interview with Mark Ellis of Mark Ellis Reviews. Mark is a prolific writer and YouTuber and I wanted to get him on the show to give you a taste of what it takes to start blogging and or YouTubing and to explain his workflow process.
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This week’s episode is part one of an interview I did with Mark Ellis of Mark Ellis Reviews. Mark is a prolific writer and YouTuber and I wanted to get him on the show to give you a taste of what it takes to start blogging and or YouTubing and to explain his workflow process.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Mark’s Website
Mark’s YouTube Channel
Mark on Twitter
Sign Up For My Free weekly newsletter
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
More about the Time Sector System
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 200 |
Hello and welcome to episode 200 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Now, this week’s episode is different, but it is the 200th episode after all, so what better way than to geek out for twenty minutes or so and learn about starting a content-creating business and how to juggle creating content with a freelance career.
So sit back, listen and enjoy. Part of two of this conversation will be posted next week.
So, that’s part one. Coming up next week, Mark and I talk about Apple’s iOS15 release and a few other topics related to getting your work done.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
How do you save and store your digital files? Things are changing in this area and it’s what this week’s question is all about.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Sign Up For My Free weekly newsletter
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
More about the Time Sector System
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Episode 199 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 199 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
If I asked you to find a Keynote or PowerPower point file you created three years ago, how long would it take you to find it? How about a file you created six months ago?
This is a problem many people are discovering. They cannot remember where (or if) a file is stored.
Several years ago, we would create a folder structure on our computers loosely based around work and home. Our music and video files would be stored together and were accessible via our computer’s media players. But those Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, these were and still are difficult to categorise.
If you were organised, you likely had these saved in sub-folders related to either the project or client, etc.
Whichever way you organised your files, it was time-consuming and once your computer’s hard drive filled up it took at least a day to begin transferring files over to an external hard drive.
Oh, I remember those days well. A lot of fun, but very time-consuming.
This week’s question is all about what to do now to store and keep your files. I can’t wait to get started. So, that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Dermott. Dermot asks, Hi Carl, do you have any advice on managing files and documents on your computer?
Hi Dermott, thank you for your question.
Now, many of you may have noticed that Microsoft, Google, and Apple are pushing you to keep all your files and documents in the cloud and there’s a very good reason for this.
Google began this by not developing separate computer apps for their Docs, Sheets, and slides. It’s also the reason why we don’t have a stand-alone Gmail app on computers. This is quite different from your phone or tablet where there are dedicated apps.
These companies want you to store your documents in the cloud for a number of reasons. First and foremost is because we have multiple devices now—your phone, tablet, and computer, and if you want access to all your files on all your devices it makes sense to have them located in a central place where you will have access to the latest versions anytime anywhere.
The second reason for this was caused by us. Yes, us. Why? Because the vast majority of us never backed up our files and if your computer died or was lost or stolen, you lost everything. There was no way to retrieve these files. I’m sure those of you who have been using computers for the last fifteen to twenty years will have experienced this at some point or another. Not a great experience.
Now, what you will have noticed is if you are using a Word or an Apple Pages document, the default location for saving is either OneDrive or iCloud. This is because Microsoft and Apple believe they have a better way to manage your documents than you do. And to a large extent, it is true.
If you create a Word document and find yourself rushing off to a meeting, autosave kicks in, and your file is automatically saved to OneDrive’s Word folder. What you will find is if you’re using a Surface Tablet in the meeting, all you need do is open up Word, and there it is. The file you were working on is now ready and available for you to continue with your work from your Surface.
The same happens with your MacBook or iMac. Begin a document there in Pages, then go off somewhere with only your iPad, as soon as you open up your iPad, you’ll find that Pages document ready and waiting.
It’s a brilliant system and has saved us from losing a lot of information.
Now, you can save files the old-fashioned way if you wish, you can change the default save location at any time, but I’d advise against doing that for another reason.
Often when we are working on a document, be it an Excel, Word, or Keynote file, we will be returning to it multiple times. A report or presentation file is rarely completed in one sitting. So, opening up Word or Keynote and seeing that file right there in your files list is fantastic. It’s one-click or tap and you’re right there where you left off. It couldn’t be any easier.
Now, what about all those documents you have completed and finished with?
This one’s a difficult one to answer because we are all going to organise things differently. I run two companies, so I separate these by tags in Mac OS. As each company has different types of documents and files the folder structure I have for these is quite different.
In my From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days course, I advise participants to manage their files by date. This is because often we are doing a complete reorganisation and most of your older files you will never need. For instance, a presentation file I used ten years ago, would be very out of date today. The slide design would look dated and the content would need a lot of updating. It wouldn’t be worth me doing. So, placing these old files in folders by organised by year makes sense. Or of course, you can delete them. But for me, this is a record of all the content I have created over the years and it’s a nice record of what I have done and how I have developed my skills over the years.
Documents created more recently can still be organised by year, but you may want to organise these year folders with sub-folders for your different projects. This way, if you do ever need something from them in the future, you can quickly find them.
Before going on, I should point out another area where your computer system has improved to help you. Search. On a Mac, you have Spotlight search which will be coming to iOS in the next week or two, and on Windows, you also have a search function. Search capabilities on your devices are now so good you really do not need to worry too much about where you put a document. Everything either in the cloud (that would be iCloud on a Mac or OneDrive on Windows) or on your computer’s hard drive is searchable.
But, and there is a big but here. If you want this to make finding files easy, you will need to make sure your naming convention is consistent. A lot of documents we download or are sent to us are likely to have names we would not naturally search for. I’ve downloaded important PDFs with incomprehensible names and if I do not immediately rename them they will quickly get lost in the system.
The best file naming system I have come across, and the one I’ve used for years is to name files with the date first. I date these in a computer-friendly way which means you start with the year, then the month, and then day followed by the type of document and name. This means I can search for documents by date or date range as well as type and or name.
To give you an example of this at work, after each call I have with a coaching client, I write feedback for them. It’s a summary of what we discussed during our call. The file name is the date I created the feedback, followed by the word “feedback” and then the name of the client.
Then next time I have a call with the client, all I need to do is search for the client’s name. I get a list of all their feedback in date order and I can click the latest one and have it up on my screen when we talk. Searching for that file takes around half a second. It’s a lot faster than going into my folders, looking for my coaching folder, finding the name of the client, and then looking for the last document.
For you Mac users, to get Spotlight, the keyboard shortcut is Command + Space bar. I’m not sure what it is on Windows, but it is worth looking for as using the keyboard shortcut will save you a huge amount of time.
Now for your notes, pretty much every notes application now has a very robust search. Evernote is famous for theirs, and Apple Notes is excellent too. I should point out that if you do use Apple Notes, you will find using your computer’s search it will also search your notes too.
But for search to be useful, you do need to make sure you give your documents a clear name. That’s the key to making sure you will be able to find everything.
The best advice I can give you is to not overcomplicate this. The more complexity you add to your file structure the harder it will be to find something later. Try not to have too many sub-folders. My limit is one sub-folder. I’ve been down the road of creating multiple sub-folders inside my folder structure and it rapidly becomes a nightmare.
Think in terms of your projects. Have a master project folder where you put your current projects. Each project has its own sub-folder. Do the same thing for your areas of focus. One partner folder is called areas of focus, and each of your areas nests inside that folder. This prevents you from having to dig too deep looking for something.
Ultimately, when it comes to managing your files, the best way is to manage them in a way that works for you. If you are not doing so already, take advantage of the cloud services. It means your documents are saved on all your devices, are backed up, and will be completely searchable. And learn how to search for your documents through your system’s search function.
Thank you Dermott for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is on the humble to-do list and how to get the best out of using one.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Sign Up For My Free weekly newsletter
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
More about the Time Sector System
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 198 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 198 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Have you noticed that your to-do list isn’t very good at helping you to get things done? It’s a great way to remind you of all the things you haven’t done and how much you have to do, but motivating you to do the tasks? No. Not very good at all.
This week, I have a question on this very topic and I can’t wait to answer it for you.
Now, before we get to the question, if you want to receive a time management and productivity tip every week, then sign up for my weekly newsletter. This newsletter goes out every Friday and it contains a list of all the content I produced that week, a short article on productivity, time management, or goal planning, and links to articles and videos I have found interesting that week. It’s like getting your very personal weekend newspaper digitally every week. No negative news or politics. Just straightforward helpful tips and tricks to help you on your continuous journey to self-improvement.
Details on how to sign up for my newsletter are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ben. Ben asks; Hi Carl, I’ve been using a to-do list for years but have always struggled with it. I’m very good at adding tasks and stuff, the problem I have is I just ignore the list altogether on most days. I don’t want to go there and look at all the stuff I have to do. It leaves me feeling stressed and anxious. How do you make your list inspiring?
Hi Ben, thanks for your question.
Firstly, I should reassure you that you are doing nothing wrong. I’ve met a lot of people who have found the same problem with a to-do list. They can be very demotivating and uninspiring.
When we make the decision to start a to-do list it can be exciting. It can also be stress-relieving to get all those tasks and to-dos out of our heads and into an external place. The trouble is that stress relief rarely lasts very long at all. Once we have everything out of our heads, all that’s happened is all those things that were swimming around causing us stress and anxiety are now staring at us from a computer screen or a piece of paper so the stress relief is short-term.
Now, the number one problem with to-do lists is what we put on them. There is a belief that everything needs to go on the list. Well, yes and no. You see a lot of the things we put on our lists are the kind of things we are not going to forget anyway. They have their own natural triggers. For instance, taking the garbage out. The trigger here is you get to see how full your trash can is every time you walk past it. Do you really need a reminder for that?
Email is another example. A lot of our tasks come from email and so it’s natural to feel we must send actionable emails to our to-do list. Makes sense doesn’t it? I mean, the email contains a task and tasks should go onto a to-do list.
The problem here is all you’ve done is moved a task from one place to another place and done nothing about it. You’ve shuffled the proverbial paper, which might give you a small sense of accomplishment when in reality you’ve accomplished zero. Nothing.
With email, you can create folders So all you need to do is create a folder for all your actionable emails. I advise my clients to create a folder called “Action This Day”, and any email that needs something doing with it—a reply, reading, or adding to a project note, for instance—goes into that folder.
Then, either once or twice a day, give yourself some time to clear that folder. I recommend you reverse the order of the mail in that folder so that the oldest email is at the top and the latest at the bottom. This helps to stop you from cherry-picking the easiest emails and forces you to deal with the oldest email first. That way you will always be up-to-date with your mail.
You can create a task in your to-do list reminding you to clear this folder once a day if you wish, but the reality of our modern life is email and messages from places like Slack need dealing with every day, so scheduling time for this makes more sense. For me, I schedule an hour a day for dealing with my communications in my calendar. It’s got to be done every day anyway. Time for replying to email won’t magically appear. You have to make time for doing it.
For some of you, much of your work may involve following up with clients and customers and it seems logical to add all these follow-ups into your to-do list. Again, this can create overwhelm. Now depending on your work and how many of these you have to do each day you could create a dedicated list for calls and follows up in your task manager. But, if a lot of your work does involve calls, I would create a spreadsheet that I can work from every day. This way I can add notes dates when I called when I should follow up and anything else relevant to that person.
This again means you can replace individual tasks with a single task telling you to complete your calls for the day. It also means all your information is in one place which means if your boss asked you about a particular client or customer you can easily retrieve that information.
A functioning to-do list acts as a central hub directing you towards the work that needs doing. A to-do list stops functioning when it becomes clogged up with a large number of low-value tasks that crowd out your important work.
We, humans, are hard-wired to pick the low-hanging fruit. If you have three tasks two of which are simple tasks like call your colleague to check they received a file you sent a couple of days ago or look into buying a new laptop computer, and one task to work on a presentation you need to do early next week, you will pick the call and laptop research first. That gives you two checks instead of one but it doesn’t move anything important forward. That’s just the way we are.
We have to be much stricter about what gets onto our daily to-do lists if we want them to direct us towards the important tasks. One way to do that is to separate your routine tasks—the clearing of actionable emails, following up with colleagues and clients, and doing your expenses—from our project and goal tasks. One way to do that is to create a folder for your routine tasks and set a recurring date for each one for when they need to come up. That way you won’t need to review that folder very often and these low-value tasks will come up when they need to come up in your daily list.
You also want to make sure these tasks fall to the bottom of your daily lists by using tags or flags. Most good task managers allow you to flag tasks and these will show up at the top of your list, so make sure your high-value tasks are at the top of your list and the low-value ones are at the bottom.
The next step is to make sure you do a daily and weekly planning session. Daily planning sessions should be done before you end the day before. The weird thing about these daily planning sessions is almost everyone knows it makes sense. It’s a good practice and it sets you up for a very meaningful and productive day. You get better sleep because you are not worrying about missing anything and you feel a lot more in control of what needs to be done. Yet, most people skip it.
I’m too tired, I don’t want to be thinking about work in the evening or I don’t have time, are just three of the excuses I often hear. Yet, you’re too tired and you feel you don’t have time precisely because you didn’t have a plan for the day and you ended up working to everyone else’s plan. And if you think avoiding doing the daily plan will stop you from thinking about work in the evening, you’re gravely mistaken. You’ll be worrying about all the things you think you might have forgotten all evening.
If you really want to feel less tired and not worry about what you might have missed at work, do the daily planning session. You only need ten minutes or so. Clear your inbox to make sure there are no fires developing there, check your calendar for your appointments, and review your to-dos for the next day to make sure they are still relevant—it’s surprising how many things you thought you might have to do three weeks ago no longer need doing.
One final point for you, Ben, is to know your limitations. There are only a small number of meaningful things we can do each day. For most people that will be around ten things. Now, this doesn’t include some of the less meaningful tasks and routines such as putting fuel in your car, checking email, and doing your food shopping, these are meaningful tasks that drive your projects and goals forward.
If you think you are going to put together a one-hour presentation, attend five meetings and write an outline for a new company training programme as well as contact ten clients, get an hour at the gym and cook a romantic meal for your partner, good luck. It isn’t going to happen. Get realistic.
One of the strengths of the Time Sector System is it gets you to focus on what you want to accomplish in a week, not in a day. While the saying goes ‘most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade’, the same principle applies to the day and week. We do tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can accomplish in a week. Focus on what you want to achieve in the week.
This means you don’t want to skip the weekly planning session either. This is around thirty minutes at the end of the week where you can get a big picture view of where you are with your goals and projects. You can then set yourself targets of achievement for the week. See what needs moving forward and look for the small wins that, over time, add up to big wins.
If you want your to-do list to work for you, reduce what you have on there and ensure what is on your to-do list are meaningful tasks that drive goals and projects forward. Be realistic about what you can do, and do your daily and weekly planning.
I hope this has been helpful for you, Ben. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is all about balance and how to combine a busy professional life with an active personal life.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
More about the Time Sector System
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 197 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 197 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Do you feel sometimes your work is taking over your life? You’re not alone. Many people are feeling this and with the sudden move towards working more from home, it likely feels almost impossible to put barriers between your professional and personal life.
This week, I will share with you some strategies you can use to help bring a little more balance into your life.
Before we get to the question and answer if you want to learn more about time management and productivity I have a YouTube channel that shares tips and strategies to help you get the most out of tools like Todoist and Evernote as well as many of Apple’s productivity apps.
The link to my channel is, as usual, in the show notes.
Okay, time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Claire. Claire asks: Hi Carl, my company started a work from home policy last year because of the pandemic and have now decided to move to a hybrid policy. We should work from home three days a week and go to the office on two. The problem I have is when I am at home, I find it difficult to stop working in the evening. Do you have any tips to help me keep a more balanced day when I work from home?
Hi Claire, thank you for your question.
I think this has been a challenge for many people over the last eighteen months or so. We were perfectly happy living a Monday to Friday life where we commuted every day, worked in a fixed location and then came home at the end of the day. It was easy to differentiate when we were working and when we were not. Now, with us starting and ending our work in the same place it is much more difficult to do so.
Now the first thing I would recommend is to stop thinking in terms of 9 ‘till 5 work hours. While this may seem somewhat counterintuitive, it is this area where I feel most people are struggling. The biggest problem with thinking that you must be always working between set hours each day is you soon start to feel you are under house arrest. This is not a great mindset to be working under.
We need to enjoy our work, not hate it. If you allow yourself greater freedom to roam about you are going to find yourself feeling more at ease working from home. For instance. You may begin your day by clearing your actionable email. Well, you don’t necessarily need to do that from your computer. Those quick emails could be done on your phone, so you could pop outside on a nice day and spend the first thirty minutes of the day getting some fresh air.
We have the technology to allow us to be moving around. We can respond to Slack messages and emails from mobile devices, and for many, your meetings may be done without video, and so you can do the call almost anywhere. Don’t feel you must be sat at your desk all day. Get up, move around and do your work in the best environment.
Another way we restrict ourselves is by feeling we must do our work during the day. This may be true. You might be in the unfortunate position of having a boss who is monitoring you all day. But for the majority of you who don’t have this, be more flexible with your working time.
For instance, if your kids come home from school around 4pm stop for an hour and play with your kids. Then when they settle down in the evening (hopefully they do) you can go back and do an hour of work in the evening.
Now I’ve found that breaking off in an afternoon to take a nap or do exercise helps me be more productive. I usually exercise around 4pm, but I also go back to my home office around 7:30pm for an hour to do a little more work. Sometimes, I begin the day at 10am rather than 9am and spend that first hour taking a walk with my wife and dog.
One of the great things about this move away from working full-time in an office is managers are being forced to focus less on hours worked and more on work produced—which of course is a far better metric anyway. So hours sat in front of a screen doing nothing important can be replaced with something far more regenerative and that means when you are in front of your computer screen you are going to be more effective.
One of the difficulties many people faced when they had to work in an office all day was distractions. If it wasn’t your boss asking you questions all day or colleagues interrupting you with gossip, it was the noise and movement all around you that prevented you from being able to focus on your work.
Working from home means you can close the door and do sessions of focused work without all that background noise and interruptions. The thing to remember is your brain is not a machine it needs breaks, so use your calendar and schedule out periods of focused work in between other jobs you may have to do.
For instance. Today, I had a call from 7:30am to 8:30am. Then I took my wife to her dance studio. I returned home around 9:00am and had two hours until my next call at 11am. Those two hours were a great opportunity to do some focused work.
Once my calls were over around 1:00pm, I picked my wife up from her studio and we had lunch together. Returning home around 2:30, I did another 90 minutes of focused work before exercise. Finally between 5pm and 6pm I responded to my email and messages.
If you total up the number of hours I did work today, it was seven and a half hours, yet I managed to have lunch with my wife, exercise and not be confined to a single room all day.
I was at my desk when it mattered—for the video calls, I was able to do three and a half hours of focused work and respond to all my messages without feeling under pressure. I would say, I had a balanced day.
To truly live a balanced life, you need to define what balance means to you. For me, balance is having time to spend with my wife and for exercise as well as doing my work. If I get those three areas into my regular working days I feel I have balance.
If you are trying to lead a fixed schedule you are not likely to be able to achieve balance. You need to be flexible. There are too many unknowns that will come up on a day and so planning too far ahead will not work effectively. This is why you need a daily plan. When I planned my day, last night, I saw I had three calls, I knew I had to take my wife to her studio and I wanted time for exercise. I was able to review my calendar and knew when I needed to be in my office and when I did not need to be there.
Now, as I have mentioned many times before, every plan needs to begin with your long-term goals, then areas of focus and finally your core work—the work you are paid to do. Building on this foundation ensures you have balance in your life. If you are not doing a weekly planning session, it’s easy to slip into someone else’s plan and that’s likely to be your company’s plan. There’s nothing wrong with that—all companies have a plan. But, their long-term plan should never be your long-term plan
The trouble is, if you don’t have your own plan it’s very easy to find yourself working solely on your company’s plan and that will make you feel out of balance because you are not doing anything for yourself. You are allowing your life to be dictated by the plan of your company.
Finally, if you want to be able to stop working at a fixed time, then the best solution is to fix your dinner time. Your desire to work is not as strong as your desire to eat. I eat at 6pm. I never schedule calls at that time. That is my dinner time. If I did try and push through, it would not be long before my hunger would become too much and I would have to stop to eat.
Now, this is easier done if you live with other people and you all eat dinner at the same time. It can be much harder if you live alone or members of your household eat at different times. But in my many years of experience, I’ve not found much that can trump hunger to get me to stop working.
Now to prevent you from going back to work in the evening, you need a positive distraction. That could be exercise time, time with your friends and family or learning something new. But again, to make sure this happens block it in your calendar.
The bottom line though, if you really want to bring your life into balance, you need to be intentional about it. You need to tell yourself to stop. Without an intention to do something else, you will allow yourself to work more than you intend to.
Balance is about knowing what you want from all parts of your life and doing something intentional about it. That’s why developing your eight areas of focus are important. Your family and relationships, career, finances, health and fitness, spirituality, personal development, lifestyle and experiences and your purpose. I like to spend time with my wife each day. I can do that by intentionally taking her to and from her dance studio or arranging to have lunch with her.
I also like to study and exercise each day, so I have time for these activities blocked out on my calendar so I am not tempted to sit at my desk and respond to another email or write another article.
Living a more balanced life is up to you. You can do this. Be intentional about how and where you spend your time. There is time for work, for a social life and for your hobbies (remember those?) but only if you are intentional about spending time in those areas.
Thank you, Claire, for the question and again, I thank you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s podcast, I answer a question about how to do everything on your to-do list every day.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
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Episode 196 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 196 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
My guess is, if you are listening to this podcast, you will be using a task manager or to-do list of some kind. And, you will likely have discovered that you have a lot more to do than time available each day. You are not alone. There is far more to do than we will ever have time for. But that does not mean it’s a lost battle. There are things we can do that will ensure the right things are being done each day so things that matter do get done.
Now, before we get to the question and answer, I strongly recommend you download my area of focus workbook. Part of the answer to this week’s question is really understanding what is important to you. Without this knowledge, you are going to be like a rudderless ship. Just sailing round and round with no clear destination.
The link to the download is in the show notes and don’t worry, I won’t be asking you for your email address. Just go to my downloads page, click on the Areas of Focus workbook, and boom, you get it.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Lucy. Lucy asks: Hi Carl, I recently discovered you through your blog and I hope you can help me. I am trying to get more organised but no matter how hard I try, I can never get all my work done. I don’t know if it’s a problem with me or something I am doing wrong. Can I ask if you get all your work done every day?
Hi Lucy, thank you for your question. And I can answer it in one word. No. No I don’t get all my work done every day.
There’s too much to do. But I do start the day with a list of objectives or outcomes I want from the day and with those, I generally do get them done.
Let me explain.
On most days I will have around twenty to twenty-five tasks to complete. These tasks include my prioritised tasks as well as my routines. Now, the way to start with this is to understand that while we can control what we do each day we cannot control how much time we have. Time is fixed. The only variable in the equation is your activity.
Now, activity can be affected by a number of things. Our energy levels, whether we got enough sleep, outside events such as family emergencies, client and customer demands, and our bosses. We cannot control these. Our energy levels and how much sleep we get depends on many things. You might wake up with a cold which makes you feel dreadful, or one of your children wakes up in the middle of the night and cannot get back to sleep. There are just too many variables here.
Yet the clock will keep ticking no matter how you feel or what emergency you come into work and face.
So we need to get strategic and to do that we need to ask a simple question each day. What do I want to get accomplished today?
Imagine you’ve been on a two-day training course and you have not been able to stay on top of your email and messages while you were away. You could begin the day with an objective you get your email and messages under control. That might take you two or three hours, but if you have decided that is one of your outcomes for the day, then you open your calendar and schedule it. Block out two or three hours and call it “communication time”.
Now, let us imagine you woke up this morning with a headache, your muscles ache and you feel dreadful. Not a great condition to be in to get a lot of work done. So what do you do? Well, ask the question: based on how I feel today, what do I want to get accomplished today?
In this situation, you may only be able to catch up on your reading or clear your email and messages. You can look at your list of things to do and decide to postpone some of the more difficult work to later in the week when, hopefully, you feel a lot better.
On a day-to-day basis, you want to have two or three must-do tasks and begin the day knowing very clearly what completing those tasks will look like. For instance, I have three things I want to get accomplished today. Write this podcast script, exercise, and do day 8 of a 10-day course I am doing. That’s just three things and to accomplish those things I will need four hours. Two hours for this script, an hour for my exercise, and an hour for the course.
Having an estimate of how long each activity will take does help you. I’ve been writing podcast scripts for nearly four years now, so I know how long they take. I exercise for around 40 minutes each day and take a shower afterward so that means I need an hour for that. And the course I am taking will take one hour.
For most of your tasks, because you will have probably done them before, you will have a reasonably good chance of estimating how long they will take to complete.
So, out of the twenty-four hours I have today, I only need four of those hours for my “must do” tasks. Even if this script takes longer than usual, I have plenty of time.
As for everything else, I will do what I can to complete them but if not, I’m not going to beat myself up. I can reschedule them for another day.
Now, here’s a little secret. A lot of what you have on your to-do list probably doesn’t need doing.
There’s a story I heard about Napoleon. Napoleon instructed his servants not to give him his mail when it arrived but to put it to one side for three weeks and then give him it. What he discovered is that by waiting three weeks before reading a message, 70% of the problems in those letters had fixed themselves.
I’ve found that to be true today. I often receive emails through the night from students asking me where the workbook for a course is. I then find further up my inbox is another email from the same student telling me I don’t need to reply because they found it.
It’s surprising how often that happens. Rushing to respond to things quickly is not necessarily a more effective use of your time. By slowing down you give the other person time to find the answer themselves. A lot of ‘issues’ tend to resolve themselves without you getting involved.
One of the many things I’ve learned from Tony Robbins is to think in terms of the desired outcome rather than how many to-dos I need to complete today.
If we take the email example as an illustration. On a day-to-day basis I am in control of my email. But occasionally, I fall behind with it. When that happens, I will make it an outcome to get my email back under control.
Another example would be if you have a project that has stalled or is going wrong. You could make it an outcome to get the project fixed and moving forward again. So to achieve that outcome what do you need to do today? In this scenario, it’s likely all you need do is take a look at your project notes and decide what the very next thing you could do to get it moving forward. A phone call, a message, or email?
If there is something on your mind, what could you do to get it off your mind? It’s often something you haven’t written down or given much thought to that is taking up a lot of cognitive space in your head and the best thing to resolve this issue is to get it out of your head and decide what needs to happen next. You may not need to do that today, but the very act of getting it out of your head and making a decision about what needs to happen next will stop you from stressing about it.
It’s really about starting the day and deciding what are your must-dos for the day are.
Now, hopefully, you are aware of my 2+8 Prioritisation Method. This is where you select two tasks for the day that must be done. And you will not go to bed until they are done. Then you select eight other tasks that you will do what you can to get them done, but it would not be the end of the world if you don’t complete them.
To me, my two objectives for the day are non-negotiable. They get done. The other eight I complete most days, but occasionally I do need to reschedule them. Get comfortable with that. There will be days when you cannot complete them. All you need do is give yourself a few minutes at the end of the day to look at what you did not do and reschedule them. One or two may become your must-dos tomorrow and that’s fine.
Now how do you know what’s important and what can be skipped? Well, that comes down to again knowing what you want and your areas of focus. Anything related to your goals or areas of focus must take priority over everything. This is not easy. For instance, you may have an important presentation to prepare for and you have exercise on your list of things to do today. It might be tempting to skip your exercise so you can spend an extra hour on your presentation.
No no no, don’t do this. Exercise will come from your area of focus of health and fitness and is a non-negotiable part of your life. By all means reduce the length of your exercise session, if you must, but don’t skip it. Sitting at a desk for four hours will not help you to build a great presentation. Giving yourself a break to exercise, when you do come back to your presentation after exercise you will have a lot more clarity and energy and will get a lot more done than if you just tried to plow on.
Knowing what your long-term goals are, where your areas of focus fit into your life, and having a clear plan for achieving these ensures that the most important things in your life take priority. As long as the tasks associated with these areas of your life are being done when they need doing, you are going to feel more accomplished and in control of the events in your life.
For your core work—the work you are paid to do—try to create a process for doing these tasks. For instance, if part of your job is to contact ten sales prospects each day, then make sure you have sufficient time set aside each day for doing this. If part of your core work is to review the day’s activity log looking for potential issues from customers, this must be prioritised. It’s your job. If it takes thirty minutes, then block those thirty minutes on your calendar.
Ultimately, your long-term goal activities come first. If you are consistent with this, then you will find the tasks associated with these goals will be minimal on a daily basis. Next, make sure your areas of focus tasks are done. For instance, if in your health and fitness area of focus you have a plan to exercise a minimum of three times per week, then make sure your exercise times are scheduled. Then for your core work, get those tasks scheduled too.
Once you have these three areas scheduled and you are consistent at getting them done, you will always be moving forward on the important things. I think most people struggle because they prioritise the wrong things—the latest and loudest. Sure these may be important, and you may have to negotiate some time with yourself to deal with them, you should still return to the base of long-term goals come first, then areas of focus then your core work.
I hope that has helped, Lucy. Thank you for your question and thank you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Did you know that to-do lists, on their own, don’t work? In this episode, I explain why and what you need to do to ensure you get the most out of your productivity system.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
More about the Time Sector System
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 195 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 195 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I think many of you have found that just developing the habit of using a task-manager, or to-do list, doesn’t really work in the long term. Yes, they do help you to remember things you may otherwise forget, but they don’t move you forward on your goals or your projects. It can become frustrating.
This week’s question is all about the parts that are rarely written or spoken about and hopefully, I will be able to unblock your task manager so it puts you on track to achieving your goals and completing your projects.
Now, before we get to this week’s question, if you haven’t already done so, I strongly recommend you download my FREE Areas of Focus workbook. It’s going to be a part of this week’s episode and it will enable you to start tightening up your task manager so that you are focused on the right things.
The download link is in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Timothy. Timothy asks, Hi Carl, I’ve recently started using a to-do list and have it set up for the Time Sectors. I really love it, but I find all I am doing is reacting to what my customers and boss want me to do and I don’t have time to do anything else. Is there a way to add in my goals so I have time to do something about these as well?
Hi Timothy, thank you for your question.
What you describe is quite common for a lot of people who begin consistently using a to-do list for the first time. Most people have used to-do lists at some point or another for things like a packing list before going on holiday, or when redecorating a home. There’s nothing new about a to-do list.
The problem with to-do lists is they are very focused on the here and now. Rarely do people use them to plan out what needs to happen to achieve a goal or to complete a long-term project. They become reactive instead of being used proactively.
What do I mean by that?
Well, most people I come across tend to put tasks on their list that are demanding attention now. Quieter, more long-term tasks tend to be placed in folders such as Someday/Maybe or just get added to a list and forgotten about. It’s when this happens that our longer-term goals and projects get relegated to the bottom of the list and that means there’s no time to do anything about them.
What we need to do is to reverse the way we manage our to-do lists. This does not mean we stop doing the loud, urgent tasks—we still need to do these—but we don’t want to allow them to dominate our day. We need to become more strategic about things.
What I mean by this is to use the power of the modern-day to-do lists to make sure each day our most important work comes up at the top of our lists. And when I say “our most important work”, I mean those tasks that move our goals and project forward. While these may not be the loudest tasks on our to-do list, they are still the most important if you want to take back control of your time.
Your to-do list allows you to create repeating, or recurring, tasks. This means, if you have a long-term project, you can set tasks related to that project as a recurring task. For example; if you have a long-term project that requires around six to twelve months to complete, you create a recurring task that comes up every two or three days telling you to work on that project.
Now those of you using the Time Sector System will have the specifics of what needs to happen next in your project note in your notes app. Your to-do list will tell you if it’s time to do some work on that project. When you see that task, you then go to your project note and everything you need to work on that project will be there. Links to files you are working on, reference materials that need reviewing, and any important emails related to that project.
When we get caught up in the day-to-day noisy tasks, that needs to be a trigger for us to stop and take a big picture view of what’s going on. All great productivity systems are built on the foundation of our long-term goals. The things we want to accomplish over the next five, ten, and twenty years. The sooner you start working on these, the easier they will be to achieve.
If your goal is to lose 20 pounds in weight by the end of the year, starting in January means you need to lose less than two pounds per month. Start that project in September and now you have to lose five pounds per month. A much more difficult goal to achieve.
Likewise, if you want to retire with $500,000 in savings, starting that goal when you are forty-five is going to be a lot harder to achieve than if you begin when you are thirty.
The sooner you start your long-term goals the easier they will be and they will be a lot less demanding on your time.
It’s the same with your projects. If you have a project to redecorate your house this year, planning out the project so you are doing one room a month, means you are going to need a lot less time to complete the project, than if you leave it all until the last two or three months of the year.
With the Time Sector System, you would plan out which rooms you will redecorate each month—you can create a table for this in your notes app,— and then each weekend you would have a recurring task that tells you to continue redecorating your house. You can then plan out what needs to be done. You may need to buy paint when you are out doing the grocery shopping, or you may need to arrange to borrow a paint stripper. You would see that when you did your weekly planning session and you can make the call so you have the paint stripper ready for your next session.
The problem is our addiction to instant gratification. Completing those busy work tasks—the tasks we have convinced ourselves are important—gives us that dopamine hit we crave. Doing a little bit of decorating every weekend doesn’t give us the same hit. Twelve months to redecorate our house is just too far away.
This is why visualisation of a completed project or goal helps. Collecting images so you can save them into a vision board, keeps the goal alive.
On top of those goals come your areas of focus. The things you have identified are important to you. Again, any recurring tasks related to these need to be set up in your task manager as recurring tasks. Self-development tasks such as taking a course, reading the right books, and other forms of learning need time allocated to them. Same with some form of exercise every day—whether that’s a thirty-minute walk in the evening or going to the gym every morning at 6 am. None of these things will happen unless a) you prioritise them and b) schedule the necessary time for them.
The problem is, if you don’t allocate time for these long-term goals, projects, and areas of focus, then the void you create will be filled with less meaningful things like hours scrolling through your news and social media feeds, busy work tasks that are like those empty calories from junk food—they initially make you feel full, but soon you’re feeling empty and lacklustre.
I know it can be hard to prioritise your personal goals and projects over your work projects. Usually, your personal goals and projects only benefit you and so you feel guilty doing so. But if you are not taking care of your health today, when you health starts to go, you quickly become a burden on the very people you care about. If you are reckless with you finances today, who’s going to have to support you when you can no longer work?
Taking care of your personal goals and your areas of focus is never a selfish act. You become a much more pleasant person to be around, you have more energy, so the work you do do for others is done with more attention and to a higher standard. Your self-respect improves and that can only benefit other people and more importantly you become an inspiration to others.
The goal with your task manager is to have 80% of your daily output focused on your goals and areas of focus. This may seem very high, but many of these daily activities are things you would normally do anyway such as your morning routines and daily exercise as well as your core work—the work you are paid to do.
By restricting busy work tasks to 20% you are forced to prioritise which ones you do. By constraining yourself in this way you avoid the temptation to do things that are not important and there’s no vacuum demanding to be filled by low value, junk tasks that leave you feeling empty.
One trick you can do that can be very effective is to group similar busy-work tasks together. Responding to low value emails, and messages during a communications hour. This is where you block an hour each day for dealing with your messages. Because you’ve got an hour, you begin with the high importance messages and once those are done, get as many of your low value messages completed.
Often what you’ll find is Parkinson’s Law will come into play—that’s where the work you have fills the time you have available. In this case if you have twenty emails to respond to in an hour, it will take an hour. If you have fifty emails to respond to in a hour, it will take you… You guessed it, an hour. It’s strange how that rule seems to come into play so many times.
The mot important thing to remember is your goal tasks come first, flowed by your areas of focus, then core work and finally everything else.
The key to becoming better at managing your time and feeling more fulfilled and satisfied at the end of the day is to make sure you have your priorities right. I know how difficult this is, but if you become consciously aware of what is important and what is not, you are going to find yourself moving in the right direction.
The strange thing about low value, busy work tasks is as fast as they arrive, the faster they disappear. They may be very important to someone at 3pm on a quiet Thursday afternoon, but by 5pm that person is stressing about something else anyway and the thing they were asking you to do at 3pm no longer needs doing.
I hope that help, Timothy and thank you for your question. Thank you also to you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Do you have a lot of articles, videos and newsletters to read but find it difficult to find the time to read or watch them? Don’t worry, you’re not alone and the good news is there are a few strategies you can use that gets these lists under control.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
More about the Time Sector System
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 194 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 194 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
These days, there are so many fantastic articles and videos to watch that even if we took a week off, we’d still not be able to catch up with our reading and to watch lists. So, two questions come to mind: where can I store these and how can I find time to read and watch them? And those are what I hope to answer for you this week.
Now, before we get to the question and answer, just a quick heads up that if you like the content I share with you in these podcasts and want to learn more, I do have a YouTube channel dedicated to productivity, goal planning and time management, as well as a weekly blog. Plus if you sign up for my learning centre, you receive exclusively a weekly learning note designed to help you with your productivity and goals journey.
All you have to do is get yourself enrolled in my FREE COD course (Collect, Organise and DO) and you will receive the weekly learning note. Full details, as usual, are in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Barry. Barry asks, Hi Carl, I have a lot of articles to read and videos to watch and I find myself consuming these when I should be doing more important work. Are there any tips you can share that will help me to manage these better?
Hi Barry, thank you for your question.
This is certainly a problem many people struggle with. There are so many fantastic videos and articles out there that could help us improve our overall time management and productivity, yet there is precious little time available to watch or read these.
Before we get into how to save these and when to watch or read them, let’s first look at where they are coming from.
Many people subscribe to newsletters that come to us through our email. But how many of you actually read these newsletters? If you look at the statistics on newsletters, for instance, the average open rate is less than 30% and the click rate—the number of times a link is clicked—is less than 5% of those that open the newsletter. If you are not opening a newsletter, and statically that means at least 70% of you, then you need to unsubscribe from that newsletter.
A few years ago, I found I was subscribed to over 30 newsletters. It meant I was getting at least five newsletters per day and it was impossible to read them all. I had to do something to reduce this list. What I did was monitor over one month, which newsletters I opened and which ones I skimmed through—just looking at the headlines.
At the end of the month, I found I only read around five of these regularly and the rest were just taking up digital space and pretty much were deleted almost the moment they came in. So, I unsubscribed from the twenty-five I was not reading. Even to this day, I only have five newsletters I subscribe to.
There is a problem we all face and that is FOMO—the Fear Of Missing Out. We feel if we are not reading these newsletters, we are going to miss something. The reality is you are not missing out on anything. You’re not reading them anyway and If something was important in your industry or company, someone would tell you and if you needed to, you could ask them to send you a copy of the relevant article or newsletter.
So, first up, stop worrying about what you may be missing out on. If you’re not reading something consistently, then unsubscribe from or junk the email.
A quick tip here. I’ve found unsubscribing to some newsletters results in more unsolicited mails arriving. I believe this is because when we click the unsubscribe button we confirm our email is active. I’ve found a better way to manage this is to send the email to your junk folder. Modern email apps, very quickly learn when an email is junk and will automatically junk the email for you. This way you are not confirming your email address to unscrupulous actors.
Next up with this is to set a reading deadline. By this I mean if you haven’t read the newsletter within a specified number of days, you must delete it. Let me give you an example of this:
I subscribe to James Clear’s 3,2,1 weekly newsletter. It usually arrives in my inbox around 11pm on a Thursday and by then I am usually in the middle of my closing down routine. So, I send the email to my action this day folder.
Anything in there needs to be dealt with in less than 24 hours, so this means I have 24 hours in which to read the newsletter. If I don’t do it, I have to delete the email. That little rule ensures I don’t leave this newsletter laying around collecting dust. From the moment I move it to my actionable folder, it must be read within 24 hours.
The worst thing you can do is to have a “To read” folder in your email. I haven’t met anyone who has been able to control this folder for very long. Pretty quickly they become a dumping ground for emails you will never read, but think one day you might do. You won’t. So get rid of that folder. It will not work for you. Instead, if you do get something you think you will read, put it in your actionable email folder and if you haven’t read it within say, 48 hours, delete it.
Next up, what about articles you find online that you want to read later?
Well, if you’re using a notes app such as Evernote or OneNote, you have a web clipper that will save the article to your notes app. This is a fantastic feature full of inherent dangers similar to a “to read” folder in email. You’re going to clip a lot of articles you never read.
The problem here is your notes app quickly becomes overwhelmed with a lot of stuff. There is also the problem with these articles disappearing under a lot of other notes you are collecting each day. Plus, there is no filter.
What I mean by there being no “filter” is we dump these articles into our notes app, some of you may process them and save them into a “to read” folder and then never have the time to go into that folder. Soon, you will have hundreds of unread articles. The question is: when will you sit down and read them? The reality for most people is, never. We are just too busy.
So what can you do here?
My advice is to use a read later service such as Instapaper or Pocket. These services are designed to save articles you want to read in a simple text-based format (fewer distractions). This is great because there’s no rush to read these articles and it gives you an opportunity to filter the articles first. If you like what you read, you can then save the article into your notes app for reference later.
I’ve been using Instapaper for years and before I shut down for the day, I usually give myself twenty to thirty minutes to read through my articles. I have it set up so the oldest article is at the top, which makes sure no article goes unread for very long.
And this is the trick. To keep on top of these, you want to be setting aside twenty to thirty minutes each day for reading. This way, these services are never likely to become overwhelming. Perhaps you like to read in the morning, if so, make reading through these articles part of your morning routines. Or, like me, you like to end the day reading. Whichever way you do it, a small amount of time dedicated to reading through your collected articles will help you to say on top of them.
Next up, what about videos you want to watch.
The issue here is they can be difficult to discover. Some may be sent to you via a newsletter—one of my top newsletters is Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory newsletter. In this newsletter, I get to see who Tom has been interviewing this week. I can then decide if that is something I would want to watch. If so, I open the video and save it in my watch later list.
I do the same with YouTube channels I subscribe to. I review these every few days and if there is anything I want to watch, I click “add the watch later”.
I like to end my day with around thirty minutes of learning and often I use YouTube for this. All I need do is open my watch later list and watch whatever video I feel like watching that day. Because I am doing this in my final thirty minutes before bed, I rarely watch for too long. I am tired and so thirty minutes or so helps me to unwind and relax before going to bed.
I also have a catch-up night each week where I give myself permission to watch whatever I like for two to three hours. It's a great way to unwind and stop thinking about work—unless I want to.
If you have a bad habit of watching videos well past your bedtime, I would suggest you set an alarm to remind you to stop and go to bed. You need not worry, the video will still be there tomorrow.
Just remember to clear out any videos you have watched so the list doesn’t become overwhelmed.
When should you be reading and watching all this content you have saved?
Here I’ve found the best way to read and consume all this content is to set aside time for it. It doesn’t have to be every day. As I said about watching videos, I allow myself two to three hours of vegetating on the sofa on a Saturday to catch up with anything I want to watch. This could be a movie, a comedy show or some of my favourite YouTuber’s videos. It’s completely free.
For reading, I like to read while I eat my breakfast. So for me, I do intermittent fasting and my first meal of the day is at 12pm. That’s when I read through any articles I’ve saved. It’s 30 minutes or so and it’s a nice break from writing or recording something.
If you can find thirty minutes or so each day, you will stay on top of your reading list. The most important thing to remember is if you are just collecting and not doing anything with it—why are you collecting it in the first place?
For a lot of things like exercising, reading, doing an online course etc, you are going to need time. If you’re not scheduling time for it, you are not going to do it. You need to escape from thinking that ‘one day' you’ll have time. No, you won’t. If reading articles and newsletters or watching videos is something you want to do, you need to schedule time for it.
Reading these articles and watching these videos is, for the most part, learning and education. I know a lot of what I watch and read each week are articles around time management and productivity as well as achieving goals, so for me, this is important time. It’s part of my self-development area of focus and so, I have time set aside for it each day. I certainly don’t feel guilty about doing it.
So there you go, Barry. I hope that has helped. The biggest thing you can do to ensure you are reading these articles and watching these videos is to set aside time for doing it. Early in the morning, lunchtime or evening are good times. But whenever you decide to do it, be intentional and consistent about it.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, it’s all about building a system that works for you and then making it stick—probably the more difficult part.
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Episode 193 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 193 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This show gets a lot of questions around the topic of productivity systems and apps and this week’s question comes from this same topic. So strap yourself in for a little more advice on creating your own system and overcoming some of the more common traps you will encounter as you develop your own system.
Before we get to the question and answer, I want to say if you do have a question or you are experiencing some difficulty creating your own system, then all you need do is email me at carl@carlpullein.com and I will be more than happy to try and answer your question.
Your questions help me to find solutions to difficulties around goal planning, time management, and productivity and they also help me to grow and improve my skills. I love helping, so if you feel I can help or answer any of your questions, please get in touch.
Okay, on with this week’s question and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Monica. Monica asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the content you produce. I wanted to ask you if there is a way to finally get myself organised and get my work and chores under control. I’ve spent years trying to organise myself but each time I try a new system, I stop using it after a week or two. Is there a secret I am missing or something?
Hi Monica, thank you for the question.
Now, first up, you are not alone, Monica. I think everyone goes through this process at one time or another. I know I’ve been through it and it’s just a part of the journey.
There is a lot of advice out there—most of it great advice—such as write everything down, plan your day and use a to-do list. The trouble with a lot of this advice is, it is not necessarily going to work for everyone.
There are too many variables. Some of us spend a large part of our day driving between clients’ offices and so for a lot of the day we are unable to reply to emails or read important documents. Others, work in customer-facing jobs where there is no fixed time to do any focused work during the working day. So when it comes to productivity and time management systems it really is a case of one size does not fit all.
That said, there are still some fundamentals that should be put in place before you develop anything else. You need a simple, easy and quick way to collect everything. Your tasks, ideas, and commitments. Fortunately, your phone is likely to have something like Siri or Google Assistant, or if you are at home, Alexa. These voice-activated tools, are a great way to collect things while you are driving, cooking, or doing something else that prevents you from using your hands.
Wherever you are on the productivity learning curve, I would always advise people to look at the way you collect your tasks and notes and ask yourself if there is a better and faster way to do this. The harder it is to collect things, the less likely you are to collect and that means even before your start there is a big hole in your system.
Next, make sure you spend around ten to twenty minutes before you end the day and organise what you collected and then plan out the next day. This just needs to be turned into a habit.
Now for both of the two basics above, there should not be any excuses. No matter what work you do, you can always look at the way you collect your stuff and see if there is a better, faster way and everyone can find ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day to organise and plan.
If you don’t do these two very basic, simple things, it’s not a problem with your system, it’s a problem with you and your self-discipline and if you do have a problem with self-discipline you can fix that by buying yourself a house plant that requires watering every day.
The daily practice of watering your plant develops discipline. If you do not consistently water your plant, it will die and you get to see the slow destruction of life when you don’t exercise self-discipline.
The next thing to understand is that no one system is necessarily going to work for you. The act of collecting and organising is not a system, they are the absolute basic fundamentals of ALL systems. Everything else you may do is likely to be some system or another.
The biggest problem I find with most people struggling to develop a system is they never give any system enough time to work. Whether that is David Allen’s Getting Things Done, Time Crafting, or the Time Sector System, none of these systems will work for you until you give them enough time to embed and work.
Getting Things Done, for instance, is likely to take at least six months to become fully functional. There are a lot of moving parts and you will be experimenting with where to keep your project materials as well as developing your contexts.
With the Time Sector System, you are going to be over-ambitious about what you can accomplish each week to start with and so there is a fair amount of adjusting to find the right balance.
However, with enough time, a little adjusting, and resetting, whatever system you decide to use will eventually begin to bring you the desired results. You just have to give it time.
Another mistake people make is they think an app will transform their time management and productivity. No, it won’t. The only tool that will transform the relationship with time is a calendar and whether you use Google, Apple, or Microsoft for your calendar is does not matter. All these calendars have pretty much the same functionality. They show you the same information in almost the same format.
The task manager or notes app you use does not matter one jot to your system. There may be differences in the way each app collects and organises and that means the only thing you need to decide is how you want to organise and see your stuff.
I usually advise people to pick an app they like the look of and then spend as much time as they can really learning how to use it. That’s the secret to finding an app you like.
Frequently changing apps because the latest app looks nicer is the most damaging thing you can do to your overall productivity. Every week I get emails from app developers asking me to take a look at their new app. I don’t. I understand apps have nothing to do with whether you become better at managing your time and more productive. It’s the system you use that does that.
There are thousands of apps trying to tempt you to use them. Don’t be tempted. The best way to avoid being tempted is to stop looking.
Let me tell you a secret, these developers who ask me to review their products are usually offering to pay me to do so. If my YouTube channel or this podcast was used to make money, it would be very tempting to take the money and tell you that this product or that one is the new app everyone should be using.
Don’t worry, I won’t do that. But if I am being offered money to preview products, how many app reviewers are you watching ARE taking the money to tell you how great a new product is?
When it comes to organising your stuff, this is one of the most personal things you are going to have to do. We all have a different way we want to see, collate and manage our work. What works for one person is not going to work for you. You likely do a different kind of work and have very different personal stuff to manage and think differently.
I began my working life in the 1990s, which means when I began work, everything was filed alphabetically in grey filing cabinets. That’s what I got used to and that is what still works for me when it comes to filing my documents in iCloud.
My Evernote is tagged alphabetically. Although over the many years I’ve been using Evernote, I have developed a system for finding things using keywords and titles.
If I am looking for an article I saved on the blue blazer Roger Moore wore in The Spy Who Loved Me, I would search Evernote for “TSWLM, Blazer” (I code all James Bond Movies using the letters of their title) and that would find exactly what I am looking for—I know, I just tested it.
And that’s the ‘secret’ if you like. Over time, as you get used to the apps you are using, you will develop your own way of doing things and because you developed them, they WILL work for you.
But you have to understand that it takes time for that to happen. Often it will take years to find a settled method and it will continue evolving.
One way to ensure your system grows with you and continues to develop is to do a three-monthly review. Everything three months, I ask myself if there is a better way? I look at how I am collecting—can I make it faster? Often a small tweak somewhere can speed things up a little. And I also look at how I am planning the week and day. There I am looking to shorten the process as much as possible.
Email is a good example. Over the years I have been doing videos, blog posts, and podcasts on productivity, the amount of email I receive each day has increased. This means I need to refine and try and find ways to make managing email more efficient and effective.
This looking for continuous improvement has resulted in me being able to process an inbox of 100 emails in around fifteen minutes.
So, if you want to improve your mythology and develop a system that works for you, Monica, then begin with the basics. Look at how you collect and organise your tasks. Then look at how you are filing your documents. Where are you putting them, how are you categorising them, and make sure you follow your own guidelines.
Following these simple steps will ultimately lead you to create your very own way of doing things and that is the one that will consistently work for you. Other people’s system may give you a few pointers, but in the end, whatever system you develop it must work for you.
I hope that helps, Monica. Good luck with your productivity and organisational journey because that is what it is—a journey.
Thank you for your question and thank to you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 192
This week, I have a slightly different kind of question to answer about the various tools I use to produce my work each week.
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The Tools I use Blog posts
2018
2019
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Episode 192 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 192 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
A question that occasionally arrives in my inbox is one asking about what tools and apps I use to do my work, so I thought it was about time I answered this question.
Now, I have written a couple of blog posts over the years about this, and I will put those in the show notes so you can see how often I have changed my apps over the years. I should warn you though, I am boring. I very rarely change the tools I use. I’m inspired by people who’ve been using the same tools for years. It seems that with this approach you become one with the app or tool and it just becomes a part of who you are and what you do. It means you focus more on the work and less on how to do something with the app you are using.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ricardo. Ricardo asks: Hi Carl, would you tell us what apps and tools you use to do your work. I know about Todoist and Evernote, but what other apps do you use every day?
Hi Ricardo, thank you for the question, and I should say thank you to all of you who have emailed me with this question before.
Okay first up, as you say, Ricardo, I use Todoist and Evernote as my main productivity tools. I’ve been using Todoist now for just over eight years and Evernote’s been a part of my life for twelve.
These two apps are the backbone of my whole productivity system. Todoist tells me what tasks I need to perform each day and what my objectives are. Evernote manages my project work, goals, my content ideas, and notes and is pretty much my “second brain” as the current term appears to be.
All my research, quotes, and articles of interest are kept in Evernote. At the last count, I had over 8,000 notes in there. The great thing about Evernote is you are not restricted by how much you have in Evernote, you are only restricted by the amount you put in there each month. I have the Personal Account—what used to be called pro—and that gives me 10 GB of uploads per month. I’ve never come close to hitting that limit.
Todoist manages my tasks and I use the Time Sector System for organising my tasks. That means my tasks are organised by when I will do the task: This week, next week, this month, next month, etc.
However, Todoist and Evernote are not the first apps I open in the morning. That honour goes to Day One, my journaling app. Back in January last year, I decided to experiment with digital journaling for a year. Previously I had a hit and miss journaling habit with a paper-based system, but found whenever I was away on a trip I rarely opened my journal. So, I thought I would try digital journaling and chose Day One to be my digital journal. I liked the idea I posting a picture every day and the journal being searchable by tags.
Over eighteen months later, I haven’t missed a day and I’ve posted a picture every day too.
So, When I wake up, I begin my morning routines. This involves drinking a glass of lemon water and brewing my coffee. I use a Chemex coffee maker and there’s an art to making the perfect coffee with a Chemex. (I researched it for hours on YouTube) So, while my coffee is brewing, I do my shoulder stretches. Once my coffee is brewed, I sit down at my desk and open up my iPad, and hit a shortcut I have pinned to the Home Screen that opens up a new entry in Day One and for the next ten minutes, I write. I use a template that has a number of little checklists so I can monitor what I am doing and making sure I am following the right habits.
Once I have my journal written, I open up the email app on my iPad. I use Apple mail (I’ve been using that app since 2001 when Apple launched Mac OS Ten) and clear my inbox. Most of my emails come through the night. So when I open Mail, there are likely to be about 100 to 150 emails. So, for the next 20 minutes or so I go through these, clearing them and moving them to where they need to go. Either Action This day, archive or delete. I practice the principles I teach in my Email Mastery programme and I can promise you, those principles work.
After I’ve completed those tasks, I usually have a couple of hours of calls. These are usually run through Zoom.
Now I have an M1 MacBook Pro, that I bought back in February and it's an amazing computer with one flaw. The built-in camera is terrible. So, I have a Logitec Brio 4K video camera attached to my LG 27 inch 4K monitor that I use for all my Zoom calls and workshops.
Once my calls are over, I exercise and shower, and then sit down to do the day’s writing. For writing blog posts and newsletters—like my Learning Centre’s weekly Learning Note, and the script for this podcast, I use an app called Ulysses. This is a fantastic writing app that puts everything out of the way while you are writing. As the filing system uses iCloud as its backend, I keep all my writing in here.
I have been using Ulysses for just over five years and I have hundreds of blog posts, all my podcast scripts, and newsletter essays in here. At a quick glance, there are over a thousand pieces of content in here. WOW! That’s a lot of words written over a five-year period.
One of the great things about sticking with an app is you learn how to use it properly and proficiently. I know all the keyboard shortcuts, I know how to quickly add tags, move drafts to my different folders without having to think about it. When I am in Ulysses, all I need to think about is my writing. I’m not wondering what this feature des or that one. It’s set up exactly how I like it so when I begin writing, that is all I need to focus on.
I do have one other writing app I use though. For the books I write, I use Scrivener. I’ve written every book using Scrivener because it’s purpose-built for book writing. My first book was a book I wrote on Presenting in English way back in 2009. So, I must have been using Scrivener for twelve years now.
It’s not the prettiest of apps, but it does the job, and like Ulysses, when you are writing all the functions disappear and you can focus on your writing. I am currently using it now to write The Time Sector System book.
The biggest advantage of Scrivener is when you are ready to publish, it will create all the formats you need. Word documents if you are sending the book to a publisher, Kindle format if you want to publish on Amazon, and ePub if you are publishing to Apple Books. All the formats are built-in.
While on the topic of writing, I use Apple Pages for my formatted documents. For instance, I write feedback for all my coaching clients after their calls—it’s a summary of what we discussed and the next steps they can take to improve their systems or achieve their goals. All these are written in Pages and I have a saved template for these documents.
Likewise, for tracking sales, my coaching clients, and anything else that requires a spreadsheet, I use Apple Numbers and for all my presentations for workshops and seminars, I use Apple’s Keynote.
As I say this, I realise I’ve been using Pages since it was launched in 2005— so that’s been in my toolbox for sixteen years. Numbers was released in 2007 so, that’s been in my toolbox for 14 years and Keynote since 2003, so that one I’ve used for nearly twenty years! WOW!
I should say, I prepare my online course outlines using Numbers and I have a template set up for this. When I am updating a course, such as my recent Time And Life Mastery course, I pull up the outline from the previous version and work from that. That tells me which parts need updating and which can be left alone.
Now for the other category.
I use Asana for tracking my weekly content. I produce around six to eight pieces of content each week and they are all in different states of readiness. So to track where each is, I use a Kanban board in Asana and move these along as they are developed. I use a simple column system of planning, in production, post-production, scheduled, and posted.
The calendar I mainly use is Apple Calendar, but the back end is Google Calendar because of the integration with Zoom. I do have Fantastical on my computer and I pay for the premium service, but I really only use that for setting up group meetings and using the little dropdown calendar on my desktop for quick reference to see when my next call or appointment is. I’m probably not using Fantastical to its full potential, but Apple Calendar on my desktop is a dream to use. It is simple, and once again I’ve been using it for a very long time—almost 20 years.
Safari is my browser of choice, although I use Chrome for more work-related tasks such as accessing Asana and uploading YouTube videos. For reading, research, and watching videos though, I use Safari.
I also have some little helper apps. The most commonly used one is TextExpander. TextExpander allows you to create little snippets of text that you can call up using simple text. For instance, if I want today’s date in the British format—my preferred format—I type E Date and the date will magically appear.
I also use it for my filing conventions. I file all my documents using YYYY-MM-DD format and by typing F Date, that will give the date in that format.
TextExpander is also used for emails I regularly reply to or send which saves me a lot of time.
On my phone and iPad, I use Drafts a lot. This is a simple text app that allows me to collect tasks, notes, and pretty much anything else related to text and I can then send it to either Todoist or Evernote.
I use Apple Reminders for my grocery list and this is shared with my wife so we can both add to a single list. I love how I can use Siri from my Apple Watch by saying something like “Add broccoli to my shopping list” and boom it’s added.
I also use Goodnotes for any courses I take. I like that it doesn’t turn off my screen when I am taking notes during a course. I can also upload the course’s workbook and then use that as my guide adding note pages.
I used Goodnotes a couple of years ago when I was in Singapore at Tony Robbins’ Unleash The Power Within event. If you’ve ever done a live Tony Robbins event you know that the day is long and my iPad’s battery (a 2018 iPad Pro 11 inch with Apple Pencil) coped remarkably well even though the screen was on a lot of the time.
The great thing about using my iPad in those types of courses, I can take a picture of a slide and instantly annotate the picture in Goodnotes.
For my design work and editing videos, I use Adobe’s Creative Cloud. Photoshop seems to be permanently open (another piece of software I’ve been using for a long time—about fifteen years!) and Premiere Pro makes an appearance every week.
For cloud storage, I mainly use iCloud—I have a 2 terabyte iCloud account so everything I work on goes in there except when I am collaborating. Then I use Google Drive.
I also have Dropbox, but that is only used for backing up my book projects as Scrivener seems to only support Dropbox storage for backups.
And that’s about it. That’s all the tools I use to get my work done. Hopefully, you will have noticed that I’ve been using most of these tools for years. I know the damage caused by app switching. Yes, it might be cool to be playing with the latest shiniest app on the market, but this means you have to transfer all your old data and learn a new app. To me, that’s a complete waste of time. You will never find the “perfect” it does not exist and it never will. So, stick with one app, learn it so it becomes a part of you and then you will find your productivity improves. You are no longer thinking about how to do something and instead, you just do it.
I hope that has given you some insights, and I know I have finally answered a question that keeps popping up on my podcast questions list. So thank you, Ricardo.
Thank you also to you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Do you feel that your to-do list is just managing the day to day and you don’t have time for the things you feel are important? Well, that’s the issue I am answering this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
More about the Time Sector System
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 191
Hello and welcome to episode 191 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I get a lot of questions about to-do lists and why they become lists of urgent and short-term and unimportant tasks, leaving you with little to no time for doing work you want to do. It’s a big problem for many people and often leads people into quitting a system or wasting time trying to find new apps. Fortunately, there is a fix and that is what I will share with you today.
Before we get to the question, I would like to say if you don’t already know, I have a YouTube channel with almost a thousand videos on Todoist, Evernote, and productivity and goal planning tips and tricks. It’s really where my productivity coaching and teaching began. I also have an extensive blog on my website that is likely to have answers to your many questions.
So if you are looking for answers to productivity, goal planning, and time management problems, check out these places. I’m sure you’ll find a lot of answers there.
All the links to these sites are in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Oliver. Oliver asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the content you provide. It’s a treasure box of information. I have a question. I started using a to-do list about six months ago, and in the early days, it worked. But now, I find I spend all my time just checking off low-value tasks given to me by other people and I just don’t have time to work on my goals. Do you have any tips on making my to-do list work better?
Hi Oliver, thank you for your question.
This is a common problem and one that can occur when we start using digital to-do lists. In our enthusiasm to get stuff into the to-do list, we throw all sorts of things in there. In many ways, this is important because we need to make collecting a habit.
I remember, when I first started using a digital to-do list on my phone. It felt strange picking up my phone in a meeting to add a task. It got a little better when I began using an iPad in meetings, but even that was uncomfortable at first, because being an early adopter, many people in the meeting looked at me with weird faces.
Adding a lot of unnecessary tasks to your task manager is almost a right of passage for anyone wanting to master to-do lists. It’s impossible to know what tasks we will remember and which ones we will forget. So we need to collect everything.
Indeed, to become more effective at processing, we need to practice and the only way to practice is to throw everything into your to-do list right?
However, as you say, Oliver, eventually, this method leaves us with to-do lists that are overwhelming and often focuses our attention on the latest and loudest tasks, and these tasks don’t necessarily move much forward.
So, how do you make your to-do list more effective?
Well, you need to step back and develop your goals and areas of focus.
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that if you are planning on doing a summer reset, you should use the opportunity to step back and think about what you want—your long-term goals—as well as your areas of focus.
You see, these need to be the foundational tasks that go into your to-do list. The tasks and action steps you need to perform regularly to move you towards achieving those goals and also maintaining and growing the things you have identified as being important to you—your areas of focus.
Without identifying these you create a vacuum. You see human beings are actually human doings. We thrive when we are doing things. That could be repairing a bicycle, pottering around in the garden, or planning a trip. We love doing. If you have ever spent all day lazing in bed watching TV or scrolling through your social media, how do you feel at the end of the day? It’s never a positive feeling, is it? We usually feel guilty for wasting a day, and have a headache and just feel physically bad.
This means that your to-do list will always want to be filled with something. We will always want to put something on there. And the truth is, there will always be far more we want to do or have to do than we realistically have time for. In many years to come, you will be laying on your deathbed and you’ll still have things to do on your to-do list.
So, when it comes to filling the vacuum, you have a choice. Either you fill it with other people’s tasks—tasks that come from your boss, colleagues, and customers, or you start with making sure you fill it with your own goals and areas.
Your work tasks are likely to form the biggest block of tasks, but you want to be very careful to make sure that block is not the only block of tasks you have on there. Yes, your employed work is important. If you are of working age, it’s likely to fill up a large percentage of your tasks. But your work is not your whole life. It is a part of your life and your to-do list needs to reflect that.
You may have career-related goals—I know I have—but they are not your only goals. You will have many personal goals too and each goal has its own set of tasks that need to be repeated each week in order to keep them moving forward.
It’s these tasks that should take centre stage in your to-do list.
Now, while your goals and areas of focus should be at the centre of your daily tasks, there will be times when work or your personal life requires you to focus all your attention on something specific. That’s perfectly normal. You just have to deal with these when they arise.
Problems will arise if this is happening every day. It means you need to look at the way you are doing your work.
Doing your everyday work effectively means you need to develop processes to make doing that work as efficiently as possible. For instance, if your work involves a lot of emailing back and forth, you are going to find it very difficult to remain focused for long periods of time to do work that requires you to focus.
I’ve worked with salespeople who spend all day jumping at any email arriving from a customer as if it’s a hot rock. Now, I don’t know anyone today who treats email as a method of urgent communication. If a customer emails you, I can promise you it’s not urgent. If you are replying to their email within minutes of its arrival, what message are you sending your customer? Some may think it sends a message that the customer is important to them when in reality the message relayed is you don’t have very much work to do. Obviously, because you reply to emails so fast. You can’t be working any anything important if you jump on an email the moment it arrives.
Delaying your reply by an hour or two sends the message you want to convey. The email is important, but so is your work. If something was important, you’d get a phone call. Not an email.
I’ve recently been studying how pilots do their work. In one video entitled: A Day In The Life Of A First Officer, The pilot, began their day by getting the flight’s manifest via email and expected combined passenger and cargo weight. They need this to calculate the amount of fuel required for the flight. They then get the weather forecast for their flight to anticipate any potential dangers and to know if they are likely to have to divert from their flight path—again impacting the amount of fuel that will be required.
Once they arrive at the airport, there is a flight briefing conducted by the captain and then after boarding the plane, they get the final weight figures and flight path plus updates on the weather.
Everything a pilot does is checklisted. It’s a process they follow every flight. Nothing is ever missed and everything is recorded.
With such attention to detail to the process, a pilot’s work is made much more efficient and it’s largely the reason why there are so few plane accidents caused by pilot error.
Now, I’m not suggesting you need to checklist your work, but you want to be looking for ways you can turn your work into a more efficient process. For instance, if you usually have people to follow up, create a tag or label in your to-do list and make sure you add any follow ups there. This keeps your follow ups all in one place. Then all you need do is set aside time each day to clear that day’s follow ups.
However, there are a lot of benefits to check listing your day. For one you’re unlikely to miss anything important and for another you are going to become a lot more efficient at doing your work because you’re not having to decide what needs doing next because your checklist will tell you.
Another way to make sure your to-do list is working for you rather than against you is to follow the 2+8 Prioritisation Method. For those of you who are not familiar with this method it is a way to prioritise your day. You select two tasks (your objectives) that MUST be done today, and eight other tasks that you should do. Make sure you have a way to highlight these and you decide on them the evening before.
Then when you begin the day, you only focus on these tasks. If something important comes up through the say you can assess it’s importance against your 2+8 list, and make a decision. But for the most part you want to stay focused on clearing these ten tasks as quickly as possible.
This is a superb way of making sure the important things are being done each day.
Make sure this list of ten tasks are not just work tasks either. You want to be looking for balance. Now Monday to Friday, may be more focused on your work, but that does not necessarily mean they should all be work related. As a guide, I usually have one work objective and one personal objective each day and six other work tasks leaving two slots, if you like, for personal tasks. It helps to keep my work and personal goals moving forward.
Now this does not mean you only do ten tasks each day. I would not include my regular routines in this list. Routines just need to be done, but they are not moving goals or projects forward so they are relegated to the end of the day unless they are time specific.
So, if you want your to-do list to be more effective, begin building it from your long-term goals and areas of focus. Make these tasks the core of your day. Then build everything else on top of that.
Look for ways to build processes and checklists. The more you repeat something the better and faster you will become at doing them. As they say practice makes perfect, but do be on the look out for making the process more efficient.
And one final tip. When you build a process for doing your work, try to fix the work you are doing in your calendar. For example, I have a communications hour each day for when I deal with my messages and emails. This avoids me having to be constantly looking at my email all day. I also have blocks of time for writing and recording so that I know each week I have sufficient time to deal with the work that MUST be done each week.
I hope that helps, Oliver and again, thank you for your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, what stops you from doing a weekly planning session, and how to make sure you are doing one every week.
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Episode 190 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 190 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I’ve recently received a number of questions on weekly planning sessions and how to overcome the fear and dread of seeing all those incomplete tasks. I answered those questions individually, but I realised that my answer to these questions needs a wider audience because I know so many of you are not looking at these sessions in the right way.
Now before we get to the question, I should point out that the weekly planning session I will talk about in this episode is the Time Sector System planning session, and not the GTD (Getting Things Done one) although I will refer to the differences.
The TIme Sector System’s planning sessions are simple, quick, and are more focused on what you are going to do next week, rather than reviewing what you have and have not done this week.
And of course, if you have not joined the Time Sector Course yet, now would be a good time to do so. The course is at a very low price of $49.99 (that is four times cheaper than an equivalent course) and will give you a time management system designed in the 21st century for the way we work today.
There’s enough complexity in the world as it is, the Time Sector System keeps thing simple and focuses your attention on what needs to be done now, and not what may or may not happen in two weeks or two months time.
Full details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question
This week’s question comes from Dodge. Dodge asks: Hi Carl, I think many avoid the planning session because it can be discouraging to have to face unfinished tasks from the week before and stressful to realize you have more you need to do in the upcoming week than is realistic but can’t figure out how to drop things.
I know this is more internal than external, but do you have any suggestions to make it more attractive?
Hi Dodge. Thank you for the question
What you describe in your question is something I know a lot of people worry about. It’s horrible to go into your task manager at the end of the week and see just how much you have not done, that a week ago you decided must be done. It didn’t get done and you feel guilty.
Now, with this, you need to give yourself a mindset shift. Nobody is going to consistently get everything done they planned to each week because there are far too many unknowns that will come your way once the week gets underway.
Planning the week is in many ways a guessing game. You have to try and guess what emergencies will happen and how long they will take to sort out. Even the most experienced practitioner is going to find that almost impossible to accomplish.
Instead, we want to be looking at the weekly planning session as a learning process. Each week we will identify a number of tasks that at the time of the planning session we feel must be done next week. So we give them a date and hope we will have the time to complete them.
At the end of the week, we find a quarter to half of those tasks we thought had to be done have not been done and we feel guilty and it can erode our confidence in the system.
When this happens, it does not mean you have failed. It means you have likely been a little over-ambitious (and there’s nothing wrong with that) The key thing is you learn and become a little more strict about what goes into your this week folder.
Going a little deeper with this, I would suggest you give yourself a few minutes to look at the tasks you didn’t do and ask yourself why. What was it about these tasks that caused you not to do them? After all, a week ago you felt these were tasks that must be done. They did not get done, so they clearly weren’t must-do tasks. What made you think they were? What changed in the week that relegated these tasks to “should-dos?
You’ll find these questions uncomfortable at first, but be patient. Over time you will learn the patterns and once you know the patterns of what causes your must-do tasks to turn into should-dos, you’ll be able to approach things differently. It’ll also teach you what you may think is a must-do task, is not.
The most common reason for this is something changed in the project that demoted the task. Or something else came up that was more important. In that analysis, there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s life happening and is, in many ways a good thing.
However, there is another reason tasks don’t get done. That’s because you erroneously thought it was an important task and it was not. That’s a sign you haven’t got your prioritisation up to scratch. Now the thing about prioritisation is this is a learned skill - it is an art. There’s no science here. If you are new to having a time management system, you are not going to be great at prioritisation. That’s a given. Learning to prioritise is a skill that needs to be learned and more importantly, you need to have identified what your core work and areas of focus are.
I often find people struggling with prioritisation, skipped the section in the TIme Sector Course on identifying your core work. If you are not absolutely clear what your core work is, then everything thrown at you, while at work, will become a priority. You’ll be doing tasks to impress your boss that has no relation to your core work. You’ll be focusing on the wrong things—a salesperson who focuses on having perfect admin will never be a good salesperson.
If you have not identified your areas of focus, you are going to find prioritisation difficult because your areas of focus and your core work are where your priorities come from. If you do not know what these are, then everything in your task manager could potentially be a priority.
So, what do you do if you have a lot of uncompleted tasks at the end of the week? Well, first don’t beat yourself up. These things will happen and clearly not doing them the world hasn’t ended. All you need do is renegotiate with yourself when you will do them.
I find looking at my overdue and uncompleted tasks as an opportunity to assess whether I really want to do them. Some of those tasks will need doing—project work for your boss or client for example, but often you’ll look at a task and realise you don’t really need to do it, or you could delegate it to someone else or modify the task.
Once you’ve done that, rescheduled the tasks that need to be done you can look at what else needs doing. Here you want to be realistic. There’s an expression “biting off more than you can chew” and we are all guilty of this from time to time.
If you are consistently not completing your tasks it means you need to reduce the number of tasks you are trying to accomplish each week. Now, you may say; ‘I can’t I have to do these tasks’, but the thing is you’re not doing them. Either you are going to continue to delude yourself or you are going to get realistic. My advice is get realistic. You’ll feel a lot better if you do.
Your weekly planning session needs to be something you look forward to. Now one of the problems I used to have with the Getting Things Done weekly review was firstly how long it took. To review everything Getting Things Done advises you to review took me between 1 and a half and two hours. I dreaded sitting down doing that each weekend and often skipped it altogether.
The next problem I had with the GTD weekly Review was I was reviewing what I had done instead of planning ahead. Sure, there was some planning, but it always felt more retrospective rather than forward looking.
When I changed my approach and focused on what I wanted to accomplish, the weekly review became a lot less negative—being reminded of how little I had accomplished. This also changed my mindset about the weekly planning session. I now looked forward to it. It’s almost become a little competition with myself. If I exercised five time this week, I will challenge myself to exercise six times next week and make that an objective. If I wrote 5,000 words of my book this week, I’ll challenge myself to go for 6,000 next week.
But the biggest change, for me, was instead of losing around two hours on a Sunday afternoon, I now spend thirty minutes on a Saturday morning planning out the week ahead. Once completed, I start the week with anticipation and excitement to accomplish the things I have set myself. I often don’t accomplish those, but that just gives me more motivation to have another go.
The best thing about not accomplishing what I set is I get a lot of information about myself, how I manage my time, and I can use that information to change my approach and do a better job next week.
And that means, I am in a state of constant and never ending improvement. And I can assure you feel you are improving, it energises you. It pushes you to do it better next time.
Now one more thing about planning sessions. Make sure you are doing a daily planning session too. This is important because with the Time Sector System it is not necessarily about doing your tasks on the exact day you assigned them. You will often find, because of events outside of your control, you will have tasks you were unable to complete on a specific day. The daily planning session gives you a chance to reschedule those tasks to later in the week, or, if they have changed priority, to push them off to next week and beyond. Never be afraid to do that. If a task’s priority changes, then push it off to a time in the future.
What this does is it takes care of a lot of tasks you thought had to be done this week, but now no longer do before you get to the weekly planning session.
The weekly planning session should never be about beating yourself up. It’s a chance to reset the week, to plan out what you want to accomplish next week. Know what needs to be done and, more importantly, what does not need to be done next week.
It should energise and educate you. When you see it as a learning experience, you are going to continuously improve your prioritisation skills, you learn what is genuinely important, and what is not. And it refocuses you on what is important to you.
I hope that has helped, Dodge. Thank you for the question and thank you to you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, how to reset your whole productivity system during your summer holiday.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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The Ultimate Productivity Course Bundle
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 189 | Script
Hello and welcome to episode 189 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
From many of the emails I am receiving these days, it appears many of you have decided to do a productivity system summer reset. Now, I know how easy it is for our systems to become bloated and not run as efficiently as it perhaps should. SO, this week, the question I am answering is on how to do a complete reset when you have a few free days t focus on doing it.
Before we get to the question, I just want to give you a heads up to say that my Ultimate Productivity Bundle of courses is possibly the best value bundle I have ever done. In that bundle, you get four of my top courses including the newly updated Time And Life Mastery. It also includes Your Digital Life 3.0 which on its own includes my updated Email Mastery course as well as The Ultimate Goal Planning course.
In total, you get six courses for less than $200!. If you were to buy all six courses individually, it would cost you $420. You’re saving yourself $219!
So if you are planning on doing a productivity and time management reset over the summer break, then this bundle is THE bundle to buy. It’s going to give you everything you need to create the best productivity system for you.
Full details on how to purchase this bundle are in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show and that means it time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Evan. Evan asks, hi Carl, I’m going on vacation in the last two weeks of July and I plan to take a few days to rebuild my whole system. I feel my current system is not working for me as well as it could. Do you have any tips on how to go about doing this?
Hi Evan, great question. Thank you for sending it in.
Now, if you do have a few days to review and rebuild your whole system then my first tip is to start with the end in mind. What I mean by that is start from where you want to be in ten to twenty years' time.
You see, all great productivity and time management systems begin with where you want to end up, NOT where you are today. The stuff you do today won’t matter very much in ten years' time—it won’t matter very much next week.
When I see most people's task managers it is filled up with trivial little tasks that serve other people and do nothing to serve your own interests and goals. This is why so many people feel stressed out and overwhelmed. It’s because they spend ninety percent of their days running around doing stuff for others.
Now that doesn’t mean you need to become selfish. What it means is all those little tasks for your boss, your colleagues and customers and clients may well have to be done, but most of those tasks have come about because you said the worst thing you could say. You said “yes” without thinking about other, more important things. Things such as spending time with your family, your kids, and your elderly parents. Working on your health and fitness and preparing for those bigger projects that have much higher importance, but may not necessarily be as urgent.
Now the thing is, if you don’t know what it is that you want, then it’s much easier to say “yes” to requests from others. It keeps you busy and it makes you feel important. But that is the wrong way to build any productivity system. You need to turn that on its head and begin with what you want out of life. Begin with your longer-term goals and the things that are important to you.
If you haven’t downloaded my FREE areas of focus workbook yet, then I recommend you do so. You can get that from my downloads page on my website. That workbook will take you through the eight important areas of life we all have in common. Family and relationships, finances, career and business, health and fitness, spirituality, personal development, lifestyle and life experiences, and finally your purpose in life.
Once you know what these are, what each means to you individually and you have pulled out a few action steps to keep this in balance you are well on your way to building an effective, purpose-driven productivity system.
These action steps are often very simple, yet we neglect them because we are exhausted from all the other, less important to us, tasks we commit ourselves to each day. The only thing you are fit to do when you get home at night is collapse on the sofa and complain about how exhausted you feel. In that state how are you ever going to have the energy to play with your kids, go out for a run, or to the gym?
Now it’s easy to blame your boss or your company or your clients. But remember you said yes to doing these things. You did not draw a line in the sand and say “no, after 6pm my time is for my family and myself.”
So, establish what is important to you and get the time required to work on those things blocked off in your calendar now. Make sure any tasks you need to complete that are related to your areas of focus and longer-term goals are in your task manager and set to recur whenever they need to recur.
From now on this time—the time you’ve blocked out on your calendar for these important things for you—is non-negotiable.
How do you think people like Dwayne Johnson, Terry Crews, Tina Turner, Sylvester Stallone, Frank Grillo, and Jennifer Aniston, despite their age, are in such fantastic shape? Because they have prioritised their exercise time and it is non-negotiable. They are not super-human or have any special genetics. They are human beings just like you and me. The difference is they know what they want and they make sure that every single day they do the work required to make what they want become a reality. It’s fixed on their calendars and it just what they do.
Next up, when doing a reset is to go through your task manager and clean out any task you know you are not going to do. Now, What I mean by this is tasks such as “send Peter a thank you note for taking us out to dinner”, when that task has been sitting in your task manager for six months. It’s too late. You didn’t do it, so stop keeping these types of tasks around. Delete them.
There’s also likely to be a lot of old project tasks hanging around that disappeared deep into your system that either you did and didn’t check them off at the time, or were not necessary and the project was completed a long time ago. Clear these out too.
I would also suggest you look at your recurring areas of focus—for those of you using the Time Sector System—and refresh the wording of your tasks. As time goes by, we become numb to a lot of tasks and they don’t inspire or excite us anymore. All you need to do is change the wording. Tasks like: “call mum and dad” can be changed to “catch up with mum and dad” and “do exercise” can be changed to “get out and exercise”. Doing this every three to four months, by the way, is a good habit to get into. It keeps your recurring tasks fresh and it can be fun thinking of inspiring ways to write these tasks.
Now, take a look at your apps. Do you really need three notes apps and four cloud storage services? Probably not. Which of all these different apps could you get rid of? A lot of the issues I get in my coaching calls is where a person has inadvertently found themselves with multiple apps doing pretty much the same thing. For instance, do you really need to have Todoist AND Microsoft ToDo? Wouldn’t it be easier to just bring everything into one app? There’s less of a chance you would miss something if everything was in a single place.
How about your notes apps? I mean do you really need Dropbox Paper, Evernote, and Obsidian? Why not consolidate them all into one app? It’ll make your life a lot simpler having everything in one place.
Now, I know a lot of people will say well I need to use Dropbox paper (or OneNote) for work and Obsidian for my personal life. And in theory, that sounds okay. But you may already have found that life is not so black and white. There’s a lot of grey there too and you will find yourself wasting time trying to figure out where something should go.
Just use one app for each purpose. One calendar, One task manager, and one notes app. Seriously, you’ll find life a lot simpler that way.
And that’s really all you need do, Ethan. Begin with what you want, get that fixed into your system first so that those tasks and events become a priority over everything else. Once you have those in place, you will find your life is much better balanced and you will be a lot less stressed out and overwhelmed.
Clean out old, not longer required tasks, notes, and other digital stuff and consolidate as many apps as you can. The fewer apps you use the faster your whole system will become.
Thank you for the question and thank you for listening too.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, how to get control of your digital distractions
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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The 2021 Edition of Time And Life Mastery
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
More about the Time Sector System
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 188
Hello and welcome to episode 188 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Before we get started, just a heads up if you are a regular listener to this podcast, next week the show is taking a break. We will be back, though in two weeks time.
Okay, on with the show.
Do you find yourself distracted by all the digital inputs coming your way every day? There’s email, of course, and then digital news, social media and now we are inundated by Slack and Microsoft Teams messages. If we don’t control it, it’s non-stop and just looking at your phone’s Home Screen is enough to set off anxiety, stress and overwhelm. It’s not healthy and we do need some strategies to get control of this.
Well, that’s what we will be exploring in this episode.
I just want to give you a heads up about the early-bird discount on my Time And Life Mastery course. The special offer will be ending today, I will keep it on for a few more hours for you. I would not want to you to miss out on getting yourself enrolled in, what I believe to be, my most comprehensive and best course.
This year, I have re-recorded the Time Mastery part and it now includes lessons on how two being your goals and long term plans in the Time Sector System.
It’s a brilliant course and I do hope you join me. The special offer ends in the next few hours, so don’t delay. More details on the course and how to get enrolled are in the show notes or you can head over to my website—carlpullein.com.
Okay, let’s get on and dive deeper into ways to overcome all these digital distractions and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice.
This week’s question comes from Sadiq. Sadiq asks: Hi Carl, do you have any tips on managing all the messages and emails I get each day. It’s got the to point where I don’t have any time to do my work because of all the messages I get. Please help.
Hi Sadiq, thank you for your question.
So, let’s look at where most of our digital noise comes from. To do this I want to look at the Hierarchy of Communication. This is the order of importance of your communications.
First up is face to face communication. If you are in front of the person you are communicating with, nothing and I repeat, nothing should ever distract you from speaking with that person. It does not matter if it is the checkout assistance in the supermarket or your boss. If you are in a face to face situation, the person you are communicating with takes precedence over everything else. Full stop. No negotiation. If you cannot, or will not, accept this rule, stop listening. This podcast is not for you.
Incidentally, I would go so far as to say this also applies to Zoom and Teams video calls. Again, you are talking to a person in real-time and they deserve your undivided attention.
Next up are phone calls. This is similar to face to face. You are talking to a real human being in real-time. It is just plain rude to not give this your full attention.
Phone calls are becoming increasingly rare these days, but if do receive calls, you need to treat them appropriately.
Third in this hierarchy are text messages. These are different from social media messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger and What's App. Now, I would include your Slack and Teams messages in this list too because these are messages from either your work colleagues or boss.
These are likely to be important, but less important than face to face and phone calls.
Up next comes email. Now, these days emails are never urgent and you should never treat emails as urgent. As I have mentioned before, if your house was on fire, your neighbour would not email you to tell you.
Finally, social media messages and comments come right at the bottom. You just do not need to respond to these immediately. They are not important.
There is a bigger problem with social media comments and that is their potential to create a negative emotional response. There is a lot of bad in the world—there always has been. But I can promise you there is a lot more good in the world than bad.
Unfortunately, the good in the world is not newsworthy and so it does not get a lot of coverage. This means we end up focusing on the bad and that does nothing for your mood or emotional state in which to get your work done.
Jim Rohn said: “stand guard at gates of your mind” and you should be very careful with the news and social media posts you read. All this bad news is never going to put you in the right state to do amazing work.
A quick tip here is to find a neutral newsfeed you can subscribe to. By neutral I mean politically neutral. That way you can stay on top of what’s going on in the world without getting drawn into other people’s inflaming opinions. You can also find some of your favourite journalists and follow them. I have a number of journalists I have been reading for years and I subscribe to their newsfeed so I only get their articles.
Okay, what can you do right now that will help you to clear the noise? Well, one piece of advice I often hear is to turn off all notifications on your phone. Now, this does sound like wise advice, but in my experience, I find it a little impractical. If my wife or parents text me, I want to know. So I would advise you to be selective. Turn off your social media notifications for sure. These are never important.
With your email notifications that’s up to you. I keep them on, but then I don’t treat email as urgent, but it is good to know what’s coming in. If my learning centre went down, for instance, I am likely to first hear about it through email and that is something I want to know about.
But with all that said, what are the underlying causes of digital distraction. Well, in my experience when a person is very clear about what it is they want to accomplish each day, they are rarely distracted by anything other than what it is they are trying to accomplish.
The reason we are so easily distracted is because we have no sense of purpose. We don’t have a plan for the day and we are not clear about what it is we are trying to accomplish. When you begin the day with a clear set of tasks to complete before the day is finished, you don’t get distracted.
I coach a lot of people who are incredibly successful. The one thing they never struggle with is distractions. They are incredibly focused on what it is they want to accomplish. Do you think people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos waste hours of their day sifting through social media and the news? Absolutely not. They’re focused on their goals for the day.
Now, this does not mean you isolate yourself from the news and social media, all you need do is set aside time each day for reading news and social media feeds. I go through my Facebook feed after dinner for twenty minutes or so—the time it takes me to drink my post-dinner cup of tea. I like to see what my friend is doing. But I don’t need to be checking it every minute of the day.
All you need do is give yourself ten minutes at the end of the day and plan out what you will do the next day. Hopefully, you are now operating the 2+8 Prioritisation Method for your planning: Deciding what your two must-do tasks for the next day are and the eight other tasks that should be done.
When you have this list ready for you every morning, you are much less likely to be distracted by all the digital stuff coming at you each day. You have a plan and that is what you need to focus on. If you do get your tea tasks complete, great, you can allow yourself to be as distracted as you want.
If you do find all the pop-up notifications distract you, turn them off on your computer. You are likely doing focused work while sitting at your computer and the last thing you need when you are focusing on something important is seeing pop-up notifications out the corner of your eye.
One tip I can give you here is to check your messages and emails between sessions of work. It acts as a way to close one piece of work before you start with another piece of focused work. When you do this you do not need notifications at all. Most focused work sessions last less than two hours and so, nobody’s going to be upset with you if you respond within two hours—seriously. They will not be upset with you.
People are far more understanding than you imagine. Even your impatient boss!
Ultimately, Sadiq, you need to know what it is you want to accomplish each day and that needs to be linked to your longer-term goals both professional and personal. It’s that sense of direction that will keep you focused.
And there is one final message I want to share and it is a quote from Brian Tracy:
“You need three key qualities to develop the habits of focus and concentration, which are all learnable. They are decision, discipline, and determination.”
Decide what you want to accomplish each day—have a plan for the day
Be disciplined in making sure you follow that plan and Be determined to stay on track.
It’s true, these three “Ds” are all learnable and to do that all you need to do is practice them every day.
The most disciplined people are the ones who never allow themselves to be distracted. You can do that too.
Thank you Sadiq for your wonderful question and thank you for listening too. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, what should be going on your to-do list and what should not.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery 2021 Course
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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 187
Hello and welcome to episode 187 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So, what exactly should you be putting on your to-do list? This might seem an obvious answer, but I can tell you it is not.
When you put a lot of the wrong things into a task manager, you will become overwhelmed with tasks you have no intention of doing because they mean nothing to you and they’ve been hanging around in there for years.
This week, I will explain what should be in there and what you should not be putting in there.
Now before we go any further, over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a number of videos over on my YouTube channel around the difficult subject of prioritisation. It can be very hard to pick the right things to work on when there is so much being thrown at us.
One part of your life that should always be a priority is your goals. If you are not working on your goals, you’ll be unconsciously working on someone else’s goals. That could be your boss’s or the shareholders of the company you work for and that is never going to work for you long-term
Now, as we enter the post-pandemic world, would be a great time to re-evaluate your goals, ensure they are clear, that you have a strong, personal reason for achieving them and a definite action plan. And to help you with that, I have completely updated my Time And Life Mastery course
The 2021 edition of Time And Life Mastery will not only show you how to turn your goals (and dreams) into reality, it will also get you to think deeper about what you want and give you the strategy to make sure you have the time to work on them every day using the Time Sector System.
Don’t get left behind, start today and build your goals into the heart of your daily to-do list. Joining the course now will give you an early-bird discount of 20%.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Debbie. Debbie asks, Hi Carl, I’ve noticed in your YouTube videos that you don’t have many tasks on your to-do list. I have hundreds of tasks and I can’t help feeling I am doing something wrong. Is there a reason why you don’t put many tasks in there?
Hi Debbie, Thank you for your question. Your task list is all about elimination, not accumulation and I feel that is where so many people go wrong.
The biggest mistake I see people making is putting tasks into their task manager that should not be there. Now, I think this comes from a misunderstanding about what a task manager does.
Let me explain it this way. Your task manager is there to trigger you to do the things that need doing. For instance, complete a presentation file, work on a client proposal or prepare for a management meeting. It is not there for individual follow-ups, email replies and phone calls.
Now, I can hear expressions of outrage as I say that but hear me out.
Let me take emails as an example. Email comes into your email app’s inbox. And inside your email app, you have space to create folders to hold your important emails. In a way, your email app is a to-do list itself. You can create a folder called “action this day” for any email that requires action (replying, reading and reviewing or acting on). If you send your actionable email to your task manager you have just duplicated yourself. Now you have a task in two places.
The same goes for following up prospects. In this case, most companies have some form of CRM—customer relationship manager—and all the prospects or customers that need following up are held in there. These CRMs are purpose-built for this job. If you also create tasks reminding you to follow up with Miss Smith and Mr Jones, you’ve just duplicated yourself.
The same goes for Slack and Teams messages. You don’t need to send all the messages that need replies to your task manager.
Instead, you could create single recurring tasks that remind you to clear your actionable emails, reply to your messages and check for customers that need following up. That’s three tasks instead of thirty in your tasks manager. After all, each of those tasks is compartments of work.
If you compartmentalise those tasks so when you work on email, your work on email, when you work on following up clients and prospects you work on doing follow-ups, you are going to be less likely to procrastinate or be distracted.
You see, the problem with throwing everything into your task manager is you create a monster. And once it becomes a monster, you stop using your task manager and, of course, when that happens what’s the point of having a task manager?
For your task manager to be effective it must be clean and tight and that means whatever you put in there must be meaningful and be a genuine task. Having tasks reminding you to read a book will be ignored. You don’t need a task manager reminding you to read a book. You just need to keep the book in the place you would normally read a book. You might read for twenty minutes first thing in the morning, or lunchtime or just before you go to bed. Reading is a habit, not something you should need reminding about.
I mean, you don’t need a reminder to tell you to eat, so why would you need a reminder to feed your brain?
For those of you who have read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, or taken my Time Sector course, you already know that the details of a project need to be kept outside your task manager. Your task manager is a terrible project manager. In Getting Things Done, you have project support folders that contain all the work that needs doing on a given project. The only thing you have in your task manager is the next action. Your project plans, future tasks and milestones are in your project support materials.
The same goes with the Time Sector System. The only items in your task manager are the items related to what you will be working on this week. All the details of your projects are kept in your notes app—a modern-day version of project support folders.
Unless you are working on a project that you have done many times before, there is no way you can guess accurately what all your next actions will be. There are too many unknowns.
I remember when I bought a car last year, I made a list of all the things I thought I would need to do after buying the car several months before I actually bought the car. When it came to buying the car around 80% of the things on that list were not necessary. In fact, the only thing I remember I did need to do was get my sunglasses lenses changed to prescription lenses.
The dealership I bought the car from anticipated what was needed and included everything in the package. Sadly they didn’t anticipate my poor eyesight. In the end the list I spent hours developing was a complete waste of time.
Now there are things that you may need reminders for and for those you create a folder called “routines”. These are the little things that you would forget if you didn’t get a little nudge. The common examples might be to take the garbage out or pay your bills. These little nudges just pop up at the bottom of your daily list when they are due.
The goal with any task manager is to eliminate not accumulate. The less you put in there, the more effective your task list will be. To achieve this, you want to be very strict about what gets into your system. In a way, when you process is the first filter.
I collect around ten to fifteen tasks a day in my inbox. Of those around five to eight will manage to get through my processing filter. My first question when I process a task is: Does this task really have to be done?
Many of these tasks are likely to be done without getting into my system. For instance, today, I received a payment from one of my English students. They require a receipt for that payment so I added the task “Do student’s receipt” to my inbox. When I got back to my desk later, I saw that and as the task was a two-minute task, I did it straight away. No point in letting a simple task like that get into my system.
There’s a psychological thing going on here. If you start the day with a list that goes off your screen you are going to immediately feel anxious. As you scroll down the list that anxiousness will only increase.
Instead, you want to start your day with a list that looks doable and contains tasks you know must be done that day. You want to look forward to reviewing your list for the day so you can get started feeling confident. That’s the goal.
If you begin the day rescheduling all the tasks you didn’t do yesterday and then try to figure out what are the most important tasks for that day, you are never going to feel good about the day, are you?
Your planning needs to be done the evening before. Any rescheduling should be done then not at the beginning of the next day. Starting your day like that just destroys your day.
I cannot emphasise enough the importance of those ten minutes at the end of the day to clean up and plan the next day. Not doing that, will result in you regularly having to reset your system and that always take far too long. You don’t have time for that, but you can find ten minutes at the end of the day—seriously if you cannot find ten minutes at the end of your day you have much more serious problems than your productivity.
So there you go, Debbie. It really comes down to first compartmentalising your work. Project work, communications, follow-ups, and all your other work. Use natural inboxes such as your email inbox and process those into folders for action. All you need then is a simple task in your task manager to remind you to clear those folders.
I hope that has helped and thank you for your question.
Thank you to you too for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
2021-06-10-WW Podcast
This week, how to turn your ideas and dreams into reality.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery 2021 Course
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
More about the Time Sector System
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 186 \ Script
Hello and welcome to episode 186 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
How do you turn dreams into reality? It’s an easy question answer, but a difficult one to execute. Today, I’ll share some ideas you can try to start moving towards those dreams and higher goals you’ve had lying around for a long time.
There’s a lot I can share with you on this one as it’s something I’ve been wrestling with for many years. How do some people live their dreams and others don’t? Is there a secret or a strategy we can all follow?
So, without any further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question:
This week’s question comes from Iqbal. Iqbal asks, hi Carl, I’ve followed your work for a long time and I know you sometimes talk about goal setting. I’ve had a dream since I was a teenager to start my own business. I have a tonne of ideas, but I just don’t have any time to work on them because of my job. Are there any tips and tricks you can share that will help me to do something with these ideas?
Hi Iqbal, thank you for your question.
When I read your question, I was reminded of a quote I heard many years ago: “Most people trade their dreams for a salary” There are variations to this quote along the lines of “how much did they pay you to give up on your dreams?”
You see, if you really want to start your business, you have to start your business. Thinking, planning, coming up with ideas etc, are all well and good, but they are not starting a business. Starting a business is creating a website, buying premises, selling a product or service and quitting your salaried job.
Now, these days, quitting your salaried job is not always necessary at first. A lot of businesses can be started online and if, for example, you make leather phone cases, you can do that in the evening and sell them through Etsy or Amazon.
I started my productivity business while I was still a full-time teacher.
The first thing you are going to have to do is make sacrifices. Before I started my productivity business, I used to enjoy watching TV shows in the evening, and at the weekend I’d go out for a few beers with my friends and colleagues. When I decided to start my productivity business, I had to stop watching TV and going out at weekends. I reasoned I needed at least twenty hours each week to work on that business. As I was already working around forty hours doing my full-time teaching job, the only way I could find the time to start my own business was to stop watching TV and going out at weekends.
I suppose the question is, how much are you willing to give up to start your business, Iqbal?
You will never start any kind of business if you are not going to give it enough hours each week. Businesses do not magically appear from an idea. They need development and time. So step one is to decide how much time you will need to build your business and see what you can sacrifice in order to find that time.
Look at things like how much time you spend on social media—that’s a huge time suck—how much TV do you watch each day? There’s another one and of course, you will need to clear your weekends.
I remember when I started doing my online courses, I would look ahead in my calendar for public holidays and block them out so I could spend all day recording my courses. At weekends, I would spend writing and outlining new courses. If I remember correctly the only vacation I had in 2017 was a trip to visit my parents at Christmas at the end of the year. It was 350 days of work, work, work.
Businesses do not build themselves. You have to do the work.
Next up is clarity. You must know exactly what it is you want to build. Like you said in your question Iqbal, you have a lot of ideas. Well, you need to pick one of those ideas. You will not be able to build multiple businesses if you can’t even find the time to build one. Pick one of your ideas and run with that.
No business stands still. When Hyundai, the car company, started, the founder sold rice in the streets around Seoul, and Samsung began as a sugar company. Apple began life as a computer company, yet today their biggest market is mobile phones, music and apps. Whatever business you start today will be different in ten years time. So, pick one idea, develop it and build that business.
Ideas are great, but they can stop you if you have too many. By all means, keep your ideas in your notes app—I have loads of ideas in Evernote for future businesses, but right now I focus on the one I am in.
Next up is courage.
The one thing that separates people who have started their own business and the ones who dream about starting a business is courage. The courage to step outside their comfort zone and the courage to screw up and be embarrassed, laughed at and be ridiculed by family and friends.
That’s the biggest barrier I have come across when coaching or helping people find the time to start their own business. It’s never that they don’t have time—we all have time—it’s that “I don’t have time” is a convenient excuse that hides the real reason they won’t start and that is they are afraid to fail.
I’ve got news for you… You will fail. That’s a given. Look at any company and you will see far more failures than successes. Again look at Apple, how many time did they screw up cloud services. From the original .Mac accounts to MobileMe. They really were bad. And Google with Google Plus and Google Mailbox—which was meant to be the future of email. Then we have Microsoft with the Zune. I could go on but you get the point. Failure is an inevitable part of starting your own business.
The best advice I ever received was: “get comfortable with failure”. I did and I no longer fear screwing up. I see failure as a lesson because while an original concept might fail, there is always something in that failure that did work and I can apply it to the next product or service. You never really fail, you learn something and you move on.
You only fail when you give up. So, don’t give up.
If you ever hear yourself saying: “I don’t have time” or “I’m not ready yet”. Stop and ask yourself why? Never accept those excuses. You do have time and there will never be the right moment. You could start by buying your website domain today and outlining the product or service you are going to sell. From there, you will see what needs to happen next.
And that’s really the next thing. Build momentum. Momentum is only built when you start doing something other than planning and thinking. As I mentioned, buy the domain name so you can make a start on creating your website. Contact potential suppliers, or draw up the outline for your online course or digital service. Then do the very first step. You will find the first step is a lot easier than you imagine.
Let’s take the phone cases idea—order the leather, thread and needles and make a prototype of your first case. That will give you far more information than sitting behind a computer screen looking at what other people are doing and making. It will tell you how much leather you need for a case, how much time it will take to make and whether or not your case works with your phone.
If you are an artist, create your Instagram account, get your art out there in front of people. If nobody knows about what you do, you have nothing. You need people to support you. To share your work and tell the world what you do. The same goes for consultancy. It’s great that you want to share your experience with other people, but if nobody knows about you, your skills and your experience how will you ever get clients?
You need to be building your social media presence now. Not when you have a finished product or service. Start writing blogs, share your illustrations, photography, designs or whatever it is you will sell as a business.
Getting your message out into the world is not a single blog post announcing your product either. It’s consistent content day after day. This is why you need to sacrifice your evenings and weekends.
And so, now you have that information, I have a simple question. How much do you want to start your own business? Are you willing to make sacrifices—giving up your evenings and weekends for at least the next five years? If so, then you know where to start.
If not, that’s fine. Take the salary and work so someone else can achieve their dreams because that’s the way I see it. If you are not willing to make sacrifices, then take the Monday to Friday 9 till 5 job. It’s safe, it’ll pay you some money—put food on your table and a roof over your head, and although the concept of a job for life may have disappeared, you are much less likely to lose everything and will maintain some stability in your life.
And that brings me to probably the most important part. You must have a strong desire to start your own business. In his book, Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill, in the introduction, tells the reader that contained in the book are two secrets. Most people miss those secrets, but I can tell you that one of the secrets is desire. It’s not enough to “want” to start a business, you must have a burning desire to do it.
It’s not easy. Unlike working for someone elsewhere you may have a finance department, HR, marketing team and admin support. When you start your own business you have to do everything at first. You are sales, marketing, HR, admin and customer service. If your desire is not strong enough you will quit. It’s hard. If you think working eight to nine hours a day five days a week is hard, then don’t start your own business. You will be working sixteen to eighteen hours a day seven days a week for many years. It’s only when your business grows to a level where you can employ people to do the finance, admin, HR and marketing for you that you will be able to take some time off and perhaps reduce your hours a little.
But, it’s not all doom and gloom. Starting your own business and seeing it grow from nothing to something is possibly one of the best experiences you will ever have. If you can endure the long hours, the disappointments, and the embarrassment when things go wrong, you will make a great business person.
Dreams become reality when you are prepared to do whatever it takes to make those dreams happen. It’s hard—very hard—but I can promise you, you will never ever regret doing it. You will learn so much not just about business but about yourself. You will very quickly learn what your priorities are and become incredibly focused. You will no longer feel you spend your day doing boring mundane work, you’ll be doing inspiring work you love doing.
The funny thing is, I used to hate doing my admin when I worked for a company. Now, I love doing it. I designed the forms, the spreadsheets and decide what I track. Everything I do today is making dreams come true for my family and myself and I hope, I inspire many others to step outside their comfort zones and do the things they’ve always dreamed of. You can do it, Iqbal, you just have to start.
Thank you for your question, and thank you too you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, I talk about the best productivity system ever developed and explain how you can use it too.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery 2021 Course
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
More about the Time Sector System
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 185
Hello and welcome to episode 185 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Many of you listening to this podcast, I am sure, are on a journey to discover the best time management and productivity system. Well, the truth is it’s already been developed. It’s used by the most incredibly productive people every day and it is possibly the simplest system you will ever use.
You don’t need any special software or devices. You do not need a PhD and you could start using it today.
And that is what I am going to tell you about today. How you can create it, use it and become unbelievably more productive than you are today.
But first… Right now I have a special offer on my time management and productivity courses. You can buy The Time Sector course, Your Digital Life 3.0 AND Productivity Masterclass courses for just $175.00. If you buy this bundle of courses this week, you will also get the Time And Life Mastery course as a free gift. Once this week ends, you will no longer qualify for the free gift.
So, if you want what I consider to be, the Ultimate Productivity bundle of courses including the Time And Life Mastery course, then you need to act now. This offer will be ending at the end of this week (that’s 13 June)
I know you won’t be disappointed and I know these courses are all you need to develop your own system—a system that works for you.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Mike. Mike asks, Hi Carl, I know there are a lot of productivity and time management techniques and systems, but is there one that is better than all the others that most people don’t know about?
Hi Mike, thank you for your intriguing question.
You are right there are a lot of time management and productivity systems around. I’ve tried most of them as well over the years. I say your question is “intriguing” because this is something I’ve never really understood about people and that is why so many want the most complex systems. Systems that take forever to manage and update every day and apps that demand constant and never-ending upkeep.
You see the worst productivity systems are those that take you away from doing your work. I suppose if you think about it that’s logical. The more time you spend updating, organising and playing around with a system, the less time you have for work.
Now, when I was thinking about my answer to you, Mike, I considered naming the worst culprits for this but I decided that wouldn’t help and it would likely put a lot of people on the defensive. If I say something and you disagree with me, you will feel you must defend your choices and once you are defensive, I cannot help you.
So, before we go any further, I want to ask you to open your mind. You see, when I tell you what the best productivity system for all of us is, I want you to have an open mind. If you go all defensive, you will not learn anything. You will defend your choices and that misses the point. We all make bad choices and we all think we are different and we need a uniquely different system to everyone else. The thing is we are not all different—we all get twenty-four hours—and the only thing we can do is decide what we need to do in those twenty-four hours.
It’s those decisions where people go wrong. They choose the wrong activities. The most productive people you and I know make better decisions. That’s it.
So, what is the best productivity system?
It’s the Ivy Lee Method. Now, many of you may already have heard of the Ivy Lee method, but to give you a quick summary of how it was made famous. A gentleman in 1918, by the name of Ivy Lee, was asked by The Chairman of Bethlehem Steel, Charles Schwab, to come up with a method to increase the productivity performance of his executive team.
Ivy Lee came up with a six-step process. That process is:
- Decide what you want. Your goals and life purpose.
- At the end of each day, take ten minutes to write out the six most important tasks you must complete the next day.
- Prioritise your six tasks by importance
- When you start the next day, begin at the top of your list and work you way down. Don’t move on to the next task until you have completed the previous one.
- If you do not manage to finish your six tasks, move any unfinished tasks to the next day.
- Repeat the process.
Now, the part people familiar with this method miss is the first step. You see, you need to know what your goals and purpose are. Without that, your choice of six tasks each day will not necessarily move your goals and objectives forward and you will gravitate to doing work for other people and not necessarily for yourself.
Now, I don’t mean for you to be selfish here. What this means is answering the question: what is it that you want? Now it could be you want to be promoted to an executive position. You may want to start your own business or you may want to be financially independent by the time you reach fifty.
You need to be very clear about these goals.
Once you are clear on your goals, you can begin using this process.
Now, I’ve developed a number of resources to help you here. Probably the best one is my FREE Areas of Focus Workbook that takes you through the process of developing your very own areas of focus. These are the things that are important to you. Once you know these and have developed a goal around each one, you are then ready to begin using the Ivy Lee method.
So, why only six tasks?
One of our biggest problems is we are trying to do far too much each day. The reality is, you will always have far more to do than time available each day. That’s just a given. So, what you need to do is prioritise. That’s why the Ivy Lee Method is so effective. To use the method, you must relegate a lot of tasks that would normally be demanding your attention and you have to get ruthless about where you spend your limited time each day.
Most people are not ruthless enough. Now, this is caused, in part, because we are natural people pleasers—we hate saying “no” to people and it’s in part because of FOMO—the Fear Of Missing Out—we worry that if we say “no” to something we are closing the door on an opportunity. The trouble is, we cannot and never will be able to take every opportunity that comes our way. If we are going to say yes to an opportunity, we will have to say “no” to a lot of other opportunities.
In many ways, you have to trust your instincts. In my experience, it’s your instincts that will tell you whether an opportunity is right for you or not.
I’ve studied people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates for years and I’ve also studied the working habits of historical figures such as Winston Churchill, Earl Nightingale, Jim Rohn, Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford and all these people used the Ivy Lee method in some form or another.
They all know or knew where their priorities are or were and they did not allow themselves to be distracted by anything else. In a sense, they took this method to the extreme, but then, all these people got extreme results.
Now you could continue down the same road you’ve been following, but before you do, ask yourself if you are getting the results you want.
You see, you may indeed have the best-looking app, you may have well-organised notes or as is fashionably called today PKM system (that’s personal knowledge management system) but that does not mean you are getting the results you want.
The results you want link straight back to the first step in the Ivy Lee Method. What do you want? If what you want is a cool set of productivity apps that gives you hours of entertainment organising and playing with the settings, then fantastic! But I suspect that’s not really what you want—well, I hope not.
Most people want to get their projects completed on time without any fuss. They want to be on top of their work including their email and they want to enjoy a balanced personal and work life. This life is possible to achieve. But you will need to make the right kind of choices and those choices begin with…
What needs to be done today?
Now, for those of you who have followed me for a while now, you know I advocate the 2+8 Prioritisation System. It’s really what Ivy Lee set out with his method but with a slightly larger number of tasks.
With the 2+8 Method, you decide what two things must be done today and if you don’t do anything else all day, those two things will be done—even if you have to pull an all-nighter (although let’s hope that does not happen too often) The remaining eight tasks are the next most important tasks and you will do as many of those as you can. If you don’t complete them all, no problem, you just reschedule the remaining ones and repeat the process for the next day.
Ultimately, what both Ivy Lee’s method and the 2+8 Prioritisation is about is prioritising your work. Understanding the difference between tasks that do get things done and tasks that pretend to get things done but don’t do much more than shuffle digital paper, and focusing all your time and attention to bigger, important work.
That’s how all the super-successful people operate. They’ve been doing it for centuries. You can even trace this back to the thirteenth century and William of Ockham who popularised Ockham’s Razor—where the simple answer is usually always the best one.
Ivy Lee’s Method is simple, anyone can use it and you do not need elaborate organisational systems or apps to use it. A simple piece of paper left on your desk would suffice—that’s how Bethlehem Steel’s executives used it back in 1918.
Today, we have a lot of incredibly powerful applications that can do much of the hard work for us, but we need to be careful what we choose to use. We also must understand that no matter how much we would like to have a few extra hours each day you are never going to get them. Time is the part of this equation you are not going to change. Time is fixed. Time is also your most valuable asset and you cannot afford to be wasting it on low priority tasks that move you nowhere.
The only variable you do have is your activity and that’s the variable where your ability to choose how you spend your time needs clear intentions.
So, the answer to your question, Mike, is yes there is a best system. It beats all other systems and works 100% of the time. The only reason most people are not using it, is the same reason most people never learn about, or use, the Law of Attraction: It’s simple and we humans love complexity. We just cannot bring ourselves to accept that something so simple could have such a profound, positive effect on our lives.
So while 97% of the world’s population will continue to complain about how much work they have to do and that they never have time to finish all the things they want to do, the remaining 3% will continue to use Ivy Lee’s Method and achieve amazing things.
It’s your choice. Become ruthless about what you say yes to and have a clear set of goals and plans to achieve what you want out of life, or continue down the same path you are on right now with no clear plan or purpose and a personal productivity system that would challenge the abilities of even the smartest NASA scientists.
Thank you for your question, Mike and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
27 May 2021 | Podcast 184
This week, I’m answering a question about how to get started with and, more importantly, maintain a productivity system.
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Episode 184
Hello and welcome to episode 184 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
A common type of question I get asked is one around building and maintaining a productivity and time management system. It’s not so much about how to do it—after all, there are thousands of books and videos on this subject—it’s more about taking what you have learned by reading those books and watching those videos and turning that knowledge into a functioning system that works for you.
Now, before we get to the question, I would like to point out that June—which starts tomorrow (or Tuesday depending on when you listening to this podcast) is a 30-day month. Another golden opportunity for you to establish a habit. So, I thought I would suggest something.
In the book, Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill tells us to take an idea (or a goal) that we want to accomplish, and begin and end every day imagining you have completed it successfully for thirty days.
Now the trick to doing this is to write down your idea or goal onto a piece of paper, or in your digital notes app, and read it out loud at the start and end of your day. As you read out your goal, imagine you have successfully accomplished it and really feel the emotions you experience by completing it.
The purpose of doing this is to engage your subconscious mind. That is the part of your mind that uses your knowledge and experience to come up with solutions to problems and gives you steps to take to accomplish goals and solve problems.
Remove all negative thoughts, only focus on the positives—the feelings you have when you accomplish your goal or successfully develop your idea. If a negative thought comes up, such as; I can’t do that, or that’s impossible, remove it. Replace it with a positive thought.
At the end of June, you will have programmed your brain to seek ways of making whatever your dream, goal or idea happen. Try it. What have you to lose?
Now, back to the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks: Hi Carl, for years I have been reading books and articles about productivity and how to become better at managing my time. I’ve taken your courses, and I’ve even been on a Getting Things Done Fundamentals course. Yet, despite all these courses, books and articles, I just cannot make a system work for me. I can do it for a few weeks, but I soon find myself falling back on bad habits. Do you know how to make one of these systems stick?
Hi Alan. Thank you for the question.
Firstly, I should tell you that you are not alone with this problem. I come across this a lot in my coaching programme and I get many comments on my YouTube videos about it.
With anything like creating and using a system, you need to start small. Radically changing the way you do something will inevitably result in falling back into old ways. It’s just the way the human mind works. We love routine and we evolved habit building to help us achieve that.
You see, there are so many distractions going on in our world—they’ve always been there. It started out on the savannah thousands of years ago when we needed to stay alert to the dangers that were all around us. If we did not have a way of automatically putting one foot in front of another or breathing in and out without thinking, for instance, our brain would soon be overloaded with stuff. That’s why we developed habits.
Habits are formed in our subconscious mind and that’s the part of the mind that does not know the difference between doing something that is good for us and doing something bad. It’s amoral and completely objective. What you feed it will be taken in and returned to you in whatever form it is acquired. That could be a habit or it could be, as I mentioned a few moments ago, a solution to a problem you are experiencing.
Understanding this helps us to take steps to develop the right habits and strategies, but it also means we have to do things in small steps and allow enough time for them to grow.
So, becoming more productive, and as a consequence better at managing our activities in the time we have each day, means we need to build the right habits in the right sequence.
So, first up, build a morning routine. Now, this does not have to be elaborate or take too long. If you give yourself anywhere between twenty and thirty minutes to start with, for a series of positive, high impact activities that you consistently begin your day with you will be on the right track.
Let’s look at an example. Let’s say you always begin your day by visiting the bathroom and then making a cup of coffee, those are the first activities to add to your morning routine. Start with something you already automatically do.
Now, the next steps need to be something new. For instance, you could spend two to three minutes doing some stretches. Begin with your neck, then shoulders, and move on down your body. Slowly stretch out your limbs one by one.
Once you have done your stretches, take your coffee to a quiet table, preferably near a window, and spend ten minutes writing in a journal. Your journal could be digital or paper, it doesn’t matter, just write out your plan for the day and a few thoughts you may have in your mind in that moment. Be strict about the time. Only do this for ten minutes.
Finish with looking at your tasks and your appointments for the day and then start your day.
In total, that routine should not take you longer than twenty minutes.
Now, the key to making this work is you commit to doing that for twenty minutes every morning for at least 30 days. Do not add anything nor take anything away. Just start your mornings every day like this for thirty days.
To ensure this happens, do it on weekends as well as weekdays and you must make sure you have time for it every morning. So this means if you have to wake up early for a Zoom call, you wake up with sufficient time so you can do your twenty minutes before the call.
Now, if you fail, and skip a morning, you must go back and start again. You want to string together a minimum of thirty days doing the same thing every day. You cannot modify it or change it in any way. After thirty days, you can change it slightly, but this first step must be consistent.
Now, moving to your productivity system and embedding this. If you have taken the COD course, you will know the three basic components of all great productivity systems. Collect everything, spend a little time organising what you collected and dedicate the largest part of your day doing the work you set yourself.
The key habit you need to develop is collecting. If you are not collecting everything meaningful that comes your way, it won’t matter how elaborate or sophisticated the rest of your system is, you won’t trust it so you won’t use it. Develop the habit of collecting first.
To do that, take a look at how you collect your tasks right now. Do you do it consistently? If not, why not? You need that answer because you will need to change the way you collect so you are consistent.
This often means you need to review how you collect on your phone. This is the one tool you are likely to have with you everywhere you go so this will be your primary collection tool. Make sure that you have whatever task manager you use set up in such a way that collecting something is quick and easy and there are no barriers.
Since a lot of us are now working from home, you may find you need to do this with your computer too. I noticed over the last year or so, my primary collection tool has become my computer so I have a keyboard shortcut set up to add tasks quickly from my computer.
Again, give yourself thirty days to embed this habit. If you feel uncomfortable pulling your phone out when you are with people to add a task, get over that discomfort. Practice until it becomes automatic.
Now for the end of the day. This is another part to turn into a habit and I have discovered is also the most difficult to build. We are usually tired at the end of the day and when we are tired, we are less mindful about what we are doing and more prone to distractions. Again, developing a habit will help you. Just like brushing your teeth and washing your face before getting into bed, which you habitually do, you want to be spending around ten minutes reviewing your task list and calendar for tomorrow. Ideally, you will flag your most important tasks for the day while you do this.
Now, as you brush your teeth and wash your face, you can connect your ten minutes reviewing your task list and calendar to these activities to create a “habit stack” as James Clear would call it.
And as with your morning routines, do this every day for at least thirty days without ‘breaking the chain’. It is possible to develop this habit at the same time as you develop your morning routine, but if you find you struggle, then just focus on getting your start of the day right first.
For the rest of your work, you must avoid over-complicating things. Complexity is the death knell of any productivity system. It might look cool and pleasing to see a load of beautifully organised project folders with sub-folders breaking down each step of the project. But these kinds of structures are a nightmare to maintain, take far too long to organise and become holes where tasks go to die never to see the light of day again.
The reality is you only need to know what you must do today. You do not need to know anything else. Tomorrow is not here yet, and next week is too far away and there’s so much that will change that if you are trying to plan out beyond a week, you’ll be wasting your time because everything will change before you get to next week.
Here are a few observations that will help to simplify your system:
Stop sending emails to your task manager. Doing that creates duplication. People like Earl Nightingale (if you’ve never heard of him look him up), Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein, never added “reply to X’s letter” into a task list. They allocated time each day to reply to their mail. Learn from these incredibly productive people.
Know what your “must-dos” are each day and spend the majority of your time focused on completing those. Relegate your “should dos” and “would like to dos” to the end of the day. Most of these you will find sort themselves out anyway.
Be clear about what it is you want to accomplish each day. If you are not starting the day with a clear plan you will fail to get anything meaningful done.
Keep your task manager as clean and tight as possible. Be very strict about what goes on there. When you fill your task manager with trivial things, it soon becomes bloated and makes doing your planning sessions a lot longer than it needs to be.
What you want to be thinking is in terms of sessions of work. This is where you have time for doing your errands, chores, communications and project work. You may need to keep this flexible, and that’s okay—all you do is schedule this time when you do your daily planning session.
Look, massively successful people from the likes of JD Rockefeller and Henry Ford right up to Elon Musk and Sir Richard Branson, focus their attention on the important things and never allow themselves to get lost in reorganising their lists or wasting time searching for the best productivity systems. We know what the best productivity system is. Ivy Lee demonstrated this to Charles Schwab over a hundred years ago.
Select your six most important tasks for the day, the day before and when you start your day, begin from the top and focus all your attention on completing the first task. When you complete it, move on to the next one and so on. This system still works today and it allows sufficient flexibility to deal with emergencies and client requests promptly and effectively so you can quickly get back to completing your list.
If you don’t manage to clear your list, roll over the tasks you did not complete to your list of six the next day.
This is essentially what the Time Sector System is built on. Focusing your attention on the most important tasks for the day and if you cannot complete them, roll them forward to another day in the week. All that really matters is your most important work for the day and making sure you do that.
Every successful person you meet will use a form of this system today. Tony Robbins and Sir Richard Branson use it, as did Jim Rohn, Earl Nightingale and Andrew Carnegie in their day. If it’s good enough for these people, then it’s good enough for you.
Hopefully, that helps, Alan. Thank you for your wonderful question. You probably can tell I’m quite passionate about this subject.
Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, We are looking at productivity and time management and how you can improve both areas.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Episode 183
Hello and welcome to episode 183 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I talk a lot about productivity and time management on this podcast and yet I don’t think I have ever answered a question about the actual mechanics of improving both. So this week, that’s what I am going to do.
Before we get into the question, I would like to draw your attention to my Ultimate productivity Bundle. I put this together because I have a lot of requests for discounts on multiple purchases. So, I have done just that.
You can now buy my three most popular courses: The Time Sector System course, Your Digital Life 3.0 and Productivity Masterclass PLUS get Time And Life Mastery thrown in for FREE. You save yourself over $100 and all it will cost you is $175.00.
This is the best value bundle I have put together and will change your whole approach to productivity and managing your workload.
Full details of the bundle are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Shelly. Shelly asks, hi Carl. I hear a lot about how we should be improving our time management and productivity, but I don’t really understand what all this is about. To me, productivity is something you hear about in factories not in an office. Could you explain what the fundamentals of all this is about and, more importantly, why I should care?
Hi Shelly, Thank you for your question and don’t worry, I am sure a lot of people feel the same way you do.
Let’s start with the easy one. Time Management. The truth is you cannot manage time. Time is fixed. We all get the same amount of time each day and there is nothing we can do to change that. The only thing you can manage is what you do in the time you have.
However, that does give us something to work with. If we work eight hours a day and we have an amount of work to do all we need to do is start at the top and work our way down. I know this sounds incredibly simplistic, but it works.
Now, it was much easier to do this in our paper-based days. When we had letters instead of email and physical file folders instead of digital folders on a computer screen. In those dim distant days, we could see our work. Today, a lot of our work is not easily seen.
However, that does not mean we cannot manage it. Today, we need to make our work more overt. To do that all you need is set yourself up with a to-do list. This can be digital or paper-based. It does not really matter, but what does matter is you collect everything you have to do on to this to-do list.
Now, how do you make this work so you are better at managing your activities in the time given?
There are a few ways to do this and it really depends on the kind of work you do. However, the most important part of this is to schedule some time on your calendar for doing your work. This is the part most people miss.
I know a lot of people are great at collecting all their work into their to-do list but are terrible at making sure they have enough time to do the work.
Let me give you an example. Most people get a lot of emails and the emails that require replies can take up as much as two hours a day. If this happens to you, how do you expect to reply to your emails if you don’t have any time blocked on your calendar for doing it?
Time does not magically appear. You have to allocate time for these activities.
I need about an hour each day to reply to my emails, so I have a one hour time block each day for replying to my emails and any other messages. There’s no way I would be able to stay on top of my email if I didn’t have that time each day.
The next part to your question comes into play now, Shelly—productivity.
What is productivity, well first we need to change this a little and call it “personal productivity”. Personal productivity is completing meaningful project or goal work to the standard you expect and on time.
Now we do not want to be confusing personal productivity with busy work. Busy work is the meaningless work we do. Rearranging your to-do list because you are ignoring tasks and telling yourself if you could just see these tasks on a different list you would do them. No, you won’t. Stop fooling yourself.
Or meetings you attend that do nothing to improve your projects or move anything forward. Often these meetings are just meetings to exercise your managers’ egos. Stop attending these meetings. Find excuses and do something meaningful instead.
If you allocate time for doing your work, and you do it, you will find you get more work done and that means you become more productive.
Every successful person you know does this. From Isaac Newton, who incidentally wrote, Principia Mathematica while in lockdown during the plague in the 18th century, to Elon Musk today. They schedule a time to work on their meaningful projects.
There’s no secret here and there is nothing complicated about it. These people were and are ruthless with their time. They understand the value of each minute of the day and they will not allow anything or anyone to disturb them when they are working on their projects or goals.
Now, this does not mean you block out the whole day and ignore all demands on your time. That would be impossible. Most of you will have bosses, colleagues and clients. But it does mean you allocate two to three hours a day for doing your work undisturbed and if you try this, rather than trying to find excuses why you are so different to everyone else (you’re not) you will find it a lot easier than you think.
So if you really want to improve your overall productivity, you need to allocate time for the work you have to do. It’s no good “hoping” you will have time, hoping is not a sustainable strategy. Hoping you will have time is a one way street to burnout, stress and overwhelm.
So, what else can you do that will help you get more out of your time and be more productive.
Two areas most people ignore is sleep and health. If you are not getting enough sleep and you are not moving or doing any kind of exercise, you are not going to be very productive. You will feel lethargic, your mood will be all over the place and your energy levels will be at rock bottom. Not the best way to be if you want to improve your overall productivity.
Getting enough sleep and exercise requires time, and as with getting your work done, you need to make sure you have this scheduled. Now it might be asking too much to be scheduling your sleep, but you should have a sleep routine. It could be you go to bed at 11 PM and wake up at 6:30 AM. If that is what you decide, then you need to stick to that routine.
Likewise, for exercise, schedule it. If you don’t, you will run out of time and not do it.
Your sleep and health need to be a part of your life. It is just something you do. Reading about the routines of great people in history, you will discover that they fixed their routines for sleep and exercise. Charles Darwin, for instance, woke up at 8 AM every morning and went out for an hour’s walk before settling down to a period of focused work.
Even Winston Churchill, not known for his physical fitness, would do his work in the morning, have a long lunch but would then go outside and do something manual such as building a wall or some gardening and taking a ninety-minute nap before dinner.
The right amount of sleep and exercise has always been a fundamental part of what makes incredibly productive people productive.
It’s far too easy to forget about our personal lives, but your personal life is more important than your professional life.
I’ve known people dedicate twenty plus years to a single company. Then one day the company decides to restructure—or gets into financial difficulties and these people have gone. Some may get what we call a golden handshake, but any money you get as redundancy or compensation will not last long. No matter how loyal you are to your company, that loyalty will never be returned—not in today’s world.
Now, this is not the companies fault. It’s our fault. My parent's generation, on the whole, stayed with one company for all their working lives. In return, these companies guaranteed a job for life. Today, we—the employees—jump from one company to another seeking bigger salaries and more time off. So, of course, companies have changed. No longer do they expect an employee to stay with them for their whole working lives so they are less willing to invest in you.
So another part of your day needs to be spent on your own personal development. Here you work on your personal skills. So many people get left behind while the world moves on and this can be avoided if you just give yourself thirty minutes or so to develop your skills each day. That could be reading, taking an online course or even watching a YouTube video.
Netflix or Facebook might be attractive, but neither of these will save your career or keep you fit and healthy. Time spent in front of the TV is time you are not working on yourself. Always remember that. Time is fixed, what you do with your time is your choice. Choose wisely.
So, if you want to improve your productivity and time management, become more strategic about how you use your time. Time is fixed. We cannot change that, but we can decide what we do with our allocated time each day. If you choose to use your time gossiping with your co-workers, that’s a choice you made. But you cannot then later complain how you don’t have time to do your work. You do have time. Do your work first, then if you have time left, by all means, gossip.
And don’t allow yourself to fall into the “hope to find time” trap. You will never find more time. It does not exist. If something needs doing allocate time for doing it. Whether that is dealing with your email and Slack messages, calling clients or reading important documents. If you must do it, then allocate time for it.
Hopefully, that helps, Shelly. Thank you for your question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
10 May 2021 - Podcast 182
This week, how can you improve the productivity of your team or company? That’s the question I am answering this week.
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Script
Episode 182
Hello and welcome to episode 182 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This podcast and many others tend to focus on the individual rather than the group and this is likely because changing an individual’s habits can be easier than trying to change a group’s habits. But that does not mean changing the way a group operates is impossible. With leadership and a commitment from the group as a whole, significant positive changes can be made and very quickly.
So that is what I shall be addressing this week.
Now, before we dive into the answer, I’d like to urge you to download a copy of my free Areas of Focus workbook. The cornerstone of all effective time management and productivity systems is knowing what is important to you. If you do not know what is important to you, you will soon find yourself serving the interests of other people and their interests are never going to be fulfilling to you.
Once you know what is important, you can then build these areas of your life into your daily, weekly, and monthly tasks ensuring that you are bringing balance into your life. Time spent on your relationships and family, your career, your health, wealth, experiences and overall purpose are a lot more important than most people realise. That balance gives you the sense of freedom and wellbeing that so many people lack in their lives today.
The download is free and I will not be asking you for your email address or any personal information. I just want you to discover what is important to you so you can build your life around what you want, and not what other people want.
So if you have not done so already, head over to my downloads page on my website—carlpullein.com and start working your way through it.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question:
This week’s question comes from Mark. Mark asks, Hi Carl, I manage a team of sixteen people and we are all struggling to stay on top of the work handed down to us from head office. There’s a mixture of customer support, admin tasks and sales and it is just piling up and we don’t seem to be getting anywhere close to clearing our backlog. Do you have any productivity tips for teams that might help?
Hi Mark, thank you for your question and for reminding me that productivity is not only about the individual, but also about the team.
To answer your question directly, yes there are and there are quite a lot of them.
First up we need to deal with communication. How does your team communicate with each other? With the seismic changes in the way we work that has happened over the last year, one of the key areas that have a profound impact on a team’s productivity is in the way the team communicates.
One of the issues I’ve come across numerous times is the number of channels a team can communicate. There is the phone, email and instant messaging of course, but over the last twelve months, there have been additional channels added. Slack, Microsoft Teams and even messaging within project management software such as Salesforce and Trello.
That’s a lot of communication channels a team member needs to navigate and with so many channels to check there is going to be a time cost and a risk of something important being missed.
A leader of a team needs to designate one channel for team communication. Ideally, this channel should be a purpose-built channel. By that I mean, if you are using an app like Trello or Google Docs, while they do have a way to add comments and messages to documents or tasks, these tools were not designed to be a complete solution for communicating.
Instead, you would be better served if you designated one purpose-built communication tool for all your team’s communications. Apps like Microsoft Teams, Twist or Slack have been developed for teams to work together and they have the added benefit for team leaders to see what’s going on without the need to be constantly interrupting team members asking for updates.
Within these apps, you can create various channels, so in your case, Mark, you could have a separate channel for customer support, sales and admin as well as any other area your team is responsible for.
This way you and your team can quickly see what’s going on, ask questions and assign responsibility for the different tasks that can be involved.
With these apps, Teams, Twist and Slack, you can add on your favourite task manager as an extension. For instance, if you use Todoist, you can get the Todoist add on for Teams and Slack so any task that is assigned to you, you can quickly add it to your own to-do list. And as Twist is made by the people who develop Todoist, their integration is excellent.
Next up is ownership. One reason why so many tasks and issues within a team fall between the cracks—so to speak—is because no one has taken ownership of the problem.
While modern technology does help us to get more work done more effectively, it only works if the people using the technology take responsibility for what goes in it. So, if there is a customer with a problem, then someone in your team needs to take responsibility for that customer.
I’ve been on the receiving end of a customer support team that has no such responsibility, so each time I communicate with the team I get a different person who is using the same script as the one before. Now not only does support management by computer input damage the relationship with the customer (we are humans we like to work with other humans and not machines) it also leaves your customer support team feeling unfulfilled because they get no sense of accomplishment if all they are doing is picking up where someone else left off and then passing the problem on to the next person in the shift.
Give someone responsibility for each task—whether that is a customer support issue, a sales lead or some admin task that needs doing for head office. That way there is ownership and accountability and your team will be much better engaged in the process and their work.
Next up is meetings. Meetings are the antipathy of productivity because while you are holding a meeting nothing is getting done. Sure, decisions may be made, but more often than not, a team with good leadership will always have excellent decision-making processes anyway.
And while decisions are being made, you will often find no one is willing to take responsibility to see that the decision is carried through.
Now, while I do accept a limited number of meetings are unavoidable, they should be kept to a minimum. Each decision made in a meeting must be given a DRI—a Designated Responsible Individual to see through the decision and make sure whatever needs to happen happens within the allotted time. That way you have accountability and your team are empowered to make sure the work gets done.
And while on the subject of meetings, meetings should be limited to thirty minutes. There are two very good reasons for this too.
If you hold thirty-minute meetings these things will happen immediately. First, people will always arrive on time. One of the reasons you get people joining meetings a few minutes late is because with a typical hour-long meeting there is an expectation of small talk at the beginning. So there’s less sense of importance for the first five or ten minutes.
In thirty minute meetings, people sense that the meeting will start on time and get straight to the point.
Secondly, because the time is limited, people get to the point much faster. There’s little digression, and things stay on point.
You should always have an agenda and make sure people get that agenda at least 24 hours before the meeting so they have time to prepare. And if, as the leader, you discover someone in your team did not prepare, call them out for their lack of preparation. You will only need to do this a few times before your team soon learn they must prepare.
Whenever I talk with individuals about their time management troubles, the most common reason for backlog and overwhelm is not the volume of work they have but the number of meetings they are expected to attend. So reducing the number of meetings you hold just makes sense from a productivity point of view
If you want to improve your team’s productivity make all meetings voluntary. When you do this two things will happen.
Firstly, you give greater flexibility to your team to make judgments on whether they can or should attend a meeting. Trust that your team know whether they could contribute something significant to the meeting or not. If they feel they cannot, then allow them the flexibility to decline the meeting invitation.
Secondly, and more importantly, you make the meeting organiser accountable for the content of the meeting. If a meeting organiser frequently runs disorganised and ineffective meetings, people will stop attending their meetings. This will put pressure on them to improve the way they hold their meetings or better yet, stop holding meetings.
This is similar to me writing a blog post on a specific topic and find I don’t get any readers. That tells me the topic has no interest and I need to change the topic or make the writing more compelling. I am forced to improve either way. The same happens once you make all meetings voluntary. The quality of your meetings will improve significantly.
Finally, implement the Time Sector System. While I create the Time Sector System for individuals, it works brilliantly for small teams. Our work and priorities are moving incredibly fast these days. What might be a priority today could easily become obsolescent next week. The idea behind the Time Sector System is you focus on the work that needs to be done this week.
Now what I am about to say will seem counter to what I said about meetings, but there are two meetings a leader should have each week. The first meeting is held on a Monday where the team decides what needs to be accomplished this week. When you get agreement on this by the team and everyone is clear about what must happen to accomplish those goals and what their tasks are that will help accomplish those goals your team will be hyper-focused on getting their important tasks completed.
The second meeting is held on a Friday, where your team report on their progress and discuss any issues or delays and what needs to be carried forward to the following week.
The purpose here is to be clear about the work that needs to be completed that week. New inputs can be discussed in either meeting and decisions made about when these tasks should be done—this week, next week, this month, next month or longer term.
Using this method, the team leader needs to have a place where the team’s overall objectives for the quarter and the year are and what needs to be done and when in order to achieve these. To ensure all team members know what the overall purpose and objectives are, a shared Kanban board can help. Applications such as Trello, Asana or Meistertask are all great tools that can do this job well and responsibility for each project can be assigned to team members.
Again, as with tools such as Microsoft Teams, Slack or Twist, the team leader can see instantly where a project is and what still needs to be done so there is less following up, and a lot more doing going on.
So there you go, Mark, those are the ways a team can dramatically improve its overall productivity. It begins with accountability and ownership. If nobody owns the task and is not directly responsible for it, then backlogs will develop.
If communication channels are all over the place, things will inevitably get missed, so make sure you and your team agree on one single communication channel.
And restrict the number of meetings and trust that your team know what they are doing and leave them to get on with doing it. Work gets done when people have the time and space to do the work, not when they are in and out of meetings all day satisfying a manager’s need to micro-manage.
I hope that has helped, you Mark and thank you so much for your question. And thank you to you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Last week, I answered a question about how to raise your productivity level, and that sparked a lot of questions about how to reduce the number of tasks you have to do each day. So, this week, I will explain how to do just that.
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Episode 181
Hello and welcome to episode 181 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Last week, I pointed out that the most productive people—the people operating at a higher level—only ever have four or five tasks on their to-do list each day. The question is how do they manage to do that and get all their work done? That is what I will be answering today.
Now the starting point, as I explained last week, is you must know what you want. Most people are struggling with managing their work each day because they don’t know what is important to them. And when you don’t know what is really important, everything becomes important and then (bear with me here) nothing is important.
It’s similar to knowing the root meaning of the word “Priority”. Technically, we cannot have “priorities” because “priority” means one thing. There can only be one priority. You cannot make the word plural. Now about fifty years ago, the pluralisation of the word “priority” started and now most of us use the word “priorities”. But, if you really want to reduce your to-do list you need to treat the word “priority” as it should be treated. What one thing can you do today?
If you have not sat down and thought about your future, about what you want, how you want to live your life in five, ten and twenty years time, then you will find your task list becomes full of other people’s tasks and very few of your own. You will not be prioritising today what you need to be ready for in the future.
To give you a simple example, when I was a teenager, I got to know a gentleman in his 80s who was a very useful sprinter in his day. As got older he became a prolific marathon runner. Every three months he ran a marathon and he was in his mid-80s.
I was so inspired by this that I decided I too want to be running marathons when I am in my 80s.
The question is, how will I be able to do that. If I spend my life eating unhealthy food and sat behind a desk all day being stressed out by every little thing that came my way, I would soon find myself unable to run anywhere. I’d be too fat and too sick. To make sure I can achieve that goal in the future, I must take care of my health and stay fit today. How do I do that? I must be careful of what I eat and exercise frequently.
And that is what I have done. I exercise at least four times per week, I eat healthily and I make sure I do not spend all day sat down behind a desk. I move…a lot.
I know what I want to be doing in thirty to forty years time and at least four times each week, I do something that will enable me to do that.
And that is why it is important you first establish what is important to you.
Now here’s where you will face difficulties.
For most of us, we spend too much time worrying about the problems and difficulties we face today. We get caught up in the dramas of other people—our colleagues and customers for instance—and we lose sight of our long-term plans. That means you are living your life at a daily level and that is not sustainable. You need to operate on a level that grows and builds your future self. You need to understand that all great things—and life is a great thing—takes time to grow and flourish.
I work with a group of middle managers here in Korea who have dedicated their working lives to their companies. They are all now fast approaching the time where they need to think about their futures and they have nothing except a small amount of savings. They have no plans, and no compelling future and they are scared.
Their problem is they have dedicated the last twenty to thirty years of their lives serving a company that has its own goals and plans and those goals and plans are not going to include them in five years time. They have spent no time on their own future plans, largely because for most of those years they have been working, the future was tomorrow and the problems they will face at work tomorrow.
That’s why it’s important you make sure you have an exciting and compelling future designed for yourself now. You will never be able to operate at a higher level if all you are doing is adding tasks to your to-do list that benefit others and the things you feel you have to do today and not your long term future plans.
Okay, enough of the background. Hopefully, you get that now. Let’s imagine you do have a compelling future planned out for yourself. How do you reduce the number of tasks on your to-do list?
The first thing is to automate as much as you can. Now when I use the word “automate” here I do not necessarily mean use technology. For instance, every Friday I record my YouTube videos. To set up the “studio”, I have to move some furniture around. So, once I finish recording and before I put the furniture back, I always vacuum my office and shake out the rugs. It’s a ten-minute job, and it just makes sense to add that ten minutes to my recording time and clean things up before I move everything back.
I don’t need a task that says “clean office” because it will always happen when I record my videos. You could easily make cleaning up your home office for instance by including cleaning in your weekly planning session.
Similarly, you can use natural triggers. Natural triggers are those things you can see with your own eyes that something needs doing. Doing the laundry can be done when you see that the laundry basket is full, doing the dishes can be done as part of your eating ritual—you wash up immediately after you finish eating. Just like you know when your car needs fuel because the fuel warning light comes on. I actually take this one a little further, when I see that I only have half a tank left, I will fill up the car.
Triggers are like when you go to bed you always put your phone on charge, so the trigger is going to bed, you automatically put your phone on charge ready for the next morning
When there is a natural trigger you do not need to make it a task on your task list.
Paying bills, usually need to be done on the same day each month, so reminders for your bills would be on your calendar as an all-day event. This also has the advantage that when you do the weekly planning session you will see it in your calendar. Hopefully, you are also reviewing your calendar as part of your daily mini-planning session so you are not going to miss anything.
However, where possible you want to be setting bill payments up as direct debits or standing orders—these are where payments are automatically paid on a given date.
My car payments, credit card bills and Apple Music subscriptions are paid automatically for instance. I don’t need a task for these.
Now in your work, you must know what you are paid to do. Too often we allow ourselves to be involved in things that we are not paid to do. If you have done the Time Sector course, you will know all about your core work. The work that you are paid to do, the quality of which will determine whether you get that promotion you have always desired.
When I was working in car sales many years ago, I was employed to sell cars. My salary was dependant on the number of cars I sold each month.
Yet, for some reason I allowed myself to be sent out by my sales manager to clean the cars outside the showroom and make sure there were enough brochures in the brochure stands. I was not paid to do any of those things, but I did them because my boss asked me to do it.
My colleague, Claire, was a lot smarter than I. She knew, like me, she was paid based on the number of cars she sold. Whenever there was a car cleaning or aligning to be done, Claire was always missing. She was either on the phone following up with a customer or talking to a customer in the showroom.
Needless to say, Claire always sold more cars than me. When I pointed out to my boss that she did no cleaning or aligning or brochure refilling he said: “I don’t F’ing care. She sells cars!”—lesson learned. I quickly learned to prioritise selling over being ‘helpful’.
Being “helpful” may have helped me to be popular, but it did nothing for the quality of the roof over my head or food on my table or my long term goals. It helped Claire and my boss, but it did nothing for me.
Claire did not have “clean cars out the front” or “check to see there are enough brochures” on her to-do list. She had tasks that helped her to achieve her sales goals each month. She was terrible at admin, and the admin department did not particularly like her for that. Did she care? Of course not. She was not paid to have meticulously filled out documents and notes. She was paid to sell and selling cars gave her the salary she wanted to live the lifestyle she wanted. Being great at admin did not do that.
Now a lot of you forward actionable emails to your to-do list. Why? Nine times out of ten emails are requests for information that benefit the sender and not you. All they do is suck up more of your time and cause you to spend time on other people’s priorities.
Now, I am not suggesting you ignore emails, but you need to get very clear about important emails and exclude non-important ones. And you should not be sending these to your to-do list.
Instead, create a Folder in your email called “Action This Day” and dedicate a certain amount of time each day for clearing as many of these as possible. If you reverse the order these emails show up in your folder so the oldest is at the top, you will always be on top of your email.
I dedicate 5 pm to 6 pm for communications. That hour each day is for responding to my mail and messages. Once 6 pm comes I stop. Doing this every day means I am usually no more than 24 hours away from responding to my mail.
Essentially, what I am doing is “chunking” responding to messages and emails to one block of time each day. This way, for the majority of the day I can remain focused on my important work knowing I have time each day to keep on top of my actionable email.
And don’t fall into the trap of believing emails will carry “urgent” requests. Nobody uses email today for anything urgent. So stop treating email as urgent. It is not. If something was genuinely urgent you would receive a phone call or text message.
If you do respond to email quickly, you are setting an unrealistic expectation. Stop doing this and train your bosses, colleagues and clients to communicate genuine urgent matters in a more direct way.
If you need to be reminded of certain routine admin tasks then group all these tasks together into a dedicated “Routines” folder in your task manager. I have these pop up at the end of the day. The way I do that is to make sure any routines—tasks that do not move my projects or goals forward—are at the bottom of my to-do list.
Routines just need to be done and it rarely is a problem if I cannot do them on the desired day. As long as I have my important tasks at the top of my list, if I have time at the end of the day I can complete my routines, although you should try to find a trigger for your routines as much as you can so they do not need to be put into your task manager.
Finally, create morning and evening routines and keep these lists out of your to-do list for the day. I find after a few weeks these routines need no reminder. For instance, when I wake up, I put the kettle on, get my lemon water from the fridge and drink that while I wait for the kettle to boil.
I then make my coffee and as I wait for my coffee to brew, I do a series of shoulder stretching exercises. Once my coffee is made, I write my journal and drink my coffee and then process my email.
I don’t need any of these tasks on my to-do list because they are automatic. I have been following the same morning routine for three or four years now.
Likewise, I have a closing down routine that includes reviewing my task list and planning tomorrow. Again, none of these needs to be on my to-do list because they are automatic.
To reduce the number of tasks on your to-do list you need to be thinking in terms of elimination. It’s about removing unnecessary tasks, grouping things together and dedicating a small amount of time to do them in one go and being very protective of your time.
But, all these are just tactics. The most important thing you can do is to identify what your core work is and being crystal clear about what it is you want out of life and pursuing tasks, goals and projects that will take you there and eliminating anything that does not serve that higher purpose.
I hope these strategies help you reduce the number of tasks you have in your task manager and helps to focus your mind on what is important to you.
Thank you to all of you who gave me feedback on last week’s episode and also to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, we are looking at the advanced level of time management and personal productivity and asking how you too can reach that level.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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Email Mastery 2021 Course
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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 180
Hello and welcome to episode 180 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Have you ever wondered what super-productive people do that most people don’t do? How the likes of Dwayne Johnson, Robin Sharma and Tony Robbins manage their time and get their work done?
The thing is while these people may have a unique way to manage their time, and of course, they do have personal assistants doing quite a lot of the smaller tasks that many of us have to do ourselves, they do operate at a different level—they have to—but that level is attainable for all of us if we are serious about maximising our potential—because that’s what it is all about.
And that’s what this week question is all about.
So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Adam. Adam asks: Hi Carl, I have often wondered how other people manage their time. I have read David Allen, yourself and many others on time management, yet I sense I must be missing something when I look at what people like Robin Sharma and Brian Tracey produce week after week. Is there a secret I am missing?
Hi Adam, thank you for your wonderful question. A question I have spent many many years searching for an answer myself.
To give you a direct answer: yes you are. People like Robin Sharma and Brian Tracey do do things differently and it is something we can all do. But, it involves a lot of risk, immense focus and a clear vision of what you want to achieve, not just in your professional life, but in your life as a whole.
Let me start with Elon Musk. Elon Musk’s lifetime goal is to colonise Mars. Right now, when you talk to people about colonising Mars, most people dismiss it as a goal that would be unachievable anytime soon. And that may be true. After all, currently to get to Mars would take you almost a year, the winter temperature can drop to as low as -180 degrees Fahrenheit (almost -120 degrees celsius) and there are frequent dust storms with wind speeds over 100 MPH (160 KPH). Why would anyone want to live there?
But that does not deter Elon Musk. His total focus is on developing solutions to any problems that humans living on Mars may encounter. From building electric cars for transportation to developing rockets that would get humans to Mars quickly and safely. Everything Elon Musk is doing is geared towards that one goal.
Now ask yourself, what is my life goal? What is my purpose?
My guess is you don’t have one. And if you do, it will likely be to save sufficient money for your retirement or to buy a dream home. Most people’s life goals are related to material things, money and themselves.
That means, most people are focused on their jobs, their salary and their status in society. And that is what restricts people. It means they will never take the kind of risks that are required to reach a much higher purpose and it generates fears around what other people think about them (something you will never have any control over anyway), how they fit into society and have a job—any job that means receiving a salary.
When I was teaching English, I taught business people. And I saw first hand the difference between those stuck in middle management and those populating the executive suites. The most successful executives I taught, were not concerned about where they lived, the car they drove or the clothes they wore. They were intensely focused on getting to the top of their organisations so they could directly change the world for the better. These people would live in a cardboard box if it meant that would get them to the very top so they could change things.
They were not trying to win popularity contests or to be the most liked person in their organisation. They had no fear in saying “no” to opportunities they felt would not contribute to their higher purpose.
Now you might think someone like Dwayne Johnson can’t have a higher purpose like Elon Musk and his purpose to colonise Mars, but you would be wrong.
Dwayne Johnson’s purpose in life is to entertain and motivate. He wants to bring joy to the world and to the people who watch his movies. Now Dwayne Johnson knows that his box office appeal is partly his physical fitness and his charismatic personality. Watch any interview or conversation with Dwayne Johnson and you cannot help but warm to him.
This is why, no matter how busy he is, Dwayne Johnson will get up and do his time in the gym—or as he calls it; “the Iron Paradise”. 3, 4 in the morning Dwayne Johnson will be in the gym six days a week.
How many of you are willing to wake up at 3 AM to work out? Probably very few of you. How many of you, after a ten-hour flight across the world, would go to the gym before checking into your hotel?
These are just some of the sacrifices people like Dwayne Johnson are willing to make to achieve their purpose in life. It’s not about them, it’s about what they give to the world.
People who are operating at this higher level do not have tasks like “Return sweater to Uniqlo” or “take dry-cleaning in” on their to-do lists. None of these tasks contributes to their overall goal. The only things on their to-do lists are tasks that take them towards their objectives, complete their projects and achieve their goals.
So, you are probably beginning to see where this higher level of productivity comes from. It comes from your overall purpose in life. Knowing exactly what you want to achieve from life and more importantly, doing it for others.
You see, when you really know what it is you want out of your life, you become incredibly focused. Everything you do goes through the prism of “how will this contribute to my overall goal?”
When that goal becomes an obsession and excites you, you will not languish in bed, you jump out of bed ready to start the day, you will burn the midnight oil and you have no fear saying “no” to anyone if whatever they are asking you to do does not contribute towards your goal.
That’s what a higher level of productivity looks like and most people are not willing to make that kind of sacrifice and that’s okay. We are free to make our own decisions and spend our time doing whatever we want to do.
This is why I encourage people to download my Areas of Focus workbook. It’s a free workbook designed to help you find want is important to you. Those areas of focus are your foundation on which you can build your own purpose in life. They are based around eight areas we all share. Those are; Family and relationships, career or business, financial wellbeing, health and fitness, life experiences, spirituality, personal development and life purpose.
Once you know what these mean to you, you are going to become a lot more focused on your life. Now, these areas will have different levels of importance to all of us. It largely depends where you are in life. If you are in your twenties your career and education—personal development—may be the most important. As you get to your fifties, you likely now know you are not immortal so health and fitness will be higher and perhaps your financial wellbeing.
Now it does not mean you have to have a single obsession like Elon Musk, but you do need to know what is important to you and what is not. Without that knowledge, you will gravitate towards making other people’s priorities yours and that is going to make you feel miserable and depressed.
Other people could be your boss or your customers. If your goal is to make these people happy so they don’t get upset with you, or cause you to lose your job, you will be unfulfilled and miserable as well as stressed out. Your happiness at work is conditional on something you have no control over—the feelings of your boss or customer. You have no control over how much sleep they got, whether they had a fight with their partner or some other external event that caused them to be angry or upset.
Your focus is on your own wellbeing, not making the world a little bit better. Doing things for others so they like you—that’s not doing something for other people. It’s dong something for you so you can be popular and liked.
I remember watching a Tony Robbins 5 day live event and although Tony was on stage (so to speak) at 11 AM, he stayed up until six in the morning reading participants’ social media comments about the event so he could make the event even better the next day. His complete and total focus was on making the event as educational as he possibly could for the participants. He didn’t worry about getting enough sleep so he would look and sound better on stage. He was at the next level—searching for ways to make the learning experience of several thousand people better.
Do you think he was worrying about how many emails were in his inbox, or whether he’d put the garbage out? Of course not. He was completely focused on making the learning experience the best he could for his participants.
That’s higher-level productivity. Being completely focused on what’s important. Blocking five days out on his calendar so he did not have to worry about anything else other than teaching people to lead better lives.
For those of you who have taken the Time Sector Course, you will know about your core work and why knowing what that is crucial to ensuring you are doing the right things. Your core work is the work you are employed to do.
You were not employed to reply to emails within an hour. You were not employed to attend mind-numbing meetings that achieve nothing and have no objective. And you were certainly not employed to keep your boss happy. Sure, if you want an easy life, do those things. But you will ultimately feel unfulfilled and unhappy because everything you do is to make other people like you—something you cannot realistically control anyway.
Knowing what your objectives are for the day—what you want to accomplish today that will take you a step further towards your goal and then doing it that’s what will bring you fulfilment. It’s that that people will respect you for and it’s that that will inspire other people to be better versions of themselves. That’s what will bring you fulfilment and pleasure.
None of this is easy and there are immense sacrifices that have to be made. You are trying to achieve a long-term vision that will not bring you any instant gratification other than knowing you are moving along the right path. That’s why so few people ever achieve it.
But it really comes down to knowing what you want to achieve in life. People like Elon Musk, Tony Robbins and Dwayne Johnson are crystal clear on their objectives. That’s why they are achieving what they are achieving. The vast majority of people are not and that is why they are where they are today.
None of this is difficult, but it is very risky, you are going to upset some people and many others will not understand you because you are living a life they think is not normal. But then why would anyone just want to be “normal”. I think being normal is a horrible life. A life controlled by other people’s feelings and emotions.
No, if you really want to take your productivity to the next level, then get clear about what is important to you. Be focused on what you want out of your life and stop trying to fit into a blueprint designed by others.
I will leave you with the inspiring words from Apple’s Think Different campaign from the early 2000s:
“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Thank you Adam for your wonderful question and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, we are digging deeper into the benefits of creating workflows and processes to ensure your most important work gets done on time every time.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Email Mastery 2021 Course
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
More about the Time Sector System
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Episode 179
Hello and welcome to episode 179 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Becoming better organised and more productive is a process. It’s not going to happen overnight and there is a lot of trial and error.
The first step is to get a system in place: one that ensures nothing is being missed and all your new tasks, events and ideas are being collected. In many ways, it is a bit like learning to walk then run. As a child, our first steps are slow, hesitant and there is a lot going on in the brain telling us to put one foot in front of the other while shifting our body weight from one side to the next.
Over time, this ‘process’ of walking becomes fixed in our brain and we no longer need to consciously think about doing it. We stand up. We walk. The only thought we have is I want a glass of water from the kitchen. We don’t need to plan out each step.
Well, the same applies to becoming better organised and more productive. Our first steps are hesitant. We have to think consciously about what we are doing and that can seem very counterintuitive if our designed goal is to have to think less so we can do more.
In this episode, I am answering a question around that process and development and hopefully what I say will give you some encouragement if you are finding the whole process of becoming more productive cumbersome and time-consuming.
While on this subject of building an unconscious process, just a little reminder that if you haven’t already got yourself the free areas of focus workbook, I highly recommend you do so.
This workbook was created to help you create that automation in your life by building in the things that are important to you so you have a lot less thinking to do on a week to week, month to month basis. Once you know what is important to you and what you need to do to maintain these daily, weekly or monthly actions, you will find yourself feeling a lot more in balance with your life as a whole.
The link to download the workbook is in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jason. Jason asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed your COD and Time Sector systems and I love them. The problem I am having is it feels like a lot of effort just to keep everything up to date. I feel like I am spending too much time just writing things into Todoist and my calendar and not really doing my work. I enjoy it, but I know I need to spend more time doing work and not managing my work. How do you get your work done more efficiently?
Hi Jason, thank you for your question.
You didn’t say in your email how long you have been doing COD and the Time Sector System, so I will assume you are relatively new to these systems.
So, as I mentioned in the introduction, when we change our way of doing things—particularly if we have been doing something in a certain way for a very long time the new system can feel like it is taking a lot longer to do our work done.
Part of the reason for this is we have to consciously think about each step, whereas our previous system was just automatic. Even if you felt you did not have a system before, whatever you were doing to get your work done, you did it automatically. An urgent email came in, you panicked, and replied immediately leaving the original email in your inbox. That might not be a very effective way of managing email, but it worked, you replied and you got the job done—in the short term.
If you change the way you manage your email and instead of panicking when an urgent email comes in you consciously move it to an action this day folder, you a) have to think about it, and b) you have to consciously resist the temptation to panic and reply immediately.
Remember, nobody treats email as a form of urgent communication today. Your neighbour wouldn’t email you to tell you your car was being stolen, would they?
So, sure this new way of doing things will feel like it is taking more time…at first. Once, it becomes habitual not to panic when an urgent email comes in and you have confidence in the way you are doing things, it will feel a lot more effective and efficient.
As I have mentioned before in this podcast, the first habit you must develop is to collect. Most people only do this when they consciously think about it so they may collect around sixty per cent, the other forty per cent of stuff coming their way is still kept in their heads. Hopefully, by now you know this is not a great strategy.
Once you automatically collect everything into your trusted place—a task manager, notes app or notebook—you can move on to the next habit to develop. That is the organising. Where are you going to put all this stuff you have collected? And of course, that depends on how you have your system set up.
But beyond that, how do you make sure everything is working automatically?
Well here comes the advanced level—the part that goes beyond the basic structure.
Firstly you must know what your core work is—the work that pays your bills and earns your income. That work must be scheduled on your calendar and the micro-tasks involved in your tasks manager. Doing this work, whether it is calling ten prospects per day, writing 1,000 words of your next article, designing the images for the next marketing campaign or reaching out to five potential speakers for your next conference must have time allocated to it every day.
To give you an example of this. Let’s say you get a lot of important email and Teams messages each day and you calculate you need around ninety minutes each day just to stay on top of that, then wishing those emails and messages would go away or somehow you will miraculously find that time is not a great strategy. Getting realistic about how much time you need each day and allocating that time on your calendar for communications will ensure you have enough time every day and knowing you have time will take a lot of stress out of your day.
This, by the way, applies also to your core work. This is why it is essential to define what that work is. Artists create art, designers design, salespeople sell and teachers teach. There’s the clue to your core work. It’s the art you create, the designs you design and the sales you make. You must make time for doing that core work every day and that means you get it on your calendar.
Once you have a consistent schedule of work, that’s when things start to work smoother. That’s when you only need to make decisions about new stuff coming in and how that new, extra work will fit “around” your core work. And, that’s an important point there—this new, additional work must fit “around” your core work, not replace it.
Always keep at the front of your mind that your core work is what puts food on your table and keeps a roof over your head—a lot of this new additional work is work that will not directly affect your core work.
This only starts to happen when you are consistent with your work.
Let me give you an example of this in play. I grew up on a farm and I still have an interest in farming methods. When I was very very young, my father had a dairy farm. Now the cows had to be milked at 6 AM, so my father and his brother would get up, get the cows into the milking parlour and start the milking at 6 AM. That happened every day, seven days of the week.
Between 6 AM and 9 AM, it was milking time. Once the milking was finished, the cows were let out into the fields for the day and the rest of the day was spent ensuring the milk that was collected was prepared ready for the milk wagon (as we called it) to collect it.
There were never any meetings with National Milk Board representatives or machinery salespeople between 6 AM and 9 AM, no impromptu gossip time or checking that morning’s mail. It was getting on with the work, Collecting that milk was my father’s core work. It’s what ultimately allowed him to put food on the family table and keep a roof over our heads.
Time for meeting with Milk Board officials, salespeople and reading that day’s mail and news, was done once the milking was done.
That’s how you make your system work for you. Establish what is your core work. What work must you do every single day? Make those tasks recurring and get them fixed on your calendar.
This is how successful productive people become successful at what they do. They first identify their core work and the tasks that make sure that core work gets done. Things like prospecting for new customers, doing the design work and seeing patients and fix that before allowing other, non-core work into their workday.
Warren Buffett identified reading the financial news for several hours a day as how he would stay on top of the latest stock market and business trends. Guess what he does every day?
Your system starts to work when these core work tasks become just something you do. When all the people you regularly interact with know that you will be unavailable at certain times in the day—including your customers and bosses—because you are doing important work.
But to get there takes time. All new ways of doing things take time. I remember learning to play golf. Just to learn how to swing a golf club properly took several one-hour lessons with a golf pro. I didn’t just walk onto a golf course and hit the perfect tee shot. It just many hours to automate the swing.
And that’s what’s happening here, Jason. You’re learning to swing. It will take time, but through consistent practice, the results will be a much more effective way of managing your work, a lot better structure to your days and a lot more of the important work getting done and being delivered on time.
Once you have identified your core work, those tasks will become recurring tasks, so you are not having to write them out every day. You write them out and they repeat when they need to repeat.
The only tasks you will need to write out are the new tasks coming in and again you will soon get faster at doing it. You quickly learn the best way to write your tasks so they are meaningful and clear about what needs to be done.
So be patient. Stay consistent, you will soon get faster and many of the things you are thinking about when you write out your tasks, will soon just become automatic.
Thank you, Jason, for your question and thank you to you all for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 178
This week, what can you do when your plan for the week is destroyed and your waiting for list get out of control.
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Episode 178
Hello and welcome to episode 178 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So, you’re finally doing your weekly planning session, you have your focused work times blocked on your calendar and you are confident you will be able to get all your important work done that week.
Then, one email from your boss late Monday afternoon throws everything out. You have to ditch the plan and all the things you have been waiting for are required right now.
How do you manage that? Well, hopefully, in this episode I will give you some strategies to help you stay in control.
Now before I do that…
Don’t forget, you can save yourself over $200 when you buy The Ultimate Productivity course bundle. This bundle gives you six courses for just $175 including the Time Sector System, Your Digital Life 3.0 and Time and Life Mastery.
With this bundle you get everything you need to build your personalised productivity system at your own pace. And that is important. It takes time to piece together a system that works seamlessly for you and that’s what this bundle of courses will enable you to do.
Taking one course each weekend over the next six weeks will give you the knowledge, the know-how and the tools to put together a system that will stick.
So, if you want to finally nail down your time management, goal planning and productivity so you have every part of your life in balance, start today and get yourself the Ultimate Productivity bundle.
Full details and more information are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Melissa. Melissa asks: Hi Carl, This year I have done really well on doing a weekly review every Saturday morning and I get my week planned and organised. But, I find most weeks, by the time I get to Wednesday, I am far behind on my plan because I get given other work from my boss, I am waiting for my colleagues to get back to me with important information and my customers are always contacting me asking for help. How do you stay with your plan when so many things keep forcing you to change everything?
Hi Melissa, great question and I am sure a lot of people find themselves in the same situation as you do. I know it happens to me more often than I like.
So, firstly, it’s fantastic to hear you are consistently doing the weekly planning session. That’s important because it keeps you on top of your bigger picture direction and helps to avoid missing anything important. A lot of the reasons why people find themselves overwhelmed and directionless is because they don’t spend any time stepping away and reviewing where they are with their projects and goals.
If you don’t know where you are, how will you ever know what you need to do next to get the project or goal completed?
And let’s be honest here, a weekly planning session takes no more than thirty minutes if you are doing it consistently every week. If you are not doing it consistently, then, sure, it’s going to take you a lot longer because you will inevitably have a lot more to review.
Now, no matter how well you plan the week, unless you are hidden away in a log cabin high up in the mountains with no connection to the outside world, things are going to change your plan. When your plan for the week comes face to face with the week, sparks are going to fly. It’s as Mike Tyson put it:
“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”
However, understanding that things are going to change—you just don’t know what is going to change—is a great place to start.
The key here is to build in flexibility. It’s no good trying to meticulously plan out your week based on what your next week calendar looks like on Saturday morning with time blocks for every hour of the day. That will never work. There are too many variables.
Instead, establish what your important work for the week is. What are your “must dos”? These are your non-negotiable tasks—if you like, they are your red-lines. No matter what, these tasks, meetings and appointments must take place.
It is these that go on your calendar—after all, you have decided they are your non-negotiable tasks.
Your non-negotiable tasks are not just about your work either. Your family and friendships, time for exercise, rest and personal development should form part of your non-negotiable plans for the week.
For instance, if making time to have dinner with your family every day is part of your areas of focus, then you make sure that happens and never schedule work related calls at those times. It’s the same with your exercise time. We all know by now you need to move. You body was not designed to spend all day sat down. You need movement. So, make sure that some form of exercise each day is scheduled. That could be a twenty minute walk after lunch and a thirty minute walk after dinner. Exercise is a personal choice. You do not have to go to a gym. Just make sure you have time for movement every day.
Now, hopefully, once you have your non-negotiable, must do tasks in your task manager and the required time to complete these are blocked out on your calendar there should be enough blank space for you to manage any emergencies that will inevitably come your way.
Now, here’s a tip. Start the week as if you expect the week to turn crazy.
What I mean here is front load your week with your most important work. If a crisis or an emergency is going to happen, you want to know that you have already completed your most important work for the week—or at the very least started doing the work.
There’s no way any of us can predict when things will go wrong. The only thing we can predict is that at sometime in the week something is going to happen that will require us to find some unplanned for time.
Knowing this, if you can, block out Monday for your most important work.
In my experience, Monday’s are the least likely days for sudden emergencies to happen. Most people spend Monday catching up with what they need to do that week, gossiping about what they did last weekend and telling anyone who will listen how much they hate Mondays.
Take advantage of this. Make Monday mornings your deepest focus work time.
Getting your most important work done early in the week, means you have the time and space to deal with all those unexpected requests, crises and emergencies later in the week, safe in the knowledge your most important tasks for the week have already been done.
I actually, block both Monday and Tuesday morning for my most important work. Monday is the day I try to get all my writing for the week done, and Tuesday is when I plan out the content I need to create later in the week—it’s the content planning time that takes up a lot of my time when creating content. So, I want that done early in the week so no matter what happens later, the hardest part of the creation process is done.
The rest of your week needs to be kept as flexible as you can make it. If you can, try to make Wednesday or Thursday your flexible day. By that I mean keep your work time blocks to a minimum.
Knowing you have space on a Wednesday or Thursday to deal with any unknowns that come up earlier in the week, takes the pressure off from worrying about finding time to work on whatever needs working on. It also means you have the space to catch up with anything that has fallen behind.
It also helps to review your plan for the week on Wednesday too. This acts as a method to refocus you on what your objectives for the week are. It also means you can reschedule less critical work if necessary.
Last week, for instance, I had a few unexpected emergencies come up with a seminar I was doing for a company on Thursday. This meant, Tuesday was spend dealing with tech issues to make sure I could connect to the company’s Microsoft Teams system—I understand security is important, but perhaps IT departments need to understand that no company is an island. Employees do need work with people outside the organisation from time to time—anyway just a thought.
These issues thew me out of my plans for the week. However, I always have Wednesday morning free so I can catch up if necessary and that is exactly what I did. By Wednesday afternoon I was back on track and I made the necessary adjustments to my planned tasks for the week.
Now what about all those waiting for tasks? Here’s the thing about waiting for lists. What is the outcome here? I’m pretty sure the outcome you wanted when you requested whatever you requested was not to sit and wait for something to happen. That objective would be bizarre. No, the outcome you wanted was to receive whatever you requested.
So, anything in a waiting for list is an uncompleted task. You have not got what you requested, therefore the task is not complete. Moving a task to a waiting for list after you sent the request is just shuffling tasks from one list to another. It’s not completing the task. The task is only complete once you receive the information you wanted.
So, if you want to complete that task, you need to do whatever it takes to get the information you are waiting for. Whether that means you pick up the phone and scream and shout at the person not supplying you with the information or you send a polite, but firm email. Remember the objective is to get the information, not necessarily to build friendships or popularity.
You want to reduce your waiting for list? Get tough, get nasty and do whatever it takes to complete the task. And yes, that means you need to get tough and nasty with your bosses if it is they who are not giving you the information.
Look, when it comes to your annual evaluation and the person doing the evaluation gives you a poor score because you are not completing your targets and KPIs, it will sound pretty pathetic if you try to justify yourself by blaming others for not sending you the information you needed to complete your KPIs. So stop seeing waiting for tasks as somehow being different from the original task. If the original task has not been completed then it’s not complete and you just have to reschedule whatever it is to another day when you do have the information in order to complete the task.
Focus on the right outcome and do whatever you need to do to clear you waiting for lists. There should be almost nothing in there.
Hopefully, that helps you, Melissa. Try to front load your week where possible and keep the mid-week as flexible as possible for dealing with the emergencies and crises and review your plan too.
There’s nothing wrong is rescheduling tasks. We all have to do that a lot more than we would care to admit. But life will always throw you off track, that’s just life. Ships are constantly battling winds and seas pulling them in different directions. But as long as you know where you are going you will always find the right port. That’s the same in life. There are constant pulls and distractions trying to pull you away from your planned course.
Just make sure you have a little time each week to review your plan, and readjust where necessary.
Thank you, Melissa for your question and thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me know to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 177
This week, I’m answering a question on how to prioritise your work and avoid getting caught up in the trivial, low importance tasks
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Episode 177
Hello and welcome to episode 177 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Before we get started, just a quick apology to those of you who were listening to this podcast on Spotify. Last February I upgraded the quality of this podcast and Spotify stopped updating the episodes. It turns out Spotify will only accept the lower quality versions of podcasts which are MP3 files. I was using M4A files as part of the upgrade,
However, I will reinstate the MP3 versions so Spotify will begin accepting this podcast once more.
Okay, on with the show.
This week, it’s all about prioritising and knowing what to prioritise and what to ignore—yes, I said that right, “what to ignore”.
You see, the problem is there are far more tasks to do each day and week than time available and we are not machines. We are apt to feel tired, lethargic and distracted at times and for most of us, these times are unpredictable.
So while we may think we are managing time, we are really better off managing our energy levels. Understanding that concept can really help us to prioritise our days better.
So, before we get to the question, just a little reminder that I have a new bundle of courses available that will give you four of my best courses PLUS two bonus courses, which will give you a time management system that will take the stress out of everything you have to do, and give you the tools and know-how to bring in your goals and dreams.
The Ultimate Productivity Bundle is priced at an amazing $175.00 which saves you 55% off the price of buying all four courses individually.
If you want the complete package with lifetime access, then this is the bundle for you. You save yourself $110 and you get everything you need to build an amazingly productive and fulfilling life.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Paul. Paul asks: Hi Carl, I have a lot of tasks coming at me every day and I struggle to know which ones to do. Most of them really are not that important, but I always feel I have to do them when I probably don’t. Do you know of any strategies I can use to better prioritise my work so I am working on the important things more often?
Hi Paul, thank you for sending in your question.
I am sure this is a common issue for many people. There is so much being pushed on us, that it can be very hard to know what to work on.
The most important part of prioritising though is planning. You see, if you are not planning then everything will seem important because you have not taken the time to look at what’s on your plate without the day to day rumble of emails, tasks and messages. It’s like you need to get off the road for a moment, climb the hill and look at your landscape and see where you are going. Without that bigger view, you will likely be travelling down roads that will take you nowhere near where you want to go.
So, strategy one is to plan the week. Now, this does not mean spending an hour or two going through all your projects as some productivity systems recommend. You know what projects need your attention—or at least if you are paying attention to what going on in your life you should do.
At the very least you need to know what projects are due this quarter. This bigger picture view will give you the knowledge of where you should be spending most of your attention next week. It also means that any project not due in the next three months can be ignored for now. You do not need to be wasting valuable time going through those projects. They are not due yet and you need to put your focus on projects that are due in the immediate future.
To use the car analogy again, you would not be worrying about what to have for dinner at lunchtime when your car is low on fuel. Your priority needs to be getting fuel in your car, not dinner tonight. Find the petrol station, and worry about dinner once you are refuelled.
So, spend twenty or thirty minutes at the end of the week and go through your projects for this month and next. Clear out your inboxes and get your email cleared. Review your calendar for appointments and deadlines next week and plan out when you will do your most important tasks.
Now, a quick warning here, when you do your first weekly planning session it will take you longer than thirty minutes. You’re going to be fumbling around trying to find things and thinking more about the process. Don’t give up. After a few weeks, it will become much more natural and you will think less about the process and will get faster.
Again, with the car analogy, when you first learn to drive a car, it takes you a little longer to get the car started because you have to think about the process. But after a little, while you no longer need to think, you just jump in, push start and off you go. It’s the same with weekly planning.
The next strategy I would suggest is to think in terms of outcomes not tasks. Most people focus far too much on the tasks that need to occur to complete a project, yet quite often a lot of those tasks do not need to be done. Outcome thinking is far better than process thinking and always focuses you on the right priorities.
Imagine you need a copy of a report to complete your project. So you email the person who has the report you need, but they haven’t replied for two or three days. Now ask yourself—what’s the outcome you want? Well, it isn’t to send an email, is it? No, it’s to get a copy of the report. So if you really want the report and your email was not responded to, what do you do? Call them? Drive to their office and get the report? There are far better ways to get the report faster than telling yourself—well, I sent an email. Sending the email was not your outcome. Getting the report was.
So, focus on the outcome you desire. That way you will always be able to ask better questions such as: how do I get a copy of that report this afternoon?
You also end up prioritising your action steps. Instead of just going through the motions, you taking what Would describe as direct action to achieve the result you want.
This all links back to knowing what your priority projects are. If you know what your most important projects are and you know the desired outcome, then you will know what to do, rather than getting caught up in tasks that you know will not take you closer to achieving that outcome.
You can ask simple questions such as “will doing this task take me closer to accomplishing my outcomes?” If your answer is “no” then consider what will happen if you don’t do the task. Will there be any consequences?
What do I mean by this? Well, if you get a message from your boss asking you for some details, what would the consequences be if you did not drop everything you are doing right now to answer a question you know your boss could easily find out if she opened up her laptop and looking for the answer? Likely very little.
Of course, these are your calls. When I was working in an office my priority was my clients, Not my colleagues or boss and I never got fired. I still got my bonuses each year and I increased my performance time and again because I prioritised the right thing—my clients, not impressing my boss.
Now another strategy is to be her-aware of what your areas of focus are. I’m surprised how few people know what is important to them. If you were looking at an Eisenhower Matrix, these would be your Quadrant 2 areas. The important but not urgent things.
So, things like your health, your finances, your relationships etc.
Why do people like Tim Cook, Satya Nadella and Dwayne The Rock Johnson wake up early to do their exercise? Because they know these areas are important. They know if they neglect this important area of focus their immense abilities would soon decline. And it’s the same for you. If you are not prioritising your health, and your relationships you will soon find yourself drowning in overwhelm and stress. You need to make sure your areas of focus are in balance and you are not neglecting them.
If you haven’t already done so, I urge you to download my free areas of focus workbook. In there you will find a step by step guide to establishing your own areas of focus so you can build a set of daily routines that keep these front and centre of your life. These are where your daily priorities need to be.
Once you have these three strategies in check, you will find knowing what to work on will become almost second nature. You will automatically know what something is and whether it deserves any of your time and attention.
However, there is one more area you do need to know and understand before you can go confidently into the day knowing you are working on the right things and that is your core work. What is your core work? What are you actually paid to do?
Now I’m pretty sure you are not paid to reply to email and Slack messages all day. You were employed to do something fundamentally more important than that. So what is it?
If you are in sales, you are employed to maximise your sales, not to be completing sales reports and other associated admin. Likewise, if you are a doctor, your job is to treat patients, not fill out patient forms. Always remember your core work.
I remember back in the day when I was in sales, the worst salespeople—the people who were always at the bottom of the sales league were the best at doing sales admin. Funny that. The best salespeople were hated by the admin department because their sales documentation were terrible. But the company didn’t care. They got results in the work they were employed to do—selling.
So what are you paid to do? That is where your priorities must be every day. If you are a sales manager, then your role is to serve your sales team is such a way that they maximise their sales. It is not to be constantly bothering them for updated sales reports. How does that improve your overall sales?
So there you go, Paul. I hope that has given you some food for thought and give you some ways that will help you prioritise your day more effectively.
Thank you for the question, Paul and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 176
How overwhelming is your to-do list? Do you find yourself not wanting to look at the list of things you have to do each day? It seems you’re not the only one.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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Episode 176
Hello and welcome to episode 176 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So, you have a system in place. Your areas of focus and routines are filtering into your daily list and your calendar is supporting you by managing your available time each day. That’s great. But now, you find your daily list looks horrendous. It’s huge and leaves you feeling uninspired each day. What can you do about it? Well, that’s what I will be answering this week.
Now, before I get to the answer, just a quick heads up, if you don’t know already last week, saw the launch of my 2021 edition of my Email Mastery course. Now the course is in glorious HD, it’s updated for the way we are managing emails today and I’ve added a few new lessons on processing your emails—a feature requested from the previous version.
So, if you use Gmail, Outlook or Apple Mail, this course is a must for you. This course will take the stress out of managing your mail and bring calm and focus to an area of work and life we cannot ignore.
Links to the course are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Anna. Anna asks: Hi Carl, I took your Time Sector course and really enjoyed it. I have set everything up but now I find I have so many tasks in my today view I just don’t want to go and look at it. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?
Hi Anna, thank you for your question.
Now there are a couple of reasons why your daily list is looking overwhelming and fortunately, there are ways you can manage that.
However, the first thing we do need to look at is how you are writing your tasks. There are two schools of thought here. One says you should break down your tasks into small bite-sized chunks and the other says to do the opposite. Personally, I like a hybrid of the two.
Let me give you an example. Imagine you have had a headache for a few days and you feel it’s time to see a doctor. With the first school of thought, you would write the following tasks:
Get telephone number of doctor
Call doctor and make appointment
In the second school of thought, you would just create a single task called make appointment to see the doctor.
Now, I know this is a very simple example, but it shows you what can quickly happen if you break down your tasks into smaller tasks. You end up with double the number of tasks.
Personally, I don’t think there is a right or wrong way. The best way is the way that works for you.,
But, if you want a list each day that is less overwhelming I would suggest you ere on the side of writing macro-tasks rather than micro-tasks.
For me, I prefer writing macro-tasks. My task list contains tasks such as write blog post, do expenses, clean the office, plan YouTube videos. I could break these down into write the first draft of blog post, clean the carpets in the office or prepare YouTube video plan, but I don’t need such detail. I see the task: write this weeks blog post and I know exactly what needs to happen next. When I go into the office, I can see immediately what needs cleaning, I don’t need to break it down into the different parts.
Now the other reason you may have an overwhelming daily to-do list is that you are just trying to squeeze in more than you can do. This is very common. It’s a human condition to believe we are capable of doing far more than we really are. It’s the same as our inability to estimate how long it will take to do something. We think responding to an email will take around two minutes but often it takes five or ten minutes. We are terrible at estimating how long things will take.
This is one of the reasons I developed the 2+8 Prioritisation method. This is where you select ten important tasks for the day and make these the tasks you will focus on for the day. Two of these tasks are your must-do objectives and the remaining eight are your should do tasks. By limiting yourself to ten meaningful tasks per day, you force yourself to be realistic about what you can do each day.
Now, these ten tasks do not include your daily routine tasks—these just need doing anyway, but those are not all that important and so if you were unable to do a few of them one day it would not be problem. You can always catch up with them the next day. This is why in the Time Sector system I recommend you set up your routines to recur when they need to recur. You can always reschedule these if you find yourself running out of time.
The other benefit of using the 2+8 Prioritisation Method is it forces you to prioritise your tasks. You can’t do everything all at once, so you need to make decisions about when you will do them based on their deadlines, importance and your schedule.
In today’s world with so many tantalising distractions, we need a mechanism that restricts the flow of things we want to do. Like most people, I want to do a lot each day, but I have to be realistic about what I am capable of doing. I want to spend some time with my family, I want time to exercise, read, relax and get enough sleep. If I filled my to-do list with all the things I would like to do, I would not have any time for those important personal things I want to do and would quickly find I have no time to sleep or eat. That’s why I use the 2+8 Prioritisation Method. It acts as a way to restrict the amount of things I do each day leaving me feeling refreshed and safe in the knowledge that I have completed the most important things each day.
Now there is one more area that needs attention if you want a more manageable and less overwhelming to-do list and that is make sure you are doing the daily and weekly planning sessions. Time and time again, when people reach out to me for help, the problems they are facing are caused simply because they are not doing any kind of planning.
You see if you are not planning the week, your daily planning is going to take a lot longer. If you plan the week, your daily planning will only take around ten to fifteen minutes a day and we can all find ten to fifteen minutes a day. If not you have much bigger problems in your life than simply time management.
The weekly planning session is all about scheduling your most important tasks throughout the week and finding a balance to each day. If you see you have back to back Zoom meetings on Wednesday, you can avoid scheduling bigger tasks on that day and spread your tasks out on other days. You might see you have a meeting-free day on Thursday, so you schedule more of your important tasks for Thursday. This way not only do you find balance in your week, but you also prepare yourself mentally for the day.
The daily planning session is essentially a check to make sure your plan is holding up. You will find important tasks have been collected during the week and you need to find time to add those to your list and so things may need to be moved around. That’s life. You will never be able to create a perfect plan, but having a plan does give you the peace of mind knowing that you have time to get all your important tasks done for the week. Sure, you may have to renegotiate some of these, but that’s fine. It means you are engaged with your world and moving with the flow of the week.
One final area you may want to consider is how you are using tags, labels or contexts in your task manager. If you use a task manager such as Todoist, you can add labels to your tasks. This means you can filter out tasks. So, for example, if you have a label called “communications” you can add that label to any task that requires you to communicate—email, phone call or Slack messages. Then, when you decide it’s time to deal with your Communcations for the day, you just bring up that label for the day and all you see are tasks related to communicating. Really the only tasks you need to see at that moment.
That is a leaf directly out of the Getting Things Done book, and if you are a GTDer, then that is a modern take on using contexts. We’ve come a long way since 2001 when GTD was written. We don’t have to be in the office sat in front of our work computer to reply to email today, we can reply to email anywhere from our phones. But if you want to reduce the lists you are looking at you can create contexts based on the type of work you are doing.
So there you go, Anna. Thank you for your wonderful question. I hope that has helped and will give you a few ways you can reduce your daily list to a more manageable number.
Thank you to you too for listening. Next week, this podcast will be taking a little break, but I will be back with another episode answering your questions. So, if you do have a question you feel I can answer, then you can email me; carl@carlpullein.com and I will be very happy to answer your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
How do you manage a situation where your company uses a particular set of tools that cannot be accessed outside of the office? That’s the question I am answering this week.
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Episode 175
Hello and welcome to episode 175 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
A common question I am asked is how to manage a situation where the tools you prefer using are different from the tools your company uses. Another variation on this is where your company does not allow you to access the company tools outside of your company or your company’s devices. It’s a dilemma I know many face.
So, that is what I will be answering today.
Now before we get to that question, I want to give you a heads up that my Email Mastery programme has just been updated and is now available.
This course will teach you the concept of Inbox Zero 2.0 and is designed to help you to get your email under control so you are not being constantly distracted by it and any actionable email is dealt with quickly and effectively.
The methods and workflows taught in this course will change your whole relationship with email. It will remove the overwhelm, the thousands of emails sitting in your inbox and will give you a system that requires little effort to maintain.
This system works. It has helped thousands of people get back in control of their mail and given them time back to work on more important things.
And if you join the course this week, you will be able to buy it for just $39.99 as part of the early bird discount.
Full details of the course are in the show notes. If you want to take the stress and strain of managing hundreds of emails every day, this course is for you.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Stian and Steve. The question is: Do you have any tips and tricks for managing tasks and calendars when you have to use the software your company tells you to use and that cannot be used on personal devices. This makes managing to-dos and calendars very difficult as there are at least two of each.
Thank you, Stian and Steven for your questions. Hopefully, we’ve summarised your questions accurately.
This question is about being in a situation where your company has very high standards of security on company materials, software and devices, and this is understandable given news like the recent hack on Microsoft Exchange servers.
Now before we start, the first thing I would not advise is to fight the system. The tools and devices a company uses are chosen for a specific reason. A lot of research has generally gone into this by IT departments and while there often is some bias towards the IT department’s favoured operating systems, on the whole, they get it right.
If your company uses Microsoft’s suite of tools, then those are the tools you will need to use. Sure, that can be frustrating if you prefer third-party tools, but that is the way things are and unless you can demonstrate to your IT department that your solution is better than the existing arrangement, you are going to be fighting a losing battle.
So, instead of fighting the system, take a step back and look at what tools you are permitted to use.
Think of it like the scene in the film Apollo 13 where the engineers have to build a CO2 filter using only the materials on board the Lunar Module. Essentially fitting a square peg into a round hole.
I have always said the tools you use to work your system are less important than the system itself. A great system should work with a pen and notebook. If the system you are using to manage your work cannot work with pen and paper, then your system is too complex and the problem is there, not with your tools.
All you really need is a place to collect your inputs—your tasks, project notes and other important information. A way to organise those inputs so that what needs doing comes up when you need to see it and you need to be getting on with your work.
For collecting, organising and doing you do not need anything elaborate.
Now, if your company insists you use their Microsoft suite of tools you have an amazing set of tools that are getting better and better. It might be nice to be able to choose a task manager such as Todoist, Things 3 or OmniFocus, but those options are not on the table here. The only option you have is Microsoft ToDo or Planner.
Now, I am old enough to remember a time when to read and respond to my company’s email I had to be in the office at my work station. I could not access my company’s calendar or email system outside of office hours and that was fantastic! It gave me a natural barrier between work time and personal time.
Today, most people no longer have that luxury now they have access to their email and calendars 24/7 and that means work emails arriving at 11 pm on a Saturday night—because there’s always someone who thinks sending emails at 11 pm on a Saturday night is a good idea.
If you have read the original Getting Things Done book, published in 2001, that was written at a time when most people had to be in their office to be able to see what their projects were and the tasks they had to do. You could not do that from home on a Sunday evening. To do a weekly review, the book advised you to do it on a Friday afternoon before going home. That made sense. All your work-related projects and tasks were there. It was also a nice way to finish the week.
So, if you do have to use your company’s software, take a step back and review what tools you have. Apply the Apollo 13 mindset. For most people that would be a Microsoft Outlook account that gives you email and a calendar. You will also likely have access to OneNote for note-taking—which is one of the best note-taking apps out there today anyway, and Outlook Mail is excellent—even on a Mac now.
Think about it. Many salespeople are given a company car that enables them to visit clients and prospective clients. Most company car drivers do not have much choice about which car they can have. It’s usually a medium-range Ford, Hyundai or Toyota. I’m pretty sure if we could choose any company car we’d all be choosing Porsches, Range Rovers or Bentleys. That’s not the way the world works… Sadly.
The same goes for the tools our companies use. IT would be a nightmare for companies if every employee used different tools to get their work done. We saw this being played out a year ago when there were concerns about the security of Zoom. In the end, IT departments standardised which video conferencing tools employees were allowed to use. Some went with Zoom after they beefed up their security. Others went with Microsoft Teams.
So, if we can’t change the tools we have to use at work, what can we do to mitigate this? The first thing I would do is to find out all the various inboxes I have where work is coming in. There will be your email inbox, possibly your Slack or Microsoft Teams inbox, plus maybe a SaleForce inbox. Knowing where your work is coming from is the number one priority.
Next, create a start of day checklist that includes checking all these inboxes and task lists for new work coming in. Then copy and paste your tasks for the day into one list. Now that might be a third party task manager if you are allowed to do that, or just a simple list in your company approved notes app. This list will form part of your daily task list. All you need is a simple list of tasks you need to complete that day.
Another thing worth investigating is whether you can subscribe to your work calendar. I don’t usually advise people to put their personal events on their work calendar—who knows who has access to that. But you may find it is possible to subscribe to your work calendar and have that coming into your preferred calendar of choice be that a Google or Apple calendar.
In my experience, having two different calendar apps causes conflicts with your time. You will likely double book yourself one day. If you can’t subscribe to your work calendar, then try it the other way round and subscribe to your personal calendar—just make sure nobody else can see it.
The reality is there are no magic bullets that will miraculously allow your work and personal systems to converge. When you find yourself in a situation where your company essentially locks down their information, the only way you will find a solution is within your work permitted tools.
Should you run two systems? Well, it’s not impossible but it’s not ideal either. But maybe that is the only solution you have.
However, no matter how security sensitive your company is, they are not going to stop you from writing down things like “call Charles Grey about the proposal” or “work on Project X presentation” into a third party application. No nefarious corporate spy is likely to figure out what those simple tasks mean. You can use your phone to collect these tasks into your preferred app.
But that said, the simplest way to manage this is to just use the company-approved apps. You may not likely them, but if they show you a list of tasks you need to complete each day and you have a notes app where you can keep your notes and project support materials for your projects then you have a system. Maybe a system not using your preferred tools, but at least you have a system.
SO, the best advice I can give you if you are in a situation where your company is running multiple tools is to not fight your IT department. By all means, reach out to them to see if you can use your own apps, but you get a firm no, then look at what is available and set up your system within those tools.
Make it a routine start of day task to collect all your work tasks from the various inputs your company has into one consolidated list and work from that list each day.
One final tip I may suggest that has worked for some people in the past is to use a task manager that will email you a list of your tasks each morning. Todoist does this, for example, and you can set it so it emails you at 5 am in the morning. Then when you get to work, all you need do is print off that list, and use it as not only your task list for the day but also as a collection system. You can write down new tasks onto that paper and when you get home at the end of the enter the new tasks and check off the tasks you did. You can do that as part of your daily planning session.
I hope that has answered your question, Stian and Steve, Thank you for the question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week on the Working With Podcast I am delighted to have Davis Knight of DIABETICSavvy talking about how a Type 2 Diabetes diagnosis in 2018 changed his life and helped him to become better organised and more productive.
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This week, how do you turn a list of over 200 tasks into a manageable list of daily actionable tasks.
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Script
Episode 173
Hello and welcome to episode 173 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
For those of you familiar with Getting Things Done, you will have come across the term “mind sweep”. A mind sweep is where you sit down with an empty piece of paper or blank screen and just empty your head of everything that’s on your mind. These could be things you need to do, ideas or pretty much anything on your mind. You get everything out of your head and into an external source.
Once you have done that you then go through your list and decide what the ‘next action’ for each item is
Done correctly, this list could soon build up in one very large list with hundreds of tasks and ideas on it. The great thing about a mind sweep is when finished you feel a huge sense of mental relief. Your brain is no longer trying to hold on to things and you realise that many of the things you were afraid of are not really that difficult to resolve.
However, one problem many people find is once you have this long list, how do you turn them into actionable tasks that you can complete and that’s what I will be looking into this week.
Now, before we get to the question, for those of you interested in my online courses, I have recently updated my Productivity Bundle. This bundle now includes Your Digital Life 3.0, The Time Sector System and Productivity Mastermind courses. This bundle gives you access to five courses because Your Digital Life includes my Email Mastery and Ultimate Goal Planning courses for free.
The bundle is priced at $175.00 which saves you over $100 if you were to buy all five courses separately.
So if you are ready to get yourself organised, build a system that works for you so you can live a more balanced life without having to worry about work and anything else you may be missing, then this bundle of courses will set you on your way.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Bret. Bret asks: Hi Carl, I have a long list of tasks from various mind-sweeps that I am having difficulty managing. How best can I structure this list so that (a) I don't miss scheduling anything important for the next 1-5 days and (b) I don't have to look through a list of 300 plus items every couple of days when making my most important tasks list?
Hi Bret, thank you for your question.
Firstly, it’s great that you have done a mind sweep, these are great ways to get everything on your mind off your mind. Doing a mind sweep does help to free up some cognitive space so you can relax and be more creative.
That said, mind sweeps can also create their own problems. Done correctly, a mind sweep will produce a lot of tasks and you need somewhere to put these tasks. Most people tend to put these into their task manager’s inbox and then process them through their various projects or time sectors. The problem here is that this over inflates your task manager developing overwhelm and a lot of redundant tasks that very quickly disappear into your system never to be seen again or pop up again six months later and you cannot remember why you ever put them into your system in the first place.
The first thing we need to recognise is we cannot do everything all at once. There’s a limited number of hours we have each day and each week. Whatever we put on our master task list needs time allocating to it. You will also find that mind sweeps produce a lot of ‘would like to do one-day’ tasks that really should not be in your task manager.
Would like to do one day tasks should go into your notes app on a note called “would like to do one day” or if you are following GTD, a “someday / maybe” list. You really do not want these low priority tasks on your task manager.
One of the ways to keep a task manager relevant and effective is to keep it clean and tight. By that I mean you only have clearly defined tasks in there that you know must be done at some point. You do not want your ‘would like to do if the circumstances are right’ tasks in there because these are not clearly defined. “Would like to do someday” is not a clear definition. I would like to see the films North by North West and Goldfinger in a cinema on a big screen one day, but how and when I have no idea so these are not clearly defined. Instead, they would be better put on a bucket or wish list.
Another type of task you want to be careful of is the “clean out the garage” type task. This type of task is deceptive because on the surface “clean out the garage” sounds defined. You have a garage, there’s a lot of stuff in there that needs cleaning up or throwing out and you want to do it.
The trouble with this type of task is not the what, but the when and how. If your garage needs cleaning out it likely means you have a lot of stuff that a few garbage sacks will not do. You probably need to hire a skip or truck to take what you throw away to the tip. It’s also unlikely to be a task that will take you a few hours. You likely have to dedicate a few days to do it and when that happens there are always other tasks that will become more ‘urgent’ on the day you decide to start doing it.
With this type of task, unless you are ready to set a date for doing it, you are best keeping it well away from your task manager until you are ready to make that decision.
How many times I’ve seen “clean out the garage” on someone’s list and discover that task has been on a list for over a year is incredible. Seriously, keep it off your task list until you are willing to block out two to three days on your calendar for completing this task.
So how do you make sure those important tasks get on to your task list?
This is why doing a weekly planning session is crucial if you want to be on top of your life. The weekly planning session is about making a decision about what is important enough to get onto your list of tasks for the week. And I really do mean that. The question to ask is: What is important enough to get onto my list for the week?
Your time is valuable—very valuable and you want to be selective about what gets on your task list. Throwing random unimportant tasks onto your task list for the week is not a good strategy. You start with your most important tasks for the week. These are the foundation for your week. I like to call these my objectives for the week. Once these are on if I feel there is space for some less important tasks I will put the next level tasks on my list.
By their very nature, less important tasks are not urgent, they are those nice to be able to do tasks, so it’s not the end of the world if you cannot get to them.
Once you have your objectives on your list for the week, you no longer need to be going back to a huge list of tasks. You’ve already made the decision on what is important this week and that’s where you need to be focused.
You see the problem you will have if you keep going back into a master task list every few days is you will lose focus on what’s important that week. That list will become a distraction and you will be tempted to keep adding to your tasks for the week. Remember, if you have done a weekly planning session you have already decided what’s important for the week. You don’t want to be allowing yourself to be distracted by more tasks. You can review your master list in your next weekly planning session and decide then what you want to work on next.
Remember, no week will be static. Once the week gets underway you will be collecting more tasks some of which will be urgent and need attention now. So while you may feel there is room for more tasks, the reality is there won’t be. The less is more principle applies when you do your weekly planning session. The less you put on your task list for the week the more you will get out of the week. You will be more focused on what you have decided to do for the week and you will have the time to do your tasks to the best of your abilities.
It also means you will be less stressed and overwhelmed because you will know that what you have on your list is important, and doable. And that makes your list more meaningful and inspiring.
I can’t stress enough how important it is to be doing a weekly planning session every week. It’s very hard to predict what you will be doing much further out than a week. Meetings you will have in ten days time are likely not have been scheduled yet. You could get a mind-numbing toothache and need to visit the dentist, or a project on track today could turn south in six days time.
Your weekly planning session is where you can review your mind sweep list select important tasks to add to your task list for the week and then only focus on those tasks over the next seven days. You will get a lot more done that way and you will stay much more focused.
I hope that has helped, Bret. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to you for listening. Remember, if you have a question you want answering, all you need do is email me—carl@carlpullein.com and I will be happy to answer your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 172
This week, I have a question about creating balance in your life, something I have been writing quite a lot about this week.
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The 2021 Task Management & Time blocking Summit
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Script
Episode 172
Hello and welcome to episode 172 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So what do we mean when we talk about a balanced life? I think this will mean something different to all of us. For me, it’s having sufficient time to do my work, spend quality time with my wife and have time for exercise and working on myself. For others, it might be being able to hang out with friends, coach the local rugby team or playing the piano. A balanced life is all about having the time to do what you want to do each day, week and month.
Now, before we get to the question, I would like to let you all know about the 2021 Task Management and Time Blocking Summit. It’s a free summit with some amazing speakers all about…well, time management and time blocking.
The event takes place from Thursday 4th March and runs through to Saturday 6th.
It’s a FREE event and all you need do is register. I’ve put the registration details in the show notes. There’s a lot you can learn here and well worth joining. Oh, and I have a session on managing your to-do list.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Stuart. Stuart asks, Hi Carl, I have been using a To-do list for years, but what I noticed is most of my tasks each day seem to be all about work. I rarely have time for doing any personal tasks so I don’t put them on my list anymore. It makes me feel that my life is just work and more work. Is there a way to balance out a to-do list?
Hi Stuart. Thank you for your question.
I think this problem has come about because most books and articles about time management and productivity frequently have a business and work slant. And, let’s be honest here, work does form a large part of our lives between a certain age. It’s difficult to avoid it.
There are few people left who have what used to be called a private or independent income. And we need to earn an income to be able to put food on our tables, be able to enjoy going out and meeting friends and travelling.
However, life should never be all about your work. There does need to be some balance. But, how do you find balance if your work is taking up all your daylight hours and your thoughts when you finally get home?
Well, the first thing is to stop allowing your to-do list to control your day. A to-do list is just a list of things you want to or need to do. It should never be used to determine how you spend the day.
The tool you need to bring balance to your life is your calendar. Your calendar will never lie to you because we only get 24 hours a day and that’s it. Whatever is on our to-do list is irrelevant if you don’t have time to do it. You cannot magically make more time.
The other thing about your calendar is it will show you where you are spending most of your time. Sure, Monday to Friday will be dominated by your work. Most of us are contracted to work a certain number of hours each week. The average being 40. That could change in the near future with the shift away from working in an office and working more from home, but right now that’s the standard.
But it is only 40 hours. There are 168 hours in a week, so those 40 hours is 24% of your week. What are you doing with the other 76%? That’s 128 hours you get for things other than work.
I know, we have to sleep and eat, but it still leaves us quite a lot of time. What are you doing with that time? That’s where you want to be starting. With that question.
This is why your calendar will help you. You will see all that blank space on your calendar once your work is in.
So, what would you like to do in that free time? For me, I want an hour a day for exercise. So I block that off on my calendar. I also like thirty minutes for reading. Although I don’t put reading time on my calendar, I just go to bed around thirty minutes early so I can read before going to sleep.
I also like an hour in the morning for writing my journal and doing my morning routines. So, between 7 and 8 AM I have a time block on my calendar for morning routines.
You don’t need to make big changes to begin feeling more balanced. Making time for yourself each day for important things like exercise, journaling and meditation can do wonders for your mental wellbeing.
I also make it a point to have lunch with my wife every day and recently we’ve added a family walk with our beloved dog every morning.
But if you add up all the time I have for my non-work activities, it’s about three to four hours a day and those three to four hours take care of so many important areas of life—my mental and physical health and my family relationships.
So in any given day, I work for around ten hours and I spend three to four hours on my personal activities. So, let’s say 14 hours a day. Now I don’t need ten hours for sleeping and eating. I like six hours of sleep, so what do I do with the remaining four hours? I don’t know. They just disappear.
If you do your own analysis, you will like to find you have more time than you think.
What you will notice is you will have some lost time each day. The question is what are you doing with that time each day? Most people will tag on an extra hour or two of work, or slump down on the sofa mindlessly watching TV, or the scourge of modern society, doom scrolling through news and social media. We don’t schedule this time, it just gets lost and it can be hard to figure out what we did.
Now, you don’t have to do anything with this time. If you are happy letting it go, and you feel your life is pretty balanced, then let it go.
But, and I suspect you fall into this category, Stuart, if we are feeling our life is made up only of work and not much else we need to reclaim this lost time for the things we want to do. That’s why your calendar will help you.
Start by scheduling the things you want to do. Work takes care of itself. It’s fixed. Monday to Friday 9 till 5—or whatever your working hours are—so the areas you want to be scheduling are the times in between.
Start with your morning routine. Even if you don’t have a morning routine right now, make sure you wake up at least an hour before you need to do anything. This hour is important because this hour is for you. Nobody else. This is for you to do whatever you want. You could use it for exercise, for reading the news, meditating, learning something, writing a journal. This is your time and you must protect it.
I have a rule. If I have to start my day at a given time I will wake up precisely one hour before. I often have coaching calls at 7 AM, so I wake up at 6 AM on the days I have calls at 7 AM, even though this is an hour before I usually wake up. A few weeks ago I did a training session for a company at 4:30 AM my time. I woke up at 3:30 AM so I still had my hour of “me time” before I started the day.
Being able to start your day your way sets you up for a great day and you will feel a lot happier about your day. Think back to the last time you overslept and had to rush to get out of bed. How did you feel all day? Rushed, yes? It’s not a good way to start the day feeling rushed you will always feel behind and trying to catch up.
Now, look at your evening time. What do you generally do? Are you exhausted? Do you just slump in front of your TV? Or, do you spend your time replying to emails and other work-related communications? Whenever you do this, you are exercising a choice. Nobody’s forcing you to respond to your work emails late at night or to slump in front of the TV.
Whatever you want to accomplish and do after work is a good time to do it.
A lot of our problems with time comes about because of habits we have developed over a number of years. It gets to a point where we do not think about it. We just do it. Slumping in front of the TV, mindlessly scrolling through our phone while watching TV with our partner, staying in bed until the very last minute because we think the extra twenty minutes of sleep will make us feel less tired in the day.
As these are habits developed we can change them. We can wake up an hour before we need to leave the house or start work. We can pull out the exercise bike and do twenty minutes of cycling before we sit down to dinner and we can read a book for thirty minutes after dinner. We can make different choices and develop different habits at any time. We just have to choose.
So, don’t focus on your to-do list Stuart. Use your calendar to build some balance into your life. Use your to-do list to tell you what needs doing—task wise, but for the activities you do, use your calendar.
Let me give you an example. I find people who have “exercise” on their to-do list often ignore it. If they move “exercise” to their calendar they are more likely to do it. Why? Because when it’s on your calendar you lose the excuse you don’t have time. You do have time, it’s right there in front of your eyes.
Finally, you need to adopt a rule: What goes on your calendar gets done. Your to-do list is negotiable. Your calendar is not. If it’s on your calendar you do it.
Of course, you can reschedule things if you have to. Let’s say a meeting overruns so you find you have to push back a few other events on your calendar. That’s okay. Sometimes that’s going to happen. But for the most part, once something is on your calendar for the day, it gets done.
I hope that has helped a little, Stuart. Thank you for your question.
It just remains for me now t wish you all a very very productive week.
On the podcast this week I answer a question about to-do lists and why they don’t always work.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Script
Episode 171
Hello and welcome to episode 171 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
You would think that the simple act of writing down everything you have to do onto a coherent list would be simple and easy to do. It makes sense, get everything out of your head and onto a piece of paper or into a digital task list so you don’t forget what needs doing.
Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as that. Problems start because of the kind of things we put on our todo lists and the kind of things we omit from the list. We then end up focusing all our time and attention on the wrong things leaving the more important things left off and neglected.
This week, it’s all about making sure you have the right things on your list every day.
Don’t forget, if you do have a question you would like answering on this podcast, all you have to do is email me: carl@carlpullein.com and I will be happy to answer the question for you.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jen. Jen asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been making to-do lists for years but have never felt they help. When the list gets too long I just ignore it because it is so overwhelming, and when I do use the list all I end up doing is doing more work. It leaves me with no time to rest or relax or do anything else but work. Is there a correct way to write a to-do list that I am missing?
Hi Jen, thank you for your question.
You are right is asking this question Jen, because there is a misconception about to-do lists that many people have and that is if you write everything down that needs doing you are help-way to becoming organised. You are not.
You see, when we think of to-do lists, most people think they are the realm of your work only and any personal tasks are just an afterthought. So you will often find twenty or thirty tasks are all related to your work—write this report, prepare that presentation or call this client—and then two or three tasks related to your home life—do laundry, clean up the living room or take the trash out tonight.
Now it may well be true these tasks need doing, but they are superficial. None of these improve your life in anyway. They don’t improve you as a person, they don’t move your goals and aspirations forward and while you might get credit for doing a good presentation, that’s all you get—credit. You rarely learn anything that improves your life.
I’ve had an interest in reading and learning about successful people since I was around eleven years old. I’ve been fascinated by what makes one person massively successful and another a failure. I don’t mean that in a judgmental way, I mean that in the way a highly talented, initially successful person, loses it all and never comes back. I can spend hours reading articles and books and watching documentaries about people.
The thing about highly accomplished people is they don’t use to-do lists. Well, not in the way most people use them. And this is the same for seemingly very productive people too. They just don’t use a to-do list in the same way most people do.
So what is this secret?
Well it starts with knowing what is important to you. You see, if you want to become more accomplished in the things that you want to be more accomplished, then the majority of what goes on your to-do list must be the things that will move you forward on those things.
If these are not on your to-do list you will never accomplish them. Period. Sure, you will accomplish getting your laundry done and your living room cleaned up and if that is your life’s goal then well done, you’ve found the secret to creating a meaningful to-do list.
But let’s be honest here, I’m sure getting your laundry done and your living room cleaned is not your life’s mission.
So what is it you want to accomplish? That’s not an easy question to answer because there is so much choice in the world today.
If we go back two-hundred years when most of us lived an agrarian life, there was always a purpose. Prepare the land for the seed, sow the seed, tend to the crops during the summer and harvest in the autumn. The goal was to maximise the yield of our crops. If we didn’t there would not be enough food for our family to eat during the winter months. Our life’s purpose was to ensure there was enough food for our families.
We did not waste time repairing walls, painting our house or other cosmetic tasks in the spring, summer or autumn—if these things needed doing we did them in the winter months. During the growing and harvesting seasons, our focus was on making sure we maximised the yield of our crops. It was a life or death decision.
Today, when you look at most people’s to-do list, very few of those tasks involve maximising the yield of anything. Most tasks are cosmetic and move very little forward.
This problem is because with so much choice about what we can do, we end up dabbling at many things and mastering nothing, but if you want to be accomplished, if you want success at anything you have to stop dabbling and start focusing on mastering.
And what does that mean?
Well, you need to know exactly what it is you want to accomplish. If you don’t know what you want, how will you ever know you are on the right path towards achieving it.
How many of you are mothers and fathers? I am sure you want to be a great parent—being a parent is certainly not something you want to be dabbling at. But let me ask you this: how many of you have tasks related to being a great parent on your to-do list?
Surely, if being a great parent is important, you want to be spending time each day on nurturing that, not panicking about whether you completed last month’s sales figures for your boss. If you are panicking about these types of tasks, then your to-do list is not working for you. It’s working for your boss (or company)
So what can you do to make your to-do list more effective and more in tune with your needs and not the needs of others?
Well, start with that question: What do you want? Now there are eight basic areas in everyones’s life that needs attention. These are:
- Family and relationships
- Personal finances
- Career and business
- Health and fitness
- Personal development
- Life experiences and lifestyle
- Spirituality
- Life’s purpose
Almost everything you want out of life will come from these eight areas. We all want great relationships with our family and friends, we want a successful career or business. We want to be fit and healthy, have continuous personal development, a solid financial base, enjoy life and live in the moment and not the past.
When you have these in balance you will feel happier, more fulfilled and relaxed about your life.
If you put all your time and effort into your work, you will feel the imbalance and it will be like you are just a cog a the wheel. You won’t feel happy, fulfilled or even enjoy life.
And that is why most to-do lists do not work. They are too focused on your work and not on your life. You need to switch it round. Your to-do list needs to be focused on your life, not just your work.
How do you do that?
Let say you want to become an author. It’s been a dream of yours since you were in middle school but you have never done anything about it. Where do you start?
You start by writing a book. That’s the only way you will become an author. What do you need to do to write a book. You need to write. So, you need to make sure you have a task on your to-do list called “write book” or “continue writing book” and that task needs to come up on your to-do list three to four times a week. You also need to find time for writing on your calendar each week. Set aside a block of time however frequently you want it to be and make sure that is what you do at the appointed hour.
Or it could be you want a great family relationship, then you need to make sure you have tasks on your to-do list that support that endeavour. Tasks like “arrange date night with my partner”, “decide where to take the kids this weekend”. The tasks won’t happen by themselves. You need to initiate them and they need to be priorities.
The next thing you need to do is to understand the concept of “when at work do your work. When at play do your play and never mix the two”.
What this means is you have time each week for when you are at work. Traditionally this would be Monday to Friday 9 til’ 5. So between these hours, that is exactly what you do. You do your work. You don’t socialise, do online shopping or doom scroll through your news or social media feeds. You do your work.
Then you have ‘play time’ or time when you are not working. During these periods you work on your other tasks—developing your relationships, working on your health and fitness and hobbies. You work on the things that are important to you.
Now most modern digital to-do lists will allow you to tag or flag your tasks. So all you need do is flag or tag tasks related to your work and when at work those are the only tasks you see. You work on these. When you finish work, you close your work tasks and you pull up the list of non-work tasks and you work on those.
When you build this balance into your to-do list, you know you are working on your life and not just your work. Work is just one part of a life. It’s important, but it is not all important to the exclusion of living your life. You life needs to be nourished, developed and lived
Most people feel unfulfilled, stressed out and overwhelmed because their to-do list promotes this imbalance. It might help your work, but it destroys your life and no work is that important.
It also goes to heart of why your to-do lists don’t feel like they are working Jen, they don’t work because they are imbalanced and no motivating you.
The only way to change that is to understand that work is just one part of your life. You need to bring in all parts of your life and make sure you are working on these consistently.
Finally, back to something I eluded to earlier. Mastery. To become a master at anything means you work on developing your skills consistently. Let’s take the example of becoming an author. The only way you will master writing is to write. Make mistakes, learn from those mistakes and write some more. You need to be doing this consistently. I mentioned Ian Fleming before—Ian Fleming created James Bond and he had a process for writing his books.
Between March and December he would research and practice writing—he would collect product names, research them, write about them in a little notebook, experimenting with different prose styles and word combinations. Then between January and March each year he would go to his bungalow in Jamaica, and each morning write between 9 AM and 12.
This consistency produced a book a year for twelve years between 1952 and 1964, when he passed away. None of these books wrote themselves. Ian Fleming had to have the tasks—continue researching book and continue writing book on his task list.
What was the driving force behind this activity? Ian Fleming knew what he wanted. His goal was simply to write "the spy story to end all spy stories" and that is what he did every year for twelve years. He executed on his goal and the tasks related to that goal were on his task list.
There you go, Jen. Hopefully that has helped. Don’t use your to-do list for your work tasks exclusively. That will only create an imbalance in your life and leave you feeling stressed out and unhappy. Instead make sure the things you want do and accomplish are prioritised on your list every day.
Thank you for the question and thank you, again to you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, the question is all about how to achieve your goals when you have failed miserably before.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Ultimate Productivity Bundle (Lunar New Year Offer)
Todoist Office Hours Goal Planning and Tracking Episode
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
More about the Time Sector System
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 170
Hello and welcome to episode 170 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
We have reached that time of year where over 80% of the goals set on January 1st have been dropped. Where resolutions, goals and new good habits are just a distant idea and where old habits and practices have returned.
That’s a terrible statistic—80% of all new year goals and resolutions fail by the first week of February. Yet it really does not have to be that way. Achieving a goal is possible for everyone if it is approached in the right way. And how to do that is what I will be answering this week.
Now before we get to the question and answer, I would just like to let you know that we have been celebrating the Lunar New Year here in Korea over the weekend and to celebrate the new year, I have put together a bundle of my finest courses to help you go from where you are today to where you want to be in the future.
This bundle includes the Time Sector System, my Productivity Masterclass AND Your Digital Life 3.0. With these three courses, you will have everything you need to create your own time management and productivity system, you will learn the skills to develop an organisation system that makes finding your files and notes quick and easy and you will learn a way of managing your email that takes the stress and overwhelm out of dealing with a massive amount of email.
Plus, as part of Your Digital Life 3.0, you also get free access to my Ultimate Goal Planning course—so a course relevant to today’s question.
Normally, if you buy all three of these courses it would cost you over $180, but for the Lunar New Year, you can pick up this bundle for just $99.00.
You will have to hurry, as this bundle will be ending on Wednesday 17th Feb. Full details on how to pick up this bundle can be found in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question
This week’s question comes from Ashley. Ashley asks, Hi Carl, I’ve heard you speak about goals and goals planning before and wondered if you have any tips for someone who fails every time they set a goal. I’ve failed so many times now I just laugh at myself every time I think about setting a goal. Is there anything I can do that would help me to set and achieve goals?
Hi Ashley, thank you for your question.
Now, this is a timely question because last week I did a talk for Todoist’s Office Hours series where we talked about goal setting and tracking using Todoist and as I was preparing for that talk, I went through the three main components and tried to think of better ways to explain why each part is important.
So, let’s start there.
There are three parts to achieving a goal: What, why and how.
This translates to what do you want, why do you want it and how will you do it.
Now you need to be very clear about what it is you want. It’s no good saying “I want to lose weight” or “I want to earn more money” while you might think these are clear they do not specify exactly what you want. How much weight do you want to lose and by when? How much more money do you want to earn and by when? Unless you know this, then if you skip dinner tonight and weigh yourself tomorrow you will likely to have achieved your goal. Or your boss could say, okay I’ll give you an extra $5.00 per month—probably not what you had in mind.
So get very specific about what it is you want:
I want to lose ten pounds by the end of March. I want to earn an extra $1,000 per month by July.
What do you want and by when do you want to have achieved it?
That’s fairly straight forward.
Now the mistake most people make is they decide what they want then move straight to how they are going to do it.
Now, let’s look at why this is a problem. Everyone knows how to lose weight. It’s a very simple formula: eat less, move more. Now we could argue about the semantics and talk about the types of foods you should be eating, but even if you are eating the healthiest foods, if the calories going in are higher than the calories coming out, you will still gain weight.
No matter what goal you want to achieve, all you need do is spend a little time on Google and you will find all you need to know about how to achieve it. If you want to become an astronaut and spend some time on the International Space Station and do a spacewalk, Google it and you will find a road map explaining everything you need to know and do to become an astronaut.
The difficulty in achieving your goals is never about the how. How to do it will be well documented. How to save money, how to earn more money, how to get your dream job, how to become a doctor. Whatever your goal is the how to do it, will never be a problem.
So, if you know what you want and you know—or can at least find out—how to do it, then why do so many people fail at achieving their goals?
It’s because their reasons for achieving those goals are not powerful enough.
The key part to achieving your goals, Ashley, is in your reasons for wanting to achieve your goals.
How to lose weight is easy. If you eat less and move more you will lose weight. However, there is one factor that will always get in the way. Hunger. When you reduce your calories sufficiently to lose weight your body will tell you it does not like eating less food and so will produce a chemical response in your brain to tell you you are hungry and you must eat something right now.
However, it is unlikely you will feel hungry first thing in the morning when your willpower it at it’s highest, you are more likely to feel hungry later in the day when your willpower is at it’s lowest.
This means your reasons for wanting to lose weight need to be stronger than your body’s reason for not wanting to feel hungry.
So, if you have decided you want to lose weight, then why? Why do you want to lose weight? It is for cosmetic reasons—you want to look good? Is it for health reasons—you don’t want to develop diabetes? Why do you want to lose weight?
Likewise with earning more money, or complete a masters’ degree or getting a promotion at work. Why do you want to do these things?
When your reasons for wanting something are strong enough, your motivation for sticking to your plan—the how—will be stronger than the forces pulling on you to stop making these changes.
You see our minds and bodies do not like change. We love habits. We love routines. It’s why we feel tired around the same time each day and why, if you allowed it, we would wake up quite naturally without an alarm clock. It’s why, weirdly, the amount of money we earn is usually roughly the same as the amount of money our friends earn. We love stasis. We hate change.
But, if you really want to achieve your goals you will have to change. You will have to go through a period of discomfort where your mind and body is fighting you to get back to it’s comfort zone.
You know the most dangerous place anyone can be is when they are earning enough money to feel comfortable. To be able to drive a reasonably nice car, to live in a nice house in a nice neighbourhood. To have a comfortable job with a stable company. That is a very dangerous place to be because the fear of losing any of that will always be stronger than the desire to improve and change. So changing anything will scare you. The problem is change is inevitable.
There will come a time when your company wants to make changes, you may perhaps reach an age where you will not be able to progress further in your company and younger colleagues begin to pass you on the promotion chain and your worst fears will become a reality and begin to live a life of fear, dread and anxiety.
So, for you to begin achieving your goals you need to reset your comfort zone. You need to become uncomfortable being where you are today. You need to be uncomfortable weighing what you weight today. You need to be uncomfortable earning what you are earning today and you need to be uncomfortable not knowing what you need to know to perform at your best.
So how do you find strong reasons for wanting a goal?
Well, in my experience, the stronger the emotional attachment to your reason the more likely you will succeed. I’m reminded of the story of a successful businessman who had everything he wanted. A great job, a wonderful family, a nice car and house etc.
He was also a very heavy smoker. Smoking was his pleasure. He would sit down in his favourite armchair and smoke every evening. His doctor, his wife and friends all urged him to stop smoking but he refused, telling them smoking was his one pleasure in life.
Then one day his five-year-old daughter came into his room crying. She was saying “Daddy, I don’t want you to die” He calmly said, “I’m not going to die honey”.
“No Daddy, you are going to die” she replied pointing to his cigarette.
At that moment, he stopped. He realised he wanted to be there to walk his daughter down the aisle on her wedding day and to play with his future grandchildren. At that moment, he got a very powerful reason for quitting smoking. From the very next day, this guy never smoked a cigarette again. And, yes he did walk his daughter down the aisle and got to play with his grandchildren.
You see, when you make you reasons for wanting to achieve your goal incredibly powerful by making them emotional, you will succeed no matter how hard it is because you will have a reservoir of motivation for those days when things are very tough.
So, make what you want clear. Be very specific about what it is you want. Make your why a powerful, emotional reason for wanting to achieve this goal and change your habits and behaviours so they fall in line with your desired outcome.
However, there is another level to consistently achieving your goals. That level is who do you want to become? How do you want to live your life? What do you want to be doing in ten or twenty years time? What kind of lifestyle do you want to live? What do you want for your family and friends?
This is what I call your North Star. Your North Star is your journey. It takes you in the direction you want to live your life. If you have a, as Tony Robbins calls it: “A compelling vision of how you want to live your life” then your goals, your habits and your daily activities will follow suit.
When your goals align with your long-term vision of the life you want to lead, you will find achieving your goals becomes easy because as you journey towards building the life you want, all you will be doing is making tiny adjustments to the way you live your life today. It’s why you will often hear: “most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade”
When you are working towards a longer-term vision the changes you need to make are much more manageable.
I’m sure many of you have heard of the book called “The Secret”. The book’s premise is that if you want it, if you desire it and if you can imagine having it, then you can have it. It’s as the Bible says “ask and you will receive”. Well, it turns out there is some truth to this.
If we ask questions like “why can’t I lose weight?” Your brain will answer that question. It will give you all the reasons why you cannot lose weight. Same for “why do I never get promoted?” And “Why can’t I find the love of my life?” That’s exactly what you will get—reasons why you cannot do something.
Change the question and you will get different answers. Instead of asking why you cannot lose weight, ask “what do I have to do to lose ten pounds?” “What skills do I need to learn to get promoted?” “Who do I need to talk to to find the love of my life?”
These questions will give you a list of all the things you can do to achieve your desired outcome.
So there you go, Ashley. It’s not that you cannot achieve your goals, you can achieve your goals, but you need to begin focusing on your why. Why do you want to achieve these goals? How will being successful with your goals align with your future vision? Get this part of the equation right and you will no longer have any difficulties achieving your goals.
Thank you for your question, Ashley, and thank you to you for listening. Don’t forget to check out my Lunar New Year bundle. There is something in there for everyone.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, in a slight change from the usual format, I’m going to give you my top three tips for becoming better organised and more productivity in your everyday life.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Download the FREE Areas of Focus Workbook
More about the Time Sector System
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 169
Hello and welcome to episode 169 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
For those of you who don’t know, I help people develop strategies to overcome tremendously overwhelming workloads, whether that is email, client requests, project support and a workplace that does not support a productive environment and we work on strategies to develop personal goals and the more important areas of focus such as your health and wellbeing, your relationships—particularly your family relationships and your financial future.
One of the benefits of working with so many people in this way is I get to see where most people struggle with their productivity, time management and the overall balance in life.
It’s hard. The world we live in today expects us to know everything that is going on around us, to form an opinion about those events and to choose sides. We also have increasingly heavy workloads that the technology available to us today is not helping. Instead, it is creating more and more work.
Three years ago, the main form of business communication was email and the telephone. Today, it’s email, telephone AND Slack. What's App, Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Instead of having one or two channels of communication to monitor each day, we now have multiple channels to stay on top of.
Is it any wonder we feel overwhelmed and stressed out?
So, in this week’s episode, I want to share with you a number of tips and strategies that have worked for me and many of my coaching clients—strategies that have helped to bring calm and control to our lives while the world around us becomes noisier and busier as each day passes.
First up
Email. Now, when we are dealing with email there are two parts to the process. Processing and responding. You want to be very clear about the differences between these two parts.
Processing is about making a decision about what an email is and what you need to do about it and there are only four things you can do with an email. Reply, forward, archive or delete. That’s it. There are no grey areas here. An email requires one of these four things.
Responding is just one action—you reply to the email.
Trouble starts when you try and do both at the same time. For instance, when you open up your inbox and you see thirty emails in there if you start at the top and try and reply to those emails that require a reply, forward emails that need forwarding (with a cover note explaining why you forwarded the email) and delete and archive the rest, even with the best will in the world you are likely to only manage to clear ten to fifteen emails from your inbox in thirty minutes. You then have to stop and go to a meeting.
When you return from the meeting you now have another thirty emails in your inbox. So that’s now forty-five unprocessed emails to deal with. This number will keep creeping up until eventually you give up and start to cherry-pick your email looking for urgent and emails from important people such as your boss or clients. And after a few weeks you end up with thousands of unprocessed emails in your inbox and now you have no idea whether anything in there is important or not.
Instead, you must separate processing from doing. Processing only requires you to make a decision about what something is. So you go through your inbox and you clear your email. Emails that require action from you goes into an Action folder. I recommend you name this folder “Action This Day” because it serves as a reminder to you to deal with it today. Emails you want to keep for future reference gets archived (you don’t need complex folder structures today because all popular email clients have fantastic search) and any emails you don’t need gets deleted.
In tests with myself and many of my clients, processing in this way can clear an inbox of 75 emails in around 15 minutes.
That now leaves you with fifteen minutes to start working on your Action This Day folder.
One more tip here, reverse the order you have in your Action This Day folder so that the oldest email is at the top. This way you don’t have to go looking through your folder, you just start at the top and respond to as many as you can before you need to attend you next meeting or whatever else you need to do.
Next tip is to schedule communication time each day. Because we now have multiple sources of communication from emails, Slack or Twist, Teams and messaging services, most of us need time each day to respond to those messages.
Now time does not miraculously appear. You need to create it. Given that we all get the same amount of time each day—24 hours—and we don’t want to be spending all 24 hours doing our work, we need to schedule time for dealing with our communications.
So, choose a time in the day—usually sometime in the afternoon is best—and dedicate it to responding to your messages and emails.
I, for example, spend about an hour each day on my communications between 4pm and 5pm. This hour is blocked on my calendar each day and so I know when it gets to 4pm I stop what I am doing and go through my Action This Day folder and clear as many messages as I can. I use Twist rather than Slack and Twist emails me when I have a message so I know whether I need to go and respond or not. Likewise, I get a lot of comments on my YouTube videos and again, notification of these comments come into my email so I know if anything needs replying to.
I try where possible to get all these messages into my email so I have a single place from which to launch my replies.
Just spending one hour a day on my communications keeps me on top of everything. I might not be able to get to clear my Action folder each day, but as I start with the oldest first, I know nothing is getting delayed.
Now to your tasks for the day.
An important thing to remember is your task list is always going to be behind. What I mean here is anything on your task list will be something you have decided needs doing, but has not been done yet. And if you decided you were going to do everything that needed doing you would never clear it because new inputs are coming in all the time. You will never clear your task list.
So, knowing that to clear your task list is impossible, your only real decision is when are you going to do the tasks. And that means you need to decide what is important and what is not.
Too often we put trivial tasks on there that probably don’t need doing or are so obvious you are unlikely to forget them anyway. For example, putting fuel in your car. You know when your car needs refuelling because your car is going to warn you. If you ignore the warning, then you will run out of fuel and that’s the best trigger I know.
Your task list is better used as a reminder of things you have identified as being important. If you have a presentation to do on Friday, then you only need your task list to remind you that you need to work on your presentation. So the task would be: “Work on Friday’s presentation”.
Now, I know some people recommend you break down the task into smaller components, but the trouble I see with this is you start to micromanage your tasks and that just generates a huge list of tasks that becomes overwhelming so you stop looking at your task list—or worse, continuously rearrange and organise your lists in the vain hope they will miraculously complete themselves. That’s just a form of procrastination that makes us feel better but does nothing to get our work done.
It’s far better to manage the details in a notes app like Evernote or OneNote. Here you can add your ideas, screenshots, meeting notes and anything else relevant to the task or project you are working on.
Let you task list inform you what needs doing and what your priorities are for the day or week.
This way you do not need complex folder structures. All you need is a way to organise your tasks. This could be by the individual project, by contexts—The Getting Things Done way—where your tasks are organised by the place you need to be, the tool you need or the person or team you need to be with in order to complete the task or by time, ie when you are going to do the task as in the Time Sector System.
Organising your tasks this way means there is little organising you need to do. All you need do is decide what needs doing today—what are your priorities? Make sure these tasks are dated and do a little review before you finish the day to assign your priorities for tomorrow.
This is not astrophysics level of complexity. It’s very simple. What needs to be done tomorrow to make sure your work is moving forward and the important things are getting done? It takes no more than ten minutes to look at your lists and make that decision.
Not doing this means you waste so much valuable time each day just looking at your lists and trying to decide what needs doing. And while you are doing that, more messages are coming in, more tasks are being thrown at you and it just becomes an endless circle of panic and reactivity.
By keeping your task lists simple and spending a few minutes before you finish the day deciding what you must do tomorrow to keep your important work moving forward, you will remain focused on your priorities and the important work gets done with little stress or overwhelm.
Complex hierarchical folder structures will always destroy your productivity.
My final tip this week is to clearly identify what is important to you. Not just in terms of your work but also in your personal life. If you are not taking care of your health and wellbeing, you will not have the energy to perform at your best. If you are not taking care of your close personal relationships, you know a decaying dying relationship is going to cause you so much pain and heartbreak that your whole life will suffer and if you are not taking care of your finances, money troubles will force you to make short term decisions that will hurt your future financial stability.
I have identified eight core areas you need to be taking care of. These are:
- Your relationships
- Your health
- Your career/business
- Your Finances
- Your self-development
- Your spirituality and mental health
- Your life experiences
- And your overall purpose in life—ie what do you want out of life?
Each of these is important but their priority in your life will change. When you are in your twenties your career and relationships may be your top priorities. In your thirties, your career, life experiences and self-development could be your priorities. Later in life, you will find your finances, life experiences, health and purpose in life will become more important.
However, it is important to know what each of these means to you, how important each one is in terms of where you are today and where you want to be tomorrow and to have clearly identified tasks or actions you can do each day or week or month that will keep you on top of these areas.
A simple example is making sure you have a date night with your partner each week. Spending some time with your children every day and showing interest in their lives. Or It means making sure you are eating right and getting enough physical exercise in and it means spending some time alone with your own thoughts and making plans for your future life.
As I said, none of this is difficult and most of this is obvious. The only thing you need to do is decide what you will do today and make sure you do it.
If you want to learn more about developing your areas of focus, I have a free workbook on my website you can download that will guide you through developing these eight areas. I will put a link in the show notes for you.
And of course, if you feel I can personally help you with any of these areas whether it is time management, productivity, getting control of your areas of focus or developing strategies to achieve your goals you can join my coaching programme. I know I can help you achieve whatever it is you want to achieve by working with you to develop simple strategies that work for you.
I hope these three tips help you. Try not to over-complicate things. Keep it simple. Decide what needs doing today and make sure you do it and never let your email and other forms of communication overwhelm you.
Thank you for listening and don’t forget to download my FREE areas of focus workbook. There are no catches. I won’t be asking you for an email address just click and download. I just want to help you build a life of fulfilment, joy and accomplishment, that’s all.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
A common question this podcast receives is about how to manage the different types of work that come at you every day. So. That’s what we’re going to address today.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet
Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 168
Hello and welcome to episode 168 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
We all have different tasks, events and ideas coming at us every day and they come from many different places. They come from our customers and clients and because of the way we are conditioned to communicate with our customers and clients, we drop everything the moment an email comes in from them. You might have an over-enthusiastic boss who likes to micro-manage you and never leaves you alone to get on with your work and of course you might work on projects with overwhelming numbers of tasks.
Whatever kind of work you do, there is always a way to manage the workload and to still have a private life where you can indulge in your favourite pastimes.
Now, before we get to the question, if you are struggling to pull together a way of managing your time and feel you have tried everything, then I can help you. I have a coaching programme where we work together to create a consistent way of managing your time so you have time to do your work—whatever work that is—and leave yourself time for the things you love doing.
I’ve worked with lawyers, doctors, executives, real estate agents and salespeople to bring calm and focus to their lives and I can do the same for you.
No matter what you do and what you want time for, I can help you. All you need do is visit my coaching programme page, complete the questionnaire, choose your programme, schedule your call and you’re in.
Places are limited—I only have so many hours in the day, like you, but there are a few places left. If you want in, make sure you schedule your call very soon.
Okay, it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Mohammad. Mohammad asks: Hi Carl, I’m struggling to get all my work done. My boss is always calling me asking me what I am doing and my customers use email for everything and expect me to reply immediately. It just leaves me so exhausted. I’ve tried everything but nothing works. What would you advise anyone who just has no time at all to do their work?
Hi Mohammad, thank you for your question.
Firstly, don’t worry, you are not alone, there are many people around the world who share your frustration and there are a few things you can do that will bring some calm to your hectic days.
First up you are going to have to manage expectations. Most of the problems you are experiencing with your customers are down to their expectations of you and possibly the company you work for.
This usually manifests itself when we are in the initial sales process. In our urgency to get the sale we make promises we will find difficult to keep later. One of the most common ones is to tell a customer that you will always be on hand to answer their questions. And once those promises have left your lips, you’ve just set yourself up for a torrid time.
Now you may not be part of the sales process, but your initial contact with the customer is your only real chance to undo the danger. This is your chance to set out your contact policy. I know that sounds formal, but really that’s what it is. You need to establish a policy for how and when you will be available.
Let me give you a few examples of what you could say.
First up, Tell your customers the best time to contact you. For example, you could say, “it might difficult to contact me between 9 and 11 in the morning as I usually have meetings at that time, but if you leave a message or email me I will get back to you”
Now, don’t say when you will get back to them, doing so only sets you up again for a difficult time.
Now when you tell your customers this upfront, they are not going to argue with you, they will accept it. Your problems will start if you answer emails and messages the moment they come in.
What customers want is consistency, not necessarily speed. So you are only asking for trouble if you reply within minutes one day and don’t get back to them for two days on another. And let’s be honest here, nobody expects replies to emails within minutes unless you always reply within minutes. You need to manage your email response times.
You can apply the same rules to phone calls, but obviously, with phone calls, you need to be faster. However, you do still have a little room for manoeuvre. Generally speaking, a phone call should be responded to within an hour or two. Once again, though, be careful here. If you do miss a call because you are talking to another customer or are in a meeting, the best strategy is to call back as soon as you can.
Now you need to treat calls a little differently. Let’s imagine you have been in a meeting and when the meeting finishes you have five missed calls. Start with the oldest one first, and once the call is over before you make the next call, put any action steps you promised into your task manager or a piece of paper. This only takes around thirty seconds, don’t make the mistake of panicking and replying to all your calls without taking a minute or two between calls to get down your commitments.
No matter how crazy things get you do need to be following COD (Collect, Organise and Do). When you find yourself in a busy situation you still need to be collecting your tasks, commitments and appointments into your system.
A lot of managing your work is about following a process and having a few rules of engagement.
I remember when I was a competitive middle-distance runner. My favourite distance was 1,500 metres. Now with this distance, you need to be strategic. You will never win the race if you charge off a full speed from the gun. You’ll soon tire out and the other runners will pass you. Likewise, if you are not particularly fast at the end of the race, you would be unwise to risk a sprint finish with the other runners.
To be a good middle-distance runner you always trained and raced to your strengths. There were the basics—speed endurance—which you practised for in the early spring, there were overall endurance and strength which you practised and developed in the winter and in the summer months, when you raced, you focused on your speed.
In races, you always had a strategy based on your strengths. If you pushed yourself too fast too soon you would lose your rhythm and would be passed. No matter how tempting it was to go flat out, you waited and waited until it was the right time—for me, it was around the 300 metres to go mark—and then you focused on your sprint. Keeping your head and shoulders relaxed and use your arms for speed and never pushing so hard because that would tighten up your shoulders and you would slow down. It was all about staying relaxed in the shoulders and head. We trained for hours for that so it was automatic in the race. Whatever the pressure, you had practised your ending so many times you knew when going and you knew what to focus on.
You need to apply the same strategy to your work. The moment you panic and start rushing into your calls and replies to emails you will tighten up and you will slow down. Focus on your rhythm. Do one thing, do it well and then move on to the next thing. That way you shift the emphasis from the speed of reply to quality of your response.
What you need is time in the day to do your work. This is where you need to block time out. Of course, this depends on your role. If you are customer-service, then your job is to answer calls and reply to emails. But, you do need to act on what you promised the customer. So, how much time do you need to do that comfortably each day? Once you know that, you can find time on your calendar to block time out to do the work and make sure you communicate to your customers you will not always be available at that time.
Now how do you deal with your overenthusiastic boss? The first question I would be asking here is does my boss do this to everyone? The reason for this could be that if your boss does not and only does it to you, then there is an underlying problem you need to address. Why does your boss not trust you? What have you done to cause your boss to feel they must always be checking up on you?
For that, you will have to have an uncomfortable conversation with your boss. Find out why they don’t trust you and resolve the issue. You do not need that attention and you need to sort that out.
Explain to your boss your difficulties with managing your work and that their incessant interruptions do not help. Ask them what you have to do to build that trust? Their answer may not be pleasant, but it needs resolving or you will not get them off your back. Set some ‘rules’ where either you report your progress each day or you arrange one call a day where you discuss everything they want to know.
Finally, how do you deal with a lot of emails each day? First up, set up a folder and call it “Action This Day”—a term I stole from Winston Churchill. Now, as you process your inbox, there are only four things you can do with an email. Reply, delete, forward to someone else or archive it if you might need it for reference later.
The key with email is to understand the difference between processing and doing. Processing is deciding what to do with an email—reply, delete, forward or archive—and doing is replying to the email. If you try and do both at the same time managing email becomes a long drawn out chore. And let’s be honest, with the pressures on us today, you just don’t have time for this.
So, either you process or you do. How does this work in practice?
Open up your inbox and go through your email deciding whether something should be replied to, deleted, archived or forwarded. As a benchmark, most people can process 70 to 80 emails in around fifteen minutes. It does take a little practice to get that fast, but if you practice you will soon get fast at this.
Once you’ve processed your inbox, open up your action this day folder and start at the top and do your replies. A key part of this is reversing the order of this folder so the oldest email is at the top and the newest is at the bottom. That way when you open the folder, you don’t go looking for the oldest, it’s right there at the top.
With this system, you do not need to be forwarding emails to your task manager, you only need one task in your task manager reminding you to clear your action this day folder.
So there you go, Mohammad, there’s quite a lot there, but really it boils down to managing expectations, being consistent and if necessary having a difficult conversation with your boss.
There is enough time each day to get your work done and to have time for yourself at the end of the day but you do need to be strategic, focus on the process and never panicking. Do one thing at a time, do it well and move on to the next task.
I hope that has helped and thank you for your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, I take you through the importance of developing your own workflows and explain why these are crucial to staying focused on what’s important to you.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet
Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet
Productivity Masterclass | Create your own custom daily workflow Course
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 167
Hello and welcome to episode 167 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Over the last few weeks, I have been writing and recording videos on the importance of creating your own workflows. This was something I was working on during my end of year break and this week, I am answering a question on how to develop your own workflows using whatever tools you are using to help you with your work and manage your time.
Now before we get to the question and answer, I would like to encourage you to take my FREE C.O.D productivity course. Now, for those of you who don’t know, COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do and it is the foundation of any good productivity system.
You see, you need to be collecting every commitment, task and event somewhere you trust you will either act on it or remember it. You also need some time each day to organise all those inputs and to make sure they are relevant and decide what needs to happen next and when. And finally, you need to maximise the time you spend doing the work each day.
This course is my foundational course and is completely free. If you have already taken it, I would recommend, as we are at the start of the year, you retake the course as a refresher, and if you have not taken the course, then please do. It will help you to understand the basics and ensure that whatever system you do decide to use personally, you have a solid foundation.
Full details, as usual, are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Joseph. Joseph asks, Hi Carl, I read your essay on workflows in last week’s Learning Note and wondered if you could explain a bit more about how to set this up and more importantly what to do when you have a boss and clients who are contacting you every minute of the day.
Hi Joseph. Thank you for your question.
Let’s start with the philosophical thinking behind the concept of workflows. To become good at anything you need two things: consistency and discipline. There are other factors such as developing skills and deliberate practice and we do that when we perform our work. But the essentials here are consistency—doing the same thing over and over again—and we need the discipline to make sure we perform those actions whether we are in the mood to do it or not.
This is one reason why morning routines when performed everyday work. They allow you to develop the right habits, give you time each day to yourself and brings a little calm in what otherwise can be crazy noisy lives.
So, what does creating your own workflows mean?
In their basic form having a workflow for your day gives you a structure to your day. Most of our productivity problems do not come from the volume of work we have to complete. Our productivity problems develop because we are not allocating sufficient time to the important things and that often means we are not taking any time to establish what our core work really is. When you do not know what your core work is—the work that you are actually paid to do—then you will find you are dragged off doing nonessential work that does little to move any of your essential, important work forward.
So, before you go any further, ask yourself: ‘what are you paid to do?’ You are not paid to respond to email, yet how much time do you spend in your email app each day? Now it could be you are paid to take care of your clients who generally communicate with you via email, but that still does not equal you are paid to check and respond to your email all day.
If you are set in front of your inbox for large parts of the day, what that means is you are working reactively and not proactively. You would be better off investing some time anticipating your client’s needs and addressing those needs before they even cross your client’s mind.
I remember back in the day when I was working with clients I noticed my clients often picked up the phone or emailed on Friday afternoons and Monday mornings and the questions were always the same: ‘what’s happening with my case?’
At the time I was working with four or five corporate clients and so I produced a simple spreadsheet for each client with a list of all their cases and kept that sheet updated throughout the week. Then immediately after lunch on a Friday, I emailed my clients the updated list detailing where all their cases were and when they were anticipated to complete as well what information we were waiting for. This had the effect of reducing the number of calls I received on a Friday afternoon and Monday morning by over 80%!
That’s how you work proactively. Anticipate your customer and client needs and address them before they address you about them.
Other things you can do is prepare a standard email your email to all your new customers and clients outlining your procedures and timelines. This very often deals with most of the questions you will be getting. This works whether you are working in clinical trials, real estate, law or sales.
Once you know what your core work is and where you need to be spending most of your working time each day you can then develop a workflow that you follow each day.
Now, my workflow has gone through a few iterations over the years—usually the name I give each part—but the basics have remained the same for a very long time.
I have a start to the day list which includes my morning routines and a quick review of my most important tasks and calendar events for the day. Once those tasks are completed, I move to my Focus for the day list. This is the list of tasks I have decided need to be completed today. There will never be more than ten items on this list and they are all important.
Why no more than ten I hear you ask? Well, that’s because realistically I know I will not be able to do more than ten important tasks per day.
These tasks do not include non-essential tasks, would like to do tasks or any new tasks that come in through the day. These are simply the most important tasks for that day.
It can be very tempting to fill this list up by telling yourself that everything is important. It’s not. There is your core work—remember, the work you are actually paid to do—your project work that if not done will result in delayed projects and any work that has become urgent.
By restricting yourself to allowing no more than ten items in this list you give yourself a chance to actually complete it consistently. If you are not completing this list consistently each day, then either you are trying to do too much each day or you are adding too many nonessential tasks in there and you need to go back and look at how you are prioritising your days.
The final list is your closing down list. This list is for the nonessential tasks and work or the non-urgent stuff that needs doing some time but has no deadline. It’s also where you have most of your daily routines—the routines that just need doing but do not improve your life or move you closer towards your goals.
And also in this list are you closing down procedures. This is where you make sure you have replied to your actionable email, planned the next day and processed your inbox.
Once all of these lists are cleared. Close down your computer and go do something for yourself. Spend time with your family, exercise or just take a walk in nature. If you make sure these lists are functional, kept up to date and done, you will find you have a lot more time for yourself and others and your life will feel so much more in balance. It will not all be work, work, work.
You will find you worry less about what you have to do, what has not been done and whether you have time to prepare yourself for that presentation later in the week.
Because you have blocks of time on your calendar to do focused work, you have time each day to manage your communications and your are working proactively—also known as smart working—then your productivity increases and your stress levels decrease. It’s a win-win for everyone and all it takes is consistency and a little discipline.
To make this happen, use filters, tags to create three simple lists for the day. The first is your opening list. This is for your morning routines and time for yourself. My list includes: make coffee, drink lemon water, do stretches, ten minutes of journaling and process email.
Your second list is for your focused work for the day and this list cannot contain any more than ten tasks. This is where you will find your most importune work for the day.
And finally, you closing down list for all your little routine tasks for the day and for planning tomorrow.
One thing I would add. If you do find you have to deal with a lot of email, messages and phone calls each day, then set aside an hour or so each day for communications. This communication time is for replying to your emails and messages as well as any phone calls you need make. A good time for this is late on in the afternoon. If you reply to email early in the day you are only going to double up the number of emails you will probably need to reply to each day. You get caught up in email ping pong. If you reply later in the day you slow down the pace and the person you are in an email exchange with is forced to work on your speed and not you on theirs.
And there you go, Joseph. That’s how you develop workflows to make your day run smoother and to make sure you are working on the important things and not being caught up in other people’s dramas and nonessential work.
I hope that has helped and thank you for your question. Thank you to you too for listening and please get in touch if you have a question you would like answering. All you need do is email me: carl@carlpullein.com
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, I am answering a question about automating your productivity and time management.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet
Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet
Productivity Masterclass | Create your own custom daily workflow Course
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 166
Hello and welcome to episode 166 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
These days we hear a lot about automation, AI and machine learning, but what does all this mean for our personal productivity and time management? And can the current state of automation work for us by helping us to improve our productivity and time management? That’s the question I am answering this week.
Now, before we get to the question, I just wanted to give you a heads up about a special offer I am running at the moment.
During my end of year break, I came to realise that the key to seamlessly being able to get your work done is a combination of good habits and workflows—or routines. I know this can sound a little boring—doing the same thing day after day—but it isn’t really about doing the same thing day after day. The tasks and projects you work on every day will be different, but what does make a significant difference to your ability to get your important work done is to develop a workflow that you habitually follow every day.
And that is what my Productivity Masterclass course is all about. It teaches you how to build you very own workflows so you have a structure designed to keep you focused on what’s important that you eventually unconsciously follow every day.
It is the key to building amazing productivity habits and goes a long way to putting you back in control of your time,
So for the next few days, I am offering 20% off my Productivity Masterclass: Building Your Very Own Workflows. It’s an amazing course and one I am sure you will get so much value from.
Full details of this course are in the show notes.
Okay, time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ruth. Ruth asks: Hi Carl, I read a lot about automation, AI and machine learning and it seems everyone is using it. But I don’t really know what it means or how to set it up and use it. Do you have any tips on getting the most out of this technology?
Hi Ruth. Thank you for your question.
Now the first thing we need to establish is that AI is a long way from being what a lot of people understand by the term “artificial intelligence”. It is not ‘real’ AI yet. All supposedly AI apps and tools are still based on basic algorithms and binary code. We are still a long way from achieving true artificial intelligence.
Machine learning is different to AI in that your device is watching what you regularly do and uses that information to present the best options for you. Machine learning is heavily used in your mobile devices these days and can be very useful.
However, the real problem with the current iteration of AI and machine learning is they will never know how you are feeling, what your current mood is, whether you had a fight with a coworker or how much sleep you got last night. Humans are not machines, we are emotional beings with varying levels of energy based on our sleep, mental wellbeing and the food we have eaten.
So what can you do to automate your work that does understand your current energy levels, mood and wellbeing? Well, that comes down to you and the workflows you set up.
One of the things I realised last year is when you develop your own workflows and use the technology we have today to do the organising for you, you develop systems that work for you and because you retain complete control over what is shown to you, you can take in account how you are feeling on any given day.
Let me give you an example. Many people have a morning routine. Now, morning routines are a great way to start the day with consistency and to build a great structure for your day. For some people, a morning routine may include exercise, for others, it might simply be a healthy breakfast and ten minutes of meditation. The beauty of starting building a workflow with a morning routine is that you can experiment a little with this.
If you are using a task manager, such as Apple’s Reminders, Microsoft’s ToDo or Todoist you can create a recurring set of tasks that pop up in your today view every day. What you want to be doing is making sure they pop up at the top of your list every day. To do that, all you need do is add a time to the task. Tasks with times will generally be at the top of your list.
If you are a Todoist user, I would recommend you use labels to denote your morning routines. You can then create a filter from that label to show you only the routines that are due today.
Now the goal here is not to rely on your task manager to remind you every day what you want to be doing for your morning routine. Hopefully, after a few weeks, you will automatically wake and begin your morning routine.
When I developed my morning routine, I had each part of the routine in Todoist, but as the weeks went by I soon no longer needed Todoist to remind me and I removed the tasks from Todoist. I now habitually start my morning routine the moment I get out of bed.
I have taken this automated workflow further now. I use my task manager to build a daily workflow that starts with my morning review—that’s a two-minute review of my tasks and appointments for the day and then I move into my important work for the day list and that is where I stay until the end of the day when I go through my closing down list that reminds me what tasks I should do to close down the day and prepare for tomorrow.
What you will find is that there are some things you need to do every day, others perhaps three times a week and some just once. So adding the appropriate dates to these and setting them to recurring when they need doing allows you to create your own automation.
Task managers are designed to show you what you need to see when you decide you need to see them. To do that you add dates and where necessary times and you can set these to recur.
Another way to create automation is in your calendar. Again, you set them up and make them recurring.
For example, you may decide you want to exercise four times per week. So you set a recurring event in your calendar to exercise. That could be Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Just put them in your calendar at the appropriate time and set them to recur.
The same can be for studying or taking a course. Decide when you want to do your study and put it in your calendar and set it to recur.
Doing things this way means you can easily change things around if you are not feeling too good, or for some reason or other things change and you are unable to follow your workflow.
I’ve found the best automations are the ones you set up for yourself. Doing it yourself allows you to mentally prepare for the task or event and as long as you have some self-discipline you will start to do it.
I’ve had a lot of problems with automation services such as IFTTT or Zapiers. These services can be used to join different apps together. For example, if you star an email in Gmail, it will be added to your task managers’ inbox. Or if you add a task with a date and time to your task manager it will be added to your calendar.
There’s a lot of little automations like this and in theory, they are great…when they work. Unfortunately, in my personal experience they don’t always work and if you start to trust these services and suddenly they stop working your whole system falls apart and you waste time trying to figure out where the problem is.
The other issue here is complexity. Adding all these services adds complexity to your system and complexity is what will eventually lead your whole system breaking down.
There are just some things you do not want to trust to third parties. Things like where things go on your calendar, and how your tasks are organised. Your hands-on approach here is important. It means you are using your productivity tools intentionally and proactively keeping you aware of what’s going on at all times.
I find that’s one of the unintended consequences of using automated third-party extensions. You get surprises and wonder where something came from and then you waste time trying to figure out what it is and rearranging stuff.
Ideally, you want to be adding tasks and events yourself. Now, there are some services that we all use. Shared calendars where your colleagues and family members can add appointments, but in those cases, you have agreed to share a calendar and in most cases, you get the option to accept or decline. And of course, you have project and task managers where the project leader can assign tasks to you. However, in those situations, you know who is sending you the event or task and it’s likely to be part of your normal working routine.
Now I am not saying you should avoid all these automations. There are some I would recommend using such as automated backups. I have an external hard drive attached to my computer that every 12 hours does a backup of what’s on my computer. It’s there and it works in the background. But this kind of automation is not critical to my daily work. I am not relying on it to tell me what work to do. If it stops working or my hard drive fills up, I will get a notification and I can fix it.
So my advice is to be very careful about implementing all these automations. When they work they can be great, but there is a high degree of backend complexity involved here and where complexity exists things will go wrong.
It is far better for you to stay in complete control of your work and when you do your work. Those decisions really need to come from you, not some algorithm that has no idea of your current mood, or energy level. It might seem like you are doing extra work, but that’s what you need if you are going to stay hands-on and connected to what’s going on in your life. It also means you stay in control of what you are doing each day.
I’m not so sure I would be comfortable with a machine telling me what to work on next. I would lose that connection to my work and my priorities and it would feel I am a slave to machines and automation.
That said, there are some things where automation does make sense. Automated backups, appointment scheduling services—where you set the parameters when people can book appointments with you and other non-critical tasks. But be careful.
I hope that has helped, Ruth and thank you for the question.
And thank you to you too for listening. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like answering, all you need do is email me at carl@calpullein.com.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, I’m answering a question about how to build an achievable plan for the year.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet
Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet
The Time Sector Course Page
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 165
Hello and welcome to episode 165 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
It’s that time of year again when we turn our attention to what we would like to do and change. It’s also a time we feel excited and enthusiastic about the future and that can lead to us being a little over-enthusiastic about what we can realistically do and change in twelve months. To make any year a success, we need to temper our enthusiasm and build a plan that is realistic and achievable while still being challenging.
That’s what I will be explaining in this week’s episode.
Now before we do get to the question, the start of the year is a great time to finally get your daily tasks sorted out so you are spending less time managing your work and more time doing your work. That’s where the Time Sector Course will help you. The course is designed to simplify your life, to make collecting everything that comes your way easy and giving you a system that makes it simple and, more importantly, to quickly organise that stuff so you free up more time to do the work.
So, if you want to start the new year, and be ready for all the challenges the year will throw at you, get yourself signed up for the course today. This is one small investment you can make right now that will give you a lifetime of returns on your effectiveness, health and time management.
Full details on the course are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Janine. Janine asks, Hi Carl I always struggle to create goals and plans for the new year. I have a lot of ideas I want to do, but find I become overwhelmed with everything I want to do and just give up. Can you help me to make 2021 different from all the other years where I have failed?
Hi Janine, thank you for your question and happy New Year to you.
One thing we all need to remember is one year is really only a small part of our whole life, and we cannot achieve everything we want to achieve in one year. Instead I have found seeing a year as a stepping stone towards a greater purpose gives you better perspective on what to plan for in the year.
Let’s take a simple example. If you plan to have a very active retirement . A retirement where you get to travel to exotic places, climb mountains and maintain a small farm of crops and a few animals, you will need two things. You will need good health and fitness and a robust retirement fund.
Those two things—health and wealth—are not things you can achieve overnight. They take years of work. You need to exercise and eat healthily regularly and you will need to save money. It easy to lose your health by overeating and leading a sedentary lifestyle, and it’s practically impossible to build a sufficient retirement fund in five years. It takes years of consistent saving to build up a sufficiently robust retirement pot.
In this example, the question to ask is what can I do this year to move me closer to creating the retirement I want to myself?
Another example could be with your career. Imagine you career goal is to one day be the CEO of a large company. Now, if you are just starting out on your career you are likely to be a long way from achieving that goal today, but that does not mean you cannot set yourself a few goals for this year that will move you closer towards that target.
Ask yourself what skills are you missing? And which of those skills could you develop this year? Are there any courses you could take? You should also review your current work and see where you could improve and if there are any areas where you are particularly weak and could do with some mentoring. It’s amazing how many people in your organisation who would be more than happy to act as a mentor to you.
By thinking of a year as a stepping stone towards a bigger purpose you will feel a lot less pressured to have lofty and mighty goals and plans. This year is just a step towards a higher purpose or goal.
So what could you do this year that will take you a little closer towards you greater goals and plans?
The next step here is to create a board divided up into five columns. In the first column you put your objectives for the year. These could be a fitness or health objective, for example, to lose a certain amount of weight or to complete a full course marathon. Or they could be a career objective such as get a promotion to a particular position.
For me, I have a health and fitness objective and a couple of business objectives. The objective is clearly stated in a simple sentence.
In the following columns you make a column for each quarter of the year. So, in column two you put Q1, then Q2, Q3 and finally Q4. Here you can add the projects and major events you wish to or will do in the quarters.
I have my planned trips in these columns. For instance, all being well, I plan to travel to Ireland in April or May this year to visit my family. That trip is in my Q2 column. I also hope to go to Tony Robbins’ UPW event in Sydney in September or October this year so that’s in Q3. These trips may not happen, they depend on how the pandemic works out this year, but as of early January they are my plans for the year.
Now the reason I put them here is because the trip to Ireland will take up at least two weeks, and Tony Robbins’ event will be a week. I need to be away of my time commitments.
Now the beauty of doing things this way is you will see where you are overcommitting yourself. I know a typical project requires around six to eight weeks to complete. Given that each quarter has at the very most twelve weeks, that means realistically I can only complete two projects per quarter.
That does not sound very much, but that’s still eight meaningful projects for the year. Knowing my bigger purpose about what I want to achieve for my business and family that’s going to make a significant impact on my overall objectives.
Having this chart, or Kanban board, makes it very easy to see where you are over extending yourself. It’s very tempting to load up the first quarter because of our enthusiasm and excitement for the new year , but if you slow down and understand you have twelve months in order to move yourself forward with your life, your career and your self-development, you are much more likely to achieve the things you want to achieve.
Now, I know many of you will be thinking that your work does not operate like that and you have multiple projects every week. That’s true if you cling to the old idea that a project is anything that requires two or more steps. But visiting the doctor for your annual medical is not a project. Seriously. It’s just something you have to do every year and all it requires is you find the telephone number of your doctor and make an appointment. Likewise sorting out a difficult customer or client’s issue is never a project. It’s likely to be your job and you just need to make that call, send that email or talk with your colleague. It’s not a project. It’s a task
A project is something much more involved than a couple of steps that could be sorted out in a day or two. The time you waste planning out these in your task manager is not worth it. It would be much faster to just add a task—“sort out Mrs P’s issue” and do whatever it takes to sort that issue out.
Real projects are things that make significant impact on your person life—moving house, getting married, retiring or turning your life around. Or work projects that involve developing and launching new products, building a marketing campaign or hiring new staff. These are real projects that require time, multiple steps and some planning.
So, Janine, if you want this year to be different, think about what you would like to be doing in five or ten years time and ask what you could do this year that will take you a step closer towards achieving that. You don’t have to do everything this year. Just a few little things that will move you forward.
As Tony Robbins says: “most people overestimate what they can do in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in a decade.” Think about the next tens years, Janine, let that be the driver for what you want to accomplish this year.
When you look at a year as a stepping stone towards living a fulfilled life rather than an end in itself, you get to think about what you could do this year that will move you a step closer towards achieving the things you want to achieve.
I hope this has helped, Janine and thank you for so much for your question. Thank you to you too for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering, then just email me: carl@carlpullein.com and I will be happy to answer your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.
Do you find it difficult to switch off at the end of a working day? You are not alone. This week, I tackle that difficult balance.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet
Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 164
Hello and welcome to episode 164 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
One area that often gets overlooked when we start to build a productivity and time management system is balance. After all, we cannot and should not spend all day and night working. It’s not healthy mentally or physically and can have a devastating effect on our family and social life.
Yet, sometimes we just need to do the work. If you are starting a business, preparing for exams or in the middle of a big project, all your time and attention should be and needs to be on that endeavour. What happens to balance in those situations? Well, that’s what I am answering this week.
Now before we go any further, I just want to give you a heads up this will be the final episode this year. We’ll be taking a little end of year break. Don’t worry, we’ll be back on the 4th January.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Kevin. Kevin asks, Hi Carl, I am really struggling to find time for my personal life. I have been working from home since March and I find all I am doing is working all day and night. I don’t have any time in the evenings because that’s the only time I have to reply to email and I feel I spend all day in meetings through Microsoft Teams. Are there ways to help balance out the day when you are stuck at home all day, every day?
Hi Kevin, thank you for your question.
I think the flexibility promise of working from home has thrown up some hard realities for a lot of people. At least when we had to go to an office to do our work there was a clear distinction between being at home and being at work. Now the two areas of our lives are being conducted from the same place and that removes a lot of barriers between our working lives and our personal lives.
The first thing I would always recommend is you build in some structure to your day. What I mean here is you set a start time and a finish time for your work. Simple? Yes. But there’s a reason for this.
You see, if we have a start and finish time to do our work each day, we now have a psychological deadline. Part of the problem with working from home is we have no structure—a structure that is built into a workplace. When we go to a workplace we have a start time—be there for 9:00 AM—and we have a finish time—leave at 6:00 PM. This means there is a fixed time each day in order to do our work. Whatever we want to accomplish that day, we much finish it by 6:00. It sets a sense of urgency. We must finish this by 6.
When working from home, we no longer need to commute, we tell ourselves we can do another 30 minutes. There’s no rush to finish so we can miss the worst of the traffic or avoid being late for dinner. Tacking on an extra thirty minutes to our day does not carry the same consequences.
The problem is it does carry consequences. Not the same consequences, but consequences all the same. You start to get complacent about your working time. Those extra thirty minutes one day soon become the ‘new normal’, and there will be days when you work an extra hour or two and soon your whole closing down work for the day becomes very blurred.
So, set a start time and finish time for the day and be strict about following it.
Another area that quickly disappears is the lunch break. How many of you working from home no longer take your full lunch break? I know this one is incredibly difficult as that was one of the first things I stopped doing when I started working from home a few years ago.
As there was no one to go and have lunch with, it was just much easier to make myself a sandwich and eat at my desk while processing my email.
Now depending on where you live in the world, your lunch break allows you time to get outside and get some exercise in. Go for a walk. A tip here is if you walk twenty minutes down the road, then turn round and walk back home you have just walked for forty minutes and that is around 5,000 steps. Do that twice a day and you hit the magical 10,000 steps a day.
My dog has benefitted a lot with me working from home. We go out walking every lunchtime and it’s a great way to get some air, refresh and reset ready for an afternoon session of work.
You also need to make sure you are in control of your calendar because it is so easy to allow people to schedule video calls at lunchtime. First up, you need to eat and second up, you need your break.
The number of people I speak to who have been stuck on Zoom meetings all day and realise they have not eaten or taken a break. No. You have to put a stop to this.
Just as if you were in your workplace you need to be unavailable at your designated lunch break. And if having a meeting at you usual lunchtime, then make sure immediately the meeting ends, you take your break then.
Okay, now for those of you who are saying to yourselves ‘I can’t do that, my boss expects me to be available’, then you have some questions to ask yourself. Are you really happy working for a boss from the 20th century who is clock-watching you? Are you happy working for a company that does not trust you? I know I wouldn’t be and I would be making it a goal for 2021 to find another company or another boss.
That takes care of the situation many people have found themselves in this year. However, there will be a day when we regain our freedom of movement and we can move around again. I’m not sure we will ever go back to the way things were before 2020, but a normal, of sorts, will inevitably come one day.
Now, as a person who is self-employed finding balance is difficult for me. However, one thing I have learned in ten years of being self-employed is there will be periods when I need to be focused. For example, if I am recording a course, everything stops for two days. My calendar is blocked out all day and night and for 48 hours I pretty much live in my studio. I don’t check email and only check messages periodically—usually when I am making a coffee or a cup of tea.
But, once the course is launched I take two or three days off. So, it’s a period of say four of five days of intense work, followed by two or three days of complete rest.
You don’t have to be completely structured every day. Balance does not necessarily mean the ‘perfect eight’—that’s 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work and 8 hours leisure. Balance means making time for the things you want to do with the people you like doing things with. And the keyword is making time for it.
It’s no good complaining about not having time. You do have time. You just have to make the decision to stop doing work and start doing the things you want to do.
Hopefully, you already know you cannot push yourself through ten to twelve hours of work every day. There’s a point where you will get diminishing returns. Even in an eight-hour workday, you will start to lose efficiency towards the end of the eight hours. Pushing on will not get more work done. Pushing on likely leads to mistakes that need rectifying later—which results in more work. You need to rest.
So, depending on the kind of work you do, the balance could be two or three days of intense work, followed by two or three days of relaxation.
I can give you another example—a seasonal one. I’m a content creator, my work involves creating content. I also want to have a week of complete rest over the Christmas holidays so, this week and next, I will be doing some intense content creation certainly not being very balanced with my time. However, this means during Christmas week I will have no content to create so I can put my feet up, eat warm mince pies with brandy cream and spend a lovely Christmas with my wife and little dog.
You may be seeing a pattern here, balance is all about getting in control of your calendar. That’s where you can see where you are spending your time. It can warn you about future over-commitment, it can also show you patterns from previous weeks. If you find yourself feeling a bit numb and out of sorts, just go back a couple of week in your calendar, you will likely see you have been pushing yourself too much and losing your balance. When that happens you can use your calendar to reset. Build-in some more relaxing days and take some time off doing what you want to do.
Ultimately, you are in control of your time. Nobody can force you to do things you do not want to do. If you have no time for your friends and family because your boss and clients are demanding so much of your time, then you need to question your choice of career. Despite what you may read in the news, you can always change your job, no seriously you can. The job market is always tough, but that should never be an excuse to trap yourself into thinking the job you have today is the only job you can do.
I changed careers completely in two of the last worst recessions. I quit being a lawyer in the middle of the dot com bust in 2002 and I quit my job as an employed English teacher to start my own teaching business in 2009. Was it hard? Yes, it was. Was it impossible? Of course not, It is always about knowing what you want, and then creating a plan to make it happen.
Ask yourself what’s important to you? Then open up your calendar and schedule time for it. It’s simple.
I hope that has helped you in some way, Kevin. Remember, you are in control of your time, so make it count. Take control of your calendar and make sure you structure your day. Have a start and stop time and build in time for yourself, your family and friends and don’t let anyone take it away from you.
Have a fantastic week, a wonderful holiday season and a joyous new year. We’ll be back in the new year.
Last week in my Todoist video, I showed how I process my inbox at the end of the day. This generated a lot of questions, so this week I am answering those questions.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet
Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 163
Hello and welcome to episode 163 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
There are three parts to any good productivity system. There is the collection of the inputs being thrown at you. There’s the organising of those inputs—what do they mean to you? What do you need to do? And When? And of course the most important part, the doing.
This week’s question is about the collecting part and how to get those collected inputs into your system.
Now, before we get to the question, hopefully, you will now be in the final stages of your 2021 planning. Yo really do not want to be doing your 2021 planning in the final week of 2020. That’s a time for reflection, resting and where possible spending time with your family.
So, if you would like help in formalising your ideas into achievable goals and to begin the year with a solid plan, then I have a personal one on one coaching programme. You can get yourself two fifty-minute calls with me, personally, to help you set up 2021 for just $149.00.
I know this might not be for everyone, but if you are serious about turning 2021 into a great year, then just head over to my coaching page on my website, complete the questionnaire and lets get you set up for an incredible year.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Zoe. Zoe asks, Hi Carl, I’ve taken your COD course and the one area I struggle with is deciding where I should put a task when I have put it into my inbox. Deciding what context to add and which folder to put it into can be so overwhelming, I usually just don’t bother. Are there any tips and tricks you could share that will make organising my tasks easier?
Hi Zoe, Thank you for your question.
I often see this problem when I am coaching. When you are not organising your inbox on a regularly basis the number of tasks builds up and one of two things will happen. Either you will stop adding new tasks because you stop trusting your system or you start to do your work directly from your inbox because the rest of your system has collapsed.
Neither of these situations is very good.
So what can you do?
Well, if your task manager’s inbox is overloaded with tasks that have been there for days or weeks you need to stop. What I mean by stop is you need to schedule an hour or so to process your inbox.
Unfortunately, when your inbox is overloaded, the chances are you will be telling yourself you are too busy to stop and process it. And of course, when you say that to yourself it becomes a vicious circle. Your inbox continues to grow (or not as the case, maybe) and you continue to feel overwhelmed and busy.
So, stop. Just stop. If you cannot do it during your office hours then do it between 9 and 10 pm. Or wake up an hour earlier than usual. You need this hour and you need to be offline and off the grid when you do it.
The first thing you have to do is process it.
Now there could be an underlying problem that you eluded to, Zoe. Your folder structure and contexts are too complicated.
Processing your inbox should be easy and fast. It should not need too much thought.
This is why the Time Sector System came about. I found myself processing my inbox and getting stuck where to put something. Was it a project (because I knew I was going to have to do two or more things to close it out) or a single action item? Or was it part of another project?
Then once I had decided where to put the task, I had to think about what context to add to it. Did I need a specific tool—my phone, computer? Or did I need to be at a particular place?
Agh! Way too many decisions and far too slow.
So how do you streamline this?
First up, you have to simplify your system. Do you really need contexts today? The old @office, @computer, @home, @hardware store etc.
Contexts worked twenty years ago when you needed a computer to reply to your email or write a report, but today you can do those things from your phone. In fact, the last statistic I read was around 70% of email is done on a smartphone today. And I often begin writing my blog posts using my phone.
You may find contexts work for you, but if you are not using those lists, then don’t use them. If you do use those lists, then there’s no reason to add a context.
Next your folder structure. As I am sure you already know, I no longer manage my tasks by project. I manage my projects from my notes app and that is my project support file. All my projects both active and inactive as well as completed projects are all contained in my Notes app. So I do not need to create a folder structure that duplicates my projects.
For one thing, I am not working on all my projects at the same time. Projects are usually worked on in the order of priority—usually deadline priority.
So my task manager is organised by when I will do a task. This means the only folder I need to look at on a weekly basis is my This Week folder. While I am doing my work, anything I want to or need to do next week is irrelevant. I’m doing that next week.
When I am doing project work, I am working from my project notes, not my task manager. If I have a meeting about a project, I can open the project file in my notes app and add comments, tasks and relevant information directly into the project notes, If I receive an email or a Twist message related to a project, I can, if I wish, copy and paste any relevant information into my project notes. It’s a central place for anything related to that project.
Now, when I do my weekly planning session, I can go to my projects and decide which projects I will be working on next week and add tasks to my task manager then.
So, when it comes to processing and organising my inbox tasks is simple. I have two questions to ask: What is it? And when will I do it?
It’s strange as I say that, it sounds complicated, but really it is quite simple. If you open your inbox now and try it, ask yourself what is it? What do I have to do? And then ask yourself “when can I do that?”
So for example, let’s say you have a task such as: “find a website designer to create a website for my new company” the first question is what is it? This is a research task, so when will you do it? You may decide you don’t need to do it this week, and you will do it next month, then just drop it into your next month folder. There’s nothing else to do with the task now. You’re not going to do it until next month so put it into next month’s folder and forget about it for now.
You could have a task that says “call Jenny about her resignation letter”, now this is something you likely have to do ASAP, so all you need do is decide when you will do it. Let’s say you decide to do that tomorrow, so add tomorrow’s date and drop it into This Week’s folder.
And that’s it. That’s all you need to do to process your inbox. Over time you will get faster at this. I can clear fifteen to twenty tasks in my inbox in less than five minutes. Knowing that means there’s no resistance to processing. It’s just something I do just before I finish my day.
Now a few words of caution here. The Time Sector System only works if you do a weekly planning session. If you are not bringing your next week tasks forward to this week and dating those tasks everything will fall apart.
If you are not going into your project list to see what needs doing and pulling tasks into your This Week folder then you will soon find yourself falling behind with your projects.
But, if you do the weekly planning session, you will be fine. The great thing about a weekly planning session is you are in a quiet place… hopefully, and you give yourself thirty minutes or so to get yourself set up for the week ahead. The feeling you have once you have done it is fantastic. You feel organised, on top of everything and ready for the week ahead.
When I did my planning last Saturday, I saw I would be away from my desk on Tuesday for most of the day so I was able to reschedule my Tuesday tasks to other days. I’m not worrying about anything being missed because I have gone through everything and made sure I am on top of it all.
So there you go, Zoe. Ask yourself do you really need those contexts? You probably do not. And do you really need all those folders in your task manager? Again, you might be happier managing your projects from your task manager. But if you do, you will need to review all those projects and make sure there are not errant tasks that crept into the wrong folder.
I hope that has helped. The best approach is if something isn’t working, then find another way. There will always be a way that works for you. Keep experimenting and you will soon find it. More often than not though, the simplest approach is the best approach.
If you would like to know more about the Time Sector System, I have a comprehensive blog post you can read about it, I also have a playlist on my YouTube channel and you can take the course. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 162
This week, it’s all about putting into place a plan for the new year.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet
Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet
Create Your Own Apple Productivity System
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 162
Hello and welcome to episode 162 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Back in October, I shared with you a simple template you could use to brainstorm ideas for what you want to accomplish in 2021. Now the idea behind that is you give yourself a few weeks to think about this and there are a few areas where you can give some thought. Your lifestyle, your career, your relationships as well as your bucket list and how you can challenge yourself.
So, this week’s question centres around what happens next with this list.
Before we get to this week’s question though, I would like to thank everyone who took part in my holiday sale this year. Without your support none of what I do to help people would be possible. So thank you so much.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Richard. Richard asks; Hi Carl, I downloaded your annual planning sheet and have filled it out. You mentioned that when we get to December we need to filter this list into a few actionable goals. Could you tell me how you would go about doing that?
Hi Richard, thank you for your question and thank you for downloading the planning template.
Now, before we start, if you would like a copy of this template, you can still get it from my download page on my website. What it is is a series of six questions about what you would like to change in the new year. These range from your personal life—your relationships, your health and fitness to your professional life—how you do your work, whether you would like to change your career etc.
The purpose of these questions is to provoke you into thinking about what you want from your life and once you have a set of ideas written down, you can move on to the next stage—which is where Richard is asking for some tips.
So, once you have your ideas written down, what do you do next?
Well, the first step is to go through your list of ideas. Many of the ideas you collected will likely be unrealistic at this stage. For instance, you may have written down on the list to sell your house and buy a yacht and live in the South of France. A wonderful idea, but perhaps realistically, this is not going to happen in 2021, but could be something for 2025. However, while you may not sell up and buy a yacht next year, you may find there are a few things you could do next year. You may decide you would like to visit a harbour in the South of France as part of your holiday next year and get some ideas on the types of Yachts available. You may want to do some research on how to buy a yacht, what second-hand ones cost etc.
Working on these areas keeps the idea alive and also builds excitement towards the ultimate goal.
You may have a few ideas on your list that you could work on next year. Health and fitness, of course, is a common one. With the restrictions on our movements this year, you may have accidentally gained a few pounds in weight and you want to get yourself back into shape. So, you can bring that forward to a goal or project to work on.
With something like that, all you need decide is when will you start and how will you do it. Let’s say you want to lose fifteen kilograms (around 30 pounds or 2 ½ stone). So by when would you like to lose that weight? For something like this, you would probably best do it over a six-month period. So, giving yourself six-months, how much weight do you need to lose per month? That would be 2.5 KGs - that’s a realistic—and more importantly healthy—figure to aim for.
Next up would be how? How will you do it? Will you diet only—a tough way to do it—or with you combine a little dieting with exercise? If so, what kind of exercise will you choose?
Let’s say you decide to do cycling, then perhaps you need to get your bike serviced, or even buy a new bike ready to get started.
So, from that one idea, you are likely to find you have a number of tasks to perform to put yourself in a position to be able to start from the 1st January.
Or you may have to change your career on your list. With something like this what skills will you need to be able to switch careers? Do you need to go back to school and get some formal qualifications? If so, there’s your starting point. Research possible universities that do courses that will give you your qualifications. Will you need to save money or could you get a grant? There’s a lot of research there. So, you may decide January will be your research month
Other items on your list could be to create a purpose-built home office so you can move towards working from home career. One thing this year has done is to accelerate the changes to the way we work. So what would a project like this involve? Would you turn your basement into a home office or your spare bedroom? What will you need to purchase?
So, as you can see, from the ideas you have collected over the last month or two, you will have quite a few ideas that you can now expand and turn into projects and goals for 2021.
So, where do you plan all these out?
For me, I take the projects and goals I have decided to work on and create individual notebooks or folders for them in my notes app. I have a master note for each project or goal where I can transfer the original idea and I will then brainstorm the next steps to making this happen.
Let’s take the Yacht example, I may decide this is not going to happen until 2025, but next year I need to investigate the costs involved. How much would a boat cost to buy? Can I get a finance package? How much will harbour fees cost? What are the maintenance costs etc? While I may not actually buy the yacht in 2021, there could still be a lot of preparation work I could do.
You can then keep your collected information in your created notebook. Things like quotations, website links and meeting notes.
For your fitness goals, you can collect inspiring pictures and articles and keep them in your project notebook. You can also create a training log in there to track your progress.
The way I see it is, October and November are my idea generation months and December is where I plan out the projects and goals I want to accomplish next year.
Now, a few tips here.
Remember you are limited by time. You only have twelve months and so try not to do too much. The idea with the annual planning sheet is you keep it in your notes app so you can refer back to it next October when you restart the process. You don’t have to do everything next year.
I break things down into quarters. So, one of the ideas on my list is to write a book next year. I love writing books but find I am limited by time. But, next year, I have planned out to write the first draft of the book in the first quarter. I want to find an hour a day to write the book. That’s not too difficult as I already know I spend an hour a day on various social media channels and YouTube. So I can cut that time down and write my book instead.
Another project I have is to re-record all my courses that are not in HD. That’s five online courses. So, I will do one course every two months. The content is already there, so I do not need to plan out the courses again—I still have the outline. All I need do is review the outline, update where necessary and then set aside two or three days for recording. So it is a realistic project for next year.
I am using Todoist’s new boards feature to plan out when I will do these projects and that means I can see what I have planned for each quarter and make sure I am not overloading myself.
Overall, you will find this process exciting. It also acts as a real motivator as well because it gives you a goal for the year and these goals and projects are goals and projects that will improve your life and push you forward towards a life you love living.
You can also add in places you want to visit for when the world opens up again—don’t worry it will. We humans are natural adventurers—so I am planning a trip to the UK and Ireland in the second quarter next year. Really excited about that.
But remember, you don’t have to do everything you wrote down next year. You can hold some back for 2022. I do. One the beauties of this is you start to see a trend. If you keep writing down something like move to the countryside—something that has been on my list fir the last four years—that could be an indicator that there’s something deep inside that you really want to change about your lifestyle.
You may not be in a position to move next year, or even in 2022, but it might be a realistic plan for 2025. With things like this, you can ask yourself what can I do next year that will make that move closer?
So there you go, Richard. There’s quite a lot you can do in December to really start to make some of these goals and projects a reality. Enjoy this planning time. It’s a lot of fun, it’s inspiring and motivating and it leaves you very excited about the start of 2021.
Good luck and thank you for your question.
Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this show, then all you need do is email me—carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.
This week, how to manage a seemingly never-ending to-do list
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet
Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet
Create Your Own Apple Productivity System
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 161
Hello and welcome to episode 161 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week’s question is all about managing time. Now I know some people will claim you cannot manage time, and if we are talking about the amount of time we have each day that is true. But we can manage how we use that time and that is where many people struggle yet when you understand what you have and you know your limitations then it can be very easy to manage.
Now, before we get to this week’s question I just want to give you a heads up on my 2020 Thanksgiving holiday sale. This year I have kept things as simple as I can. All my courses and bundles of courses are currently available with a 30% discount. And for my coaching programmes, you can get yourself a 20% discount.
I’ve had to limit my coaching programme offer to the first twenty people as I do all the calls personally and I want to do the best job I can in helping people.
So if you are interested in joining my coaching programme please act soon as the available places are going fast.
Okay, on with this week’s question and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Juan. Juan asks, hi Carl, I started to use your Time Sector System earlier this year and it has really helped me to simplify my workload. The problem I have though is I rarely complete my tasks for the day. I feel I have too many tasks and I don’t know how I can stay on top of all my work. How do you manage your tasks? Is there a way to always finish your work each day?
Hi Juan, thank you for your question.
Let’s look at this as an equation. There is two sides to this equation. The first side is time available. That’s fixed at 24 hours each daily cycle. You cannot change that. It’s the same for all of us. The second side is the work required to be done. That’s variable.
So, when you base your thinking on the fact that of the two sides to the time management equation only one is variable we can focus our attention on managing that side.
But first, on the work to be done side of the equation we have to factor in some fixed pieces. The first is sleep. We have to sleep. Now depending on your own personal sleep requirements that could be anything between six and nine hours per day. We also need to eat and that likely will take up a further ninety minutes.
So, of those twenty-four hours, we are already down to say fourteen hours per day (taking an average of ten hours for sleeping, eating and taking care of personal hygiene)
Now, having taken out time for the essentials—sleeping and eating etc—individually we may have other important tasks to take care of. For example, I schedule exercise time every day. I cannot function properly without exercise so I have an hour a day set aside for exercise.
You may have a young family and they will require time attention each day and that could be two to three hours.
Then we have our regular routines, household chores, paying bills, taking the garbage out and walking the dog. All these can quickly add up to an hour each day.
So, when you take into account your fixed time requirements, you are likely to have no more than eight to ten hours left to do all your other work.
But, it does not really end there. Another factor in this equation is your energy levels. We often assume we will have bundles of energy every day, but you know this is rarely the case. You may have not slept well the night before, you may be feeling a little sick or have a headache. All of these can have a debilitating effect on your energy levels which will affect the amount of work you can comfortably do each day.
The reason I explained that is most people’s expectations of what they can do each day is unrealistic. They bite off more than they can chew—as my mother used to say.
You need to get realistic on this side of the equation. It’s the only part of the equation you can manage.
If you use the Time Sector System, the key folder you are focused on each week is your This Week folder and you quickly learn how many tasks you can realistically accomplish each week because at the end of the week if you have any remaining tasks it will be an indicator of one of two things. Either you were being overoptimistic when you did your weekly planning or an emergency arose that took up a lot of time.
The longer you operate the Time Sector System you learn what your realistic task number is. For me, I have 17 recurring areas of focus each week. These are my most important, must-do tasks each week. They relate to my most important work such as preparing and recording this podcast, writing my blog post and recording my YouTube videos. They also include the tasks I need to complete in order to achieve my goals.
That leaves me with around twelve other tasks I can complete without putting myself under strain.
You might think twelve tasks in one week is not many, but when I talk about a task it could be planning an update to a course which will require around three to four hours, or preparing a workshop for a client company. These are not tasks like replying to an email. Email replies are part of my daily routines.
As long as I am doing my area of focus tasks and routines I am taking care of my most essential work each day. My major work. The work that will give me 80% of my results.
So knowing I have room for twelve additional tasks, when I do my weekly planning I can decide what needs to be done the following week.
Now, life is not that simple, of course. Through the day emergencies and urgencies will happen. They always do and you cannot plan for those. You just have to deal with them as they come up. You just have to have the flexibility to deal with those.
Now the beauty of the Time Sector System is you stop thinking in terms of what you get done each day, you start thinking in terms of what you get accomplished each week. So, if an emergency occurs and you get none of your planned tasks done one day, you can do a daily planning session and reschedule those tasks for other days in the week.
This week, for example, I could not prepare this podcast script on Tuesday because of a family trip. I saw that on Monday evening when I did my daily planning and rescheduled the podcast script to Thursday morning. It meant Thursday was busier than usual, but I was able to find the additional ninety minutes by waking up a little earlier than usual.
Having the freedom to shuffle tasks around on a daily basis allows me to be more flexible about when I do my tasks. Obviously, if a task needs to be done by Tuesday morning it needs to be done on Monday, but not all your Monday tasks will have the same tight deadline. Some may be just moving a project forward task and could be done later in the week if you don’t have enough time to complete it on the day you’d like to do it.
But the key to all this is learning to prioritise. You cannot do everything and you will always have more tasks on your to-do list than you could complete in a day or week and those tasks will keep coming. It’s like email. You can get yourself to inbox zero and within twenty minutes you’ve got a full inbox again.
So the real decision you have to make is which of all these tasks are you going to do. You cannot change the amount of time you have and so, you have to decide what tasks you will do and which ones you will not.
Of course, you could change that third variable—your energy levels, but quite often that involves time. You need to get plenty of sleep and you need to be exercising to increase your energy levels, so you still need to find a balance.
One pointless complaint is to complain about a lack of time. You don’t have a lack of time. You have the same amount of time as everyone else. Complaining about time is looking at things the wrong way round. You have too many tasks and you can always reduce that number by saying “no” to new inputs.
One way to help you is to monitor how you are using your time each day:
- How much time do you spend ‘chatting’ with your friends through chat apps?
- How much time do you spend on social media during the day?
- How much time do you spend chatting with your co-workers?
- How much time do you spend going through message threads in Microsoft Teams, Slack or Twist?
- How often do you “check” email and not do anything with it?
- How much time do you spend searching the internet for things to buy?
- How much time do you spend looking through your to-do list looking for something easy to do?
All these are huge time sucks and can take up a disproportionate amount of time each day. It’s surprising how many minutes can be lost getting sucked into a message thread and how much of a time waste it can be when the message thread does not concern you.
There are enough videos, articles and books on say no to new inputs, tasks and projects. Of course, you can always ignore that advice and carry on doing what you are already doing. You can keep trying new apps, rearranging your Notion pages and watching more videos on productivity in the hope that you will find a way to miraculously do your work without changing anything. Or you can change right now and work on the only thing you can work on. Prioritising.
So, how do you prioritise?
Again, know your limitations. How much can you comfortably do each day? You cannot do everything in one day, so you need to choose what you do. This is where the 2+8 Prioritisation method can help. That gets you to choose your two objectives for the day—the two absolutely must-do tasks and eight other focus tasks, or “should do” tasks that you will do everything you can to complete.
In my research, the optimum number of meaningful tasks anyone can complete in a day is ten. By meaningful I mean tasks that move projects and issues forward and take more than twenty minutes to do.
Focusing on getting ten meaningful tasks done each day does two things. The first is it focuses you on your MITs—your most important tasks and secondly it forces you to be realistic. When you know you are only allowed to schedule a maximum of ten tasks each day, you have no choice but to prioritise and say no.
These ten tasks do not include your routines, those just have to be done and routine tasks can be done anytime. Cleaning your house, washing the car and taking the dog for a walk can be done anytime.
I take my dog out for two walks a day. So, I do a session of focused work for a couple of hours in the morning and then take the little one out for his morning walk as a break for me and a walk for him. That way, I am completing my routine tasks in between my 2+8 tasks.
You can tell me you cannot say “no” to your boss or your clients and that may very well be true. But if the amount of work you have said “yes” to is greater than the time you have available what can you do? You cannot do anything about the time available—that’s fixed. The only variable is the amount of work you have said “yes” to. That’s the only part of the equation you can change.
So if you really want to consistently complete your assigned tasks for the day, get real about the number of tasks you are trying to complete each day. Time available is non-negotiable for all of us, the number of tasks we perform each day is negotiable so focus on that side of the equation. Reduce your commitments, say “no” to new inputs wherever you can, avoid time sucks like chat threads, social media and reorganising your lists.
Focus on your ten meaningful tasks per day. Get them done as soon as you can so you have the time to deal with the emergencies and unplanned events that will crop up each day.
And remember, if you have planned your week, not completing everything you planned to do one day, can always be moved off to another day that week.
I hope that has helped, Juan and thank you for your question.
Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast all you need to do is email me—carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook.
It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, in a rather special episode I am going to set you a challenge that if you accept, will guarantee to transform your life in terms of your health, your fitness and your mental and physical toughness.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet
Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet
Create Your Own Apple Productivity System
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 160
Hello and welcome to episode 160 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So, what am I talking about? I want to challenge you to commit to running and completing a full marathon in 2021.
Why?
As I will explain in a moment, marathon running teaches you life lessons that will benefit you in so many different ways. From improving your health, managing your weight to showing you that you are capable of doing something you previously thought was impossible or that you didn’t have enough time to do.
I’ve heard all the excuses, and so I want to show you in this episode that no matter where you are fitness-wise, you can take this challenge and completely change your lifestyle.
Now before I explain this to you, I just want to give you a heads up that my Create Your Own Apple productivity course has been updated and is available on my Learning Centre.
While this year has not seen many functional changes to the apps you use, there has been a few changes to the way iCloud Drive works and I have also included how to set up the Time Sector System using only Apple’s productivity apps.
So, if you only want to use the built-in apps that Apple provide for free and want the peace of mind using built-in apps bring you, then this is a course for you.
Now, if you are already enrolled in the course, this is a free update for you, and if you are new to the Apple ecosystem and want to create a simple to use intuitive productivity system, then this course is for you.
Full details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, no mystery podcast voice this week just me explaining why you should get yourself involved in the challenge.
So, how does running a marathon transform your life?
Well. Firstly, no matter what fitness level you have right now, to run 26 miles or 42 kilometres requires practice, or as we call it training. You are not going to be able to decide to run a marathon today and go out on Sunday and run 26 miles. Marathon running does not work like that.
To complete a marathon requires a period of about six to ten months of consistent training. You have to go out and run five to six times per week, every week for six to ten months. There is no getting around that and you cannot take any short cuts.
Because you are committing to training that many times per week you have to plan your training. If you have a busy week, where are you going to fit in your training runs? When you go on holiday, how will you continue your training?
What will you do when the inevitable injuries happen—and they will—how will you maintain your fitness?
All of these factors need careful consideration.
Plus, if you are over the age of 35 and have not exercised for a number of years, you will need to visit your doctor for a medical check-up. Marathon running puts a huge strain on your physical body and you need to make sure your heart and lungs are capable of going through the effort you will have to put yourself through.
Okay, so there are the challenges before you start. How does running a marathon help your productivity and your self-development?
The first, and in my opinion the most important, is it develops your self-discipline. Life is too easy for most of us today. We live in an incredibly convenient world. You’re sat down on the sofa binge-watching The Crown on Netflix and you feel hungry, all you need do is open your phone go to your local pizza takeaway app and order your favourite pizza and within 30 minutes you have a hot steaming plate of delicious pizza in your lap. With the exception of answering the door, you hardly needed to move. Total calories expended—about 40. Your pizza will contain at least 1,200 calories and watching TV will amount to less than 100 calories.
But, when you know you need to get in your daily run, you have to pull yourself up, get off that sofa and go out and run. No excuses. To do that requires a huge amount of self-discipline and effort.
When it’s pouring down with rain, the temperature has plummeted into the minuses (less than 30 degrees Fahrenheit) and the wind is blowing a gale, the determination and self-discipline required to put on your running shoes and go outside is massive.
That kind of mental training prepares you to achieve anything. It teaches you to push through no matter how hard—or boring— something is. And you learn that to achieve anything takes consistent effort over a period of time.
Secondly, marathon running moves you away from the pernicious instant gratification trap many of us have fallen in to. The last twenty years or so has been fantastic. Technology has transformed almost everything we do. Sadly, the drawback to this is we expect everything to come to us at the push of a button.
I remember when you ordered something by mail order, at the bottom of every order was the notice “please allow 28 days for delivery” and we were absolutely fine with that. Today, if you live in the right area, you can order something online at 8 PM and it will be sat outside your door when you wake up the following morning. Nobody is prepared to wait 28 days for their delivery today.
I can order a box of food from the UK using the fantastic site, The British Corner Shop, and that box will be delivered half-way around the world here in Korea within three to four days. Something that was impossible just fifteen years ago.
But with that instant service has come an expectation of instant gratification, yet great things take time to develop. Completing a marathon might not change the world, but it will change your world. The time and effort you put into preparing shows you that by taking consistent steps five to six times per week you move yourself bit by bit to a successful outcome.
And that is how great businesses are built. It’s how amazing careers are developed and it’s how you build a successful life. None of these can be achieved at the push of a button. To achieve any kind of success takes time, effort and consistency. You have to push through the difficulties, you have to learn how to deal with adversity and you have to learn to stay focused on the outcome.
Marathon running does that. To finish your marathon, you need time, you need consistency and you need to put in the effort.
Another lesson marathon running teaches you is that Google, Facebook and books can only take you so far. You will never complete a marathon by just planning and researching, At some point, you have to get outside and run. You can plan and research as much as you like, but that will never prepare you for a marathon. The only way you can prepare for a marathon is to get outside and run.
Too often I come across people who tell me they want to start a blog or begin a podcast but first they must… You fill in the blank. There’s always more research to do, there’s always something else they must do before they start their blog or podcast. No! Research and thinking will never create a blog or podcast. Only by recording or writing content will you create a blog or podcast. Doing. Doing the hard work of sitting down in front of a screen and writing or recording. That’s how you create a blog or podcast.
Research has its place. When you embark on training for a marathon you will need to read about training programmes, the best running shoes etc. But at some point, that research has to stop and you have to take those first steps. You may have to start by jogging 100 metres and then walking 200 metres, those first steps can be painfully slow. But as you do it, you gradually find that those 100-metre jogs turn into 200 metres and then 300 metres and before long you are jogging 800 metres (almost ½ a mile) and that in turn becomes 1.600 metres or almost a mile. It’s a slow process, but consistently going out for your daily run moves you closer and closer towards your target.
And marathon running teaches you about setbacks and how to handle them. Part of preparing for a marathon means you will pick up a few running injuries. You will get calf strains, hamstring pulls and blisters. When you take the first few steps, you will wake up the next morning and your legs will feel as stiff as boards. You will suffer soreness like you’ve never felt before and if you are training through the winter the chances are you will sprain your ankles at some point too.
That’s all part of the process. You will learn about RICE—the acronym for Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation—you will have a freezer full of frozen peas. Not to eat, but to put on your knees, ankles and calves when you pick up those running injuries.
But these setbacks only make you mentally stronger. You learn the importance of taking a rest day. You learn that setbacks are part of the process and that the way through them is to be patient, follow the process—RICE—and within a few days or a couple of weeks, you will be back to your best and raring to go again.
Because our convenient world has taught us we can have almost anything at a push of a button we have lost the art of persistence, determination and hard work to achieve the things we want in life. Yet, the realities are that instant gratification is short-lived. It does not make us happy in the long-term, it leaves us craving for more and a feeling unfulfilled.
By taking up this marathon challenge, you will learn so much about yourself. You will reset your approach to life by knowing that the best things in life take effort, hard work and patience. And more importantly, when you cross the finish line, exhausted, you will experience an exhilaration you have not felt for years because you have achieved something that just a few months before you thought was impossible and you have done something only a tiny percentage of people in the world have achieved.
And remember, marathon running is not a race. It’s an achievement and everyone who crosses the finish line after running 26.2 miles is a winner.
So I challenge you to become a winner in 2021. Put the awful 2020 behind you and focus on achieving this one thing in 2021. Not only will you accomplish something incredible, but but you will also teach yourself that nothing is impossible given a little patience, a lot of action taken constantly over a period of time.
Good luck and thank you so much for listening to this podcast.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week it’s all about why, and how, you need to be ding a weekly planning session.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet
Get the Evernote Annual Planning Sheet
Create Your Own Apple Productivity System
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 159
Hello and welcome to episode 159 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So, do you do a weekly planning session every week? If not, have you asked yourself why? I ask that question because as I review the questions I get through my YouTube channel, my online courses and some of the issues I see in my coaching clients, most of these are related to the weekly planning session. You see, if you are not consistently doing a planning session each week, you are leaving yourself at the mercy of the events around you.
This week’s question goes to the heart of that problem and so hopefully you will learn why these sessions are important and what you need to look at so you create a plan for the week that is manageable, motivating and more importantly doable.
Ooh, before we start, I am being asked about this years Create Your Own Apple productivity course update. Yes, it’s coming. I am almost finished with the update and all being well it will be available from next weekend.
So, if you are already enrolled in the course, go to your learning centre dashboard next weekend and it should be there for you. And don’t worry, as always this will be a free update for any already enrolled in the course.
And, of course, if you are not enrolled and want to create your own productivity system using only Apple’s fantastic productivity apps, then you can enrol at any time and will receive updates every year.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for the week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jack. Jack asks, Hi Carl, I hear you talk about the importance of the weekly and daily review. I’ve never been able to find time to do these and was wondering if they really are all that important. Could you explain why you think they are necessary?
Hi Jack, thanks for this question
It is true, I have spoken a lot about the importance of the daily and weekly planning sessions. You see the reality is if you don’t have a plan for the week, then you will end up working on someone else’s plan and that is not likely to be a great plan for you.
But aside from that, one of the reasons we feel stressed out and overwhelmed is because our brains are not really our best friends when it comes to the things we have to do. If you do not have any idea where all your projects are, then your brain will take over and start telling you are behind, tasks are overdue and all sorts of horrors are just waiting for you around the corner.
Spending a few minutes going through your project notes gives you a reassurance you are on top of things and you will clearly see what needs to happen next. Once you know that, the only decision you need make is when you will do whatever it is you need to do next. And that does not take a lot of time.
These days, I do my weekly planning on a Saturday afternoon. That process of going through my project notes allows me time to decide which projects I will work on next week.
At any one time I have around ten to twelve active projects, but I cannot work on them all in one week. So, I need to decide which ones I will work on next week. Sometimes that decision is easy because the deadline for a particular project is approaching. Other times it can be more difficult.
Generally, I only work on two to three projects each week. Most of the time, one of those projects will be in the planning stage so most of the work will be reading, meetings and thinking. Other times, the next steps to completing the project are clear and all I need decide is which tasks I will do next week and even then these are mostly obvious.
Just knowing all my active projects are moving forward is enough to settle my anxious brain. And that, for me, is one of the most important reasons for doing a weekly planning session.
Another reason for the weekly planning session is it gives you time away from the daily hustle and bustle to get your inboxes clear. Now, for the most part, I will clear my inbox every 24 to 48 hours, but I can get a little lazy on a Thursday and Friday and leave the processing until Saturday. I love processing these on a weekend because there are fewer demands coming from clients and colleagues. I have time to think about what something is, whether it is connected to an active project or whether I really want to do the task. Once I know I want to do something with it, all I need to decide is when I will do it. Will I do it next week and if so, when? When will I do the task?
And for that, I will have my calendar open so I can see what my week looks like. Where my meetings and calls are and if I have any prearranged work blocks.
For instance, this week, I will be putting the finishing touches to my Apple Productivity Course. I have blocked Tuesday and Wednesday for doing that, which means I need to get all my writing and any other work done on Monday. Essentially, I will be losing two normal working days to project-specific work.
Now, doing the weekly planning session means I see that and can reduce the tasks I plan to complete next week.
You may have added a training workshop to your calendar three months ago and if you are not doing a planning session you could easily have forgotten about that. Suddenly on Monday you see the workshop and realise you have lost two full working days. That is the worst time to be reminded you will be away from work for two days.
Now, if you are using the Time Sector System, once you have looked at the list of your active projects, all you need do next is move the tasks you have in your next week folder to your this week folder and do a quick check of your This month folder to see if you can bring any of those tasks forward.
For me, I check the tasks in my next week folder before moving them forward just to see if they are still relevant. Often I have a task in there that either I have completed already, or I decide does not need doing next week. The less I have in my this week folder the better as far as I’m concerned.
You see the thing about doing a weekly planning session is it sets you up for the week ahead and it makes the daily planning so much easier.
All you are doing with the daily planning session is checking to see if things are still relevant and adding anything new you may have collected through the day. It gives you time to process your inboxes and check you are on plan to complete your objectives for the week.
So what do I mean about your objectives for the week?
One of the best ways to make each week count is to set yourself a number of objectives. Now, these do not need to be work-related, they can be personal goals. In my case, I am currently doing a 60-day exercise and steps challenge. My objective is to exercise every day and hit a 10,000 steps goal each day for 60-days. So, I need to make sure each day I am doing my exercise and hitting the steps goal. Likewise, this week it’s all about getting my Apple Productivity course updated and published. Those are my objectives for the week.
Having these objectives means I stay focused on what is important.
Just a quick tip on setting objectives. Don’t set too many. The more you set the more diluted they become. The sweet spot for me is two and at a push three. So this week it’s hitting my exercise objective and finishing the Apple Productivity course. Just having two means I wake up knowing exactly what I need to do and I do not need to be constantly checking my to-do list looking for something to do. I am very clear.
Now, these objectives could be things like sort out a problem customer and turn them into your biggest fan. It could be to get a project you have been procrastinating on started or it could be to make a decision on a new job. You choose. These do not have to be big objectives. The only thing is you will do whatever it takes to get them accomplished that week.
Last week, one of my objectives was to keep Friday night clear so I could have a Sean Connery night. I accomplished that and it was wonderful! What a fantastic actor Sean Connery was.
So how long does all this take?
Well, the weekly planning session takes around thirty minutes. It does depend on how many items you have in your inbox and how fast you are at making decisions. The thing is, the more you do this the faster you become at making decisions. I can plan out the whole week in thirty minutes, often less.
The daily planning session takes around ten to fifteen minutes. Although I have to be honest here, it does depend on how tired I am. The only thing you need to do in the daily planning session is to review your calendar for tomorrow to see what’s coming up and your task manager to make sure you have a realistic number of tasks. If you do the 2+8 Prioritisation method, this is where you do that. Decide what your two must-do tasks are and what your eight should-do tasks are.
For most people, the hardest session is doing the daily planning session. My advice is to set a time each day when you will do this. Remember, it is only ten to fifteen minutes so if your regular work time finishes at 6 PM, then set an alarm for 5:40pm to remind you to begin your daily planning session. Even if you have work to finish, just stop doing what you are doing and do the planning session. You can always go back to whatever you were doing before you stopped.
Likewise for the weekly planning session, having a set time each week helps you. My time is 12pm Saturday. I make a cup of tea, put on some music and start. If it helps you can create a checklist in your notes app to guide you, although once you become consistent at this you won’t need to checklist as everything will be automatic.
If you have never done a weekly planning session try it this week. Look at your active projects to see what needs to happen next and look at your calendar and see where your busiest days are and make sure you do not have too many tasks allocated for that day.
One final part of why you should be doing a weekly planning session is to make sure you are not over-committing yourself. No matter how much work you think you have—and that can be a lot—the two barriers you will always come up again are time and energy. Both of these are limited. Each day you only get 24 hours and depending on your physical and mental state, you only have a limited amount of energy.
Knowing this (and it doesn’t matter who you are, if you are human you are limited by these two factors) you need to limit the number of tasks you are trying to do each day. You are not going to be able to do everything no matter how urgent things are. You need to prioritise.
For me, I limit my weekly tasks to thirty and that includes my recurring areas of focus. That might not seem very much, but each day new inputs will come—trust me they do—and whenever I have allowed more than thirty tasks into my this week folder, at the end of the week, I have to reschedule a lot of tasks because I just did not have time to do them. Get serious about what you can and cannot accomplish each week and each day and stop trying to fool yourself. You cannot do everything so you need to pick what you can do and do that to the highest possible standard.
Find your limit and then use that as your guide to what you can accomplish in one week. All you need do is track how many tasks you are doing each day and each week—that is actually doing and completing—and then use that as your guide. It will take a little time to find your sweet-spot, but when you do, your weekly planning will take a much more meaningful roll in your productivity life.
I hope that has helped, Jack. Thank you for your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, I have a question that comes from a concept I introduced in the Time Sector System course. That of identifying your “core work” and once you have identified the work you are paid to do how do you prioritise that? Find out more in this week’s podcast.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet
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Time And life Mastery
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
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Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 158
Hello and welcome to episode 158 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Last week, I wrote about how I have been using the concept of prioritising my core work from when I began working in my early twenties. It just seemed a logical way to work. This is what I was employed to, so this is my priority.
Since then, I travelled through a few different industries and have come across a lot of evil little distractions that want me to focus on their unimportant crises. It happens to all of us. Those little temptations…go on just take a little look… Go on…what’s the worst thing that could happen?
As forms of communication get better and faster, these little temptresses and tempters become even more malicious and cunning and we can quickly find ourselves being dragged off—sometimes willingly—to places we really do not want to go.
So, this week, I want to share with you my strategies for staying focused on my core work and not allowing those malicious little temptations to side-track me on the unimportant.
Now before we get to that, I hope you are well into your planning for 2021 now. I know we live in very uncertain times. I for one was expecting to be booking my flights to Europe to visit my family for Christmas now, instead, I am having to plan a few days away in the Korean countryside will no chance of being able to leave the country over Christmas. Bit that does not mean I cannot plan 2021.
We might not know when we will regain our freedom of movement, but that does not necessarily mean we cannot improve our lot in life. Often adversity brings with it opportunity and we should not let those opportunities escape. We can take some time to look at them, decide if they are worth pursuing and build a plan to turn 2021 into, as David Guetta recently said, The biggest party year ever!
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Steve. Steve asks: Hi Carl, I recently took your Time Sector Course and loved it! Thank you. I do have one question though. You talk about “Core Work” in the course, could you give me some examples of what “core work” looks like on a daily basis?
Hi Steve, thank you for your question.
Okay, so how do we define “core work”? Well, your core work is the work you are paid to do. The work you were employed to do.
In its basic form, if you are employed as a salesperson, your core work is making sales. If you are a doctor, your core work is treating patients and if you are a pilot, your core work is flying the plane.
Now, I know from my own experience in sales, just making sales all day is not exactly what I have to do. I also have to do my expenses, fill our activity reports and perhaps update a company’s CRM system. Those tasks are not your core work. Those tasks, while important to your admin team and perhaps your sales manager, do not necessarily help you make more sales.
So identifying the work that directly contributes to you making more sales is identifying your core work. The work that will directly contribute to your income.
Let me give you a few examples from my own working history.
I began my work life in hotels. I started out as bar staff, then moved into the restaurant as a waiter and eventually became a duty manager. It was a great life and no one day was the same. I loved the movement—you never stopped moving—I loved the people and I loved the variety of problems that were thrown at me every day.
Now when I started working as bar staff, I was employed to serve drinks, keep the bar clean and tidy and take and serve bar food orders. Behind the door of the staff entrance was a cleaning schedule. Each day, a different part of the bar was required to be cleaned. This could be the glass shelves behind the bar where we put the whiskeys, brandies and liquors or it could be the fridges where we kept the fruit juices, tonics and bottled beers.
Not long after beginning my work there, I learned that the 8:30 to 4:30 PM shift was the quietest. We did serve tea and coffee as well as sandwiches and other small snacks, during the day, but there were few customers early in the day. So, if I was doing the 8:30 AM shift, I would start my day by making sure the fridges and shelves were fulling stocked, and the cleaning for that day was done first.
I knew if I left it until after lunch, there would be a good chance I would not be able to do that day’s cleaning and I would end up having to work over to get it done. So, for me, priority number one was doing the cleaning and make sure the bar was fully stocked ready for the evening.
Once that work was done, it did not matter how busy lunchtime or the afternoon was. I was ready. I could focus on giving outstanding service to our customers. I was able to do my job well and I believe that is why I was given the chance to become a duty manager.
I applied the same rules when I became a duty manager, as soon as I arrived at work I would do a hand over with the previous shift’s manager. We would go through the events that had occurred in the earlier shift and once that meeting was over I would go into the duty manager’s office and review the bookings we had for the day.
Once that was done I would go round the various departments to make sure everything was okay and ready for the shift. I wanted to know of any potential problems early so I could make sure we had a plan in place in case the worst-case scenario happened. This was my planning and preparation time. It gave me the overview of what was happening.
Again, as a duty manager, my job was to make sure everything ran smoothly and any guest issues were dealt with quickly, effectively and to the highest possible standard. Knowing what was happening and where helped me to make sure I discharged that duty.
Once that was done—usually my first hour of the day—I was ready to do my work. Mostly that was helping out where there was pressure. Check-in time, for example, I would help out reception, dinner time I would help out the restaurant or the bar (or even the kitchen!)
That was the core work of a duty manager.
When I became a lawyer, I made sure when I began the day I started with the key cases for that day. I had already reviewed my case laid the previous evening—even back then I was doing a daily mini-review—I wanted to know what was coming up, what needed my attention and I wanted a plan for the day before I started the day.
As a lawyer, we were at the mercy of the phone. Our clients had our direct dial number—we would never give them our mobile phone numbers—and so I knew if I was to get my core work done, writing contracts, checking legal documents and preparing court filings I needed to get them done before the phone got hot and it got hot every day.
But by applying a little analysis, I soon discovered the busiest time for the phone was between 9:30 and 11:30 AM. So, as I began my work at 8:30 AM I knew I had an hour to get my biggest tasks done. So that is what I did. I did not check the mail or my email, that would have been a tremendous waste of a valuable hour. I needed to get that big work done. That is why having a plan for the day prepared before I began the day I was able to stay on top of my core work. The work I was paid to do.
My core work has changed over the years, now as a teacher and coach, now I need to prepare materials and content. That is my core work today. And although I am no longer at the mercy of a constantly ringing phone, I do still get those inevitable emergencies each day. But, my task manager allows me to collect the work as it comes in, my calendar allows me to block time out to create my teaching materials and the content I put out each week and as my calendar is king, I know that if I am supposed to be preparing this podcast, then I should not be checking my email or instant messages.
I need ninety minutes to prepare this script, so I block those 90 minutes. It’s part of my core work. Checking email is not. I know I will have time later in the day to deal with email. But I must get this script prepared. That is core. The same applies to writing my blog post, recording my YouTube videos. All these are part of my core work. It is how I help people and helping people is my purpose.
Your core work will be different, it is for everyone. But to work out what your core work is go back to your job description. What were you hired to do? If you are self-employed as I am, what work brings in your income? That’s where you start. You will find your core work there.
As Jim Rohn and Brian Tracy say, planning a sales call is not your major work. Being in front of the customer is your major work. Planning sales calls, updating the company’s CRM system and checking your email is minor work. And yes, some of that minor work is important, but it is not your core work. Always remember that. Core work gets the job done, minor work often distracts us and leaves us feeling overwhelmed and busy. When you focus on your core work, the work that matters, you never feel busy because you are always moving the ball forward.
If you want to learn more about the Time Sector Course and how to build in your core work I write a blog post a few months ago about it. The Time Sector house shows you how to build in your core work to your recurring areas of focus so you never have to worry about this on a daily basis because when the work needs doing it will come up on your daily list.
I hope you found this helpful, Steve. Thank you so much for your question.
Thank you also to you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 157
This week, what can you do to stop overthinking and over planning.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
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Links:
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Get the FREE Annual Planning Sheet
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Time And life Mastery
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 157
Hello and welcome to episode 157 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
One issue I find that causes the biggest problems is overthinking and over planning. Now I suspect there are many reasons for this, partly because of the many books and articles written about the benefits of planning—and there are a lot of benefits. But we should always remember that planning and thinking never get the job done.
So, this week, I will attempt to answer this excellent question.
Now, don’t forget we are in the middle of planning season—which seems a little ironic given this week’s question—and that means you should be thinking about what you want to accomplish next year.
To help you, over on my downloads page you can get my FREE annual planning sheet and if you are an Evernote user, I have a template you can get that will put the planning sheet into your Evernote.
All the links and details are in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice.
This week’s question comes from Maria. Maria asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the valuable content you produce. I want to ask about planning. I find myself spending so much time planning and organising each week I find I have no time to finish my work. Do you have any ideas about finding time to plan and do the work?
Hi Maria, Thank you for your question.
One of the reasons I came up with the COD system several years ago was because I too found myself spending too much time planning. When I sat back and thought about the process, I realised all I needed was a simple and quick way to collect new inputs into a trusted place. I needed some time each day to organise those collected inputs and the rest of the time I needed to be doing the work. And that, in essence, is what COD is. Collect, Organise and Do.
Now, breaking it down, Collecting is something you should be doing automatically. A new input comes your way, you collect it. Job done. Once it is collected it is in your system.
The area I found most difficult to sort out was the organising and doing. I realised I was spending far too much time organising each day. It was a joy to be reorganising my lists and changing typefaces and creating new perspectives and views. But all that organising and fine-tuning was not doing the work. That is why eventually I came up with the ratio of spending 90% of my time doing and 10% planning and organising. That meant in a typical eight hour day you spend forty minutes or so planning and organising. As time has gone by, I have made my own processing more efficient and now aim to spend 95% doing and only 5% planning and doing. That’s what eventually led to the development of the Time Sector System.
So, in any given day, if I spend more than thirty minutes planning and organising, I know I need to readjust.
But to get to that stage takes time and practice. It’s not something you can do overnight. You need to learn how to process inboxes quickly—without overthinking things. For instance, with the Time Sector System, the only decision you need make is “when am I going to do this task?” As there are no projects, labels, tags or contexts in the Time Sector System, you do not have to waste time trying to decide which project it goes to (or if it a project by itself) or whether you need a computer, phone or some other tool. It’s simple and it gets the job done.
But how do you stop overthinking and over planning?
The first thing is to be absolutely clear about what your outcome is. If your outcome is a bit fuzzy, you will be drawn into thinking too much about it. By that, I mean unclear outcomes leads to unclear action steps.
Now one of my favourite sports is the World Rally Championship. I’ve been following it since the days of Juha Kankunnen, Carlos Sainz and Colin McRae in the 1990s and the incredible Lancia, Toyota and Subaru teams of that era.
One thing that has always struck me about motorsport teams is they are completely focused on the outcomes. When a new season begins, the focus is on winning the championship for both the drivers and the manufacturer. These top manufacturers want to win and the whole team from the drivers to the mechanics and design engineers have that one goal in mind. The whole team, all departments, everybody start with a very clear outcome.
For each round of the championship. The goal is the same. You cannot win the championship in one single round, to win a championship you have to be at the top of the leaderboard by the end of the rally. It’s about winning consistently.
Monte Carlo is the first round every year, all teams go there to win the race. If they don’t they go back to their base, analyse why they did not win and make any adjustments that will put them into a stronger position next time.
When your whole team is focused on the same outcome, you never get bogged down in details. The question will always be: what do we have to do to win?
Let’s look at a simple example. If you decide to start a project to lose weight and get healthy, that may seem a great goal particularly if you state it as “I will lose weight and get healthy by the end of the year”.
On the surface that may seem a very clear goal. But, it is not. You see, there are too many unanswered questions. For example, how much weight do you want to lose and what does “get healthy’ mean?
What happens with an unclear outcome like this is you will spend far too much time researching. You give yourself an excuse not to start because there will always be something else to read or watch.
Instead, if you state the goal as “I will lose 20 pounds in weight and remove sugar and refined carbs from my diet by the end of the year”
Now, in this example, the second part is easy. You do not need to do too much research you just need to stop eating sugar and refined carbs. The first part, to lose 20 pounds may need a little research on the best and healthiest way to do it, but, your outcome is very clear and really to lose weight, it’s simply all about reducing your calorie intake.
Another way having clear outcomes works is once you know exactly what it is you want to accomplish, your brain will help you to achieve it. Tony Robbins has a great analogy for this. Having very specific and clear outcomes is like being a modern-day missile. Once the missile is locked onto its target it will overcome any obstacle to make sure it hits its target.
Now let’s look at a more every-day example. Imagine you work in sales and you want to increase your prospecting activities. You decide to do that, you need to make a number of phone calls each day. So, you create a list of names and numbers.
Now, here the problem is you could have a list of over 1,000 people to contact. If you say I will call these people every day until the list is done, you will procrastinate. On day one you will see a list of 1,000 plus people to call and you will try to find a way to break it down. You are not going to be able to call 1,000 people in one day, but your brain is trying to solve the problem and it thinks it must call those people ASAP.
Instead, if you go that one step further and take that list and say. “ I will call ten people from this list every day for 100 days” now you have a very clear outcome. You will not resist. All you have to do is call ten people today. That’s all you need to focus on.
It’s the same with writing a book. Preparing a report or presentation. Be very clear about what you want to accomplish and by when and your brain will help you. If not, your brain will hinder you. It will get in your way and give you plenty of excuses.
I see this a lot with people who want to start their own business consultancy. The key to starting a successful business consultancy is to build credibility in your chosen field. How do you build credibility? Well, unless you are lucky and already have a reputation in that field, you need to start writing blog posts, creating YouTube videos and or podcasts. You will never build a successful consultancy by leaving your current employment on a Friday and opening the doors to your consultancy on Monday expecting people to start calling you. It does not happen that way.
It takes years of putting out content to build credibility. So, start writing about your chosen subject. Start by setting a project to write one blog post and a podcast each week. That’s your project and your outcome. This will stop you from wasting time trying to decide which software you need to write the blog post with, where you will host your podcast and which day you will post. That is incidental stuff. It’s easy to find out where to post a blog post and host a podcast. The hard part is doing the writing and recording. And remember, without content, it does not matter how fantastic your software and hosting services are. No content, no blog or podcast.
Now how does this work for people who do not want to lose weight, get healthy and start their own business consultancy?
The same principles apply. Start the week with a plan and by that, I mean a set of outcomes you want to accomplish. That could be to finish a particular section of a project, it could be to resolve an outstanding issue with an unhappy client or to exercise six times that week.
If you have a set of realistic outcomes for the week, your brain will work with you. If you rely on a to-do list linked to hundreds of projects you’re not going to move very much forward. You have no clear outcomes. And I am sure you have already noticed, the incoming work never stops. It just keeps coming. And that just leaves you feeling overwhelmed and overworked.
When your to-do list is organised by projects, you will spend far too much time inside your projects list looking for work to do and more often than not you choose either the easiest to check off or end up working on tasks that are latest and loudest and find yourself never moving anything significant forward.
This is why I consistently stress the importance of the daily and weekly planning sessions. Spend around twenty to thirty minutes each week devising a set of outcomes you want to accomplish that week, and give yourself ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day to create a daily plan for the next day that will take you towards achieving your weekly outcomes.
This way, you will not need to waste time breaking down projects into tiny steps. If one of your outcomes for the week is to prepare and finish a great presentation for your next business meeting, the only task for that in your daily list would be a recurring task every day for that week that says “work on presentation for next week’s business meeting”. All your notes, resources and presentation file will be somewhere else—your notes app and file folders—and all you need do is open up your presentation file and notes related to that project and get working on the project.
Likewise, if you have an unhappy customer that you need to sort out, then really the only task in your task manager would be “sort out customer A’s problem” and either call the customer and find out what you need to do to make things right or call your colleagues you may have the answer. You do not need ten sub-task to sort that out. The outcome is clear—make customer A happy. Your brain will figure out what to do.
So there you go, Maria. I hope that helps you. Remember, focus on the outcomes, not the steps. Trust your brain. It’s been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years and based on your own life experiences it will find a way to achieve whatever your outcomes are.
Thank you for your question and thank you to you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering all you need do is email me your question at carl@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the sow notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 156
This week, it’s all about how to find the time to set up a system when you are already stressed out and overwhelmed.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
How To be More productive Blog Post
Time And life Mastery
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 156
Hello and welcome to episode 156 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
One of the more common objections to taking the time to build a productivity system is a belief that a person is far too busy to get organised. It’s an objection that has always made me smile because I often ask why a person is so busy they don’t have time to organise their work in the first place? It’s because they don’t have any kind of system for managing all the inputs that are coming their way in the first place and leads to a build-up of backlog and trying to remember everything in their heads.
It’s a vicious circle. No system, more inputs, less time and an overwhelming feeling of things spiralling out of control. And that ultimately leads to very dark places such as ill-health caused by stress and depression.
So, how do you manage all these inputs and find the time to get control of all the work you must do? That’s what I am answering this week.
Now, before I do get to this week’s question, October is the best time to begin planning the coming year. And, well 2020 has not turned out exactly as many of us had hoped.
In order to help you develop an achievable plan and to help you dive deep into your dreams and goals and bring them forward so you can begin making progress on them, I have reduced the price of my Time And Life Mastery course.
I know it is difficult to maintain focus on our goals and dreams, but while it may be difficult it is not impossible, and I devised a course that helps you to uncover those goals and dreams and shows you how to build them into your everyday life so you can start making progress on them.
Time And Life Mastery is my premium course and it is packed full of ideas, methods and strategies that will help you turn dreams into actionable goals.
So for a short period of time, you can buy this course, which is normally $99.00, for just $74.99. That’s a 25% saving. It’s a course that will not only show you how to build a life you want, it will also inspire you to take action.
I do hope you will join me on the course. I put my heart and soul into this because I know it works. I have been using these principles myself over the last ten years and it has allowed me to start two companies, get my health in order and to leave the so-called rat race of working for a company and being told what to do by boss and build a life I am in control of and love living and that energises me every day.
I hope you will join me in this course and turn 2021 into the year you wanted for 2020.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tina. Tina asks: Hi Carl, I’ve taken a few of your courses and love them. The problem I have is I just cannot get on top of my work. I have so much to do and feel there is so little time to do it. I end up having to catch up with my work in evenings and at weekends and I am sick and tired of this. I have no time to put into practice all the things I have learned. I get so many messages and emails from my customers, and my bosses don’t help. Is there anything I can do to just get a little control?
Hi Tina, thank you so much for your question.
I know this is common—you are certainly not alone. I’ve come across clients of mine that have thousands of tasks on a backlog list that go back more than 12 months. When you find yourself in this situation it can feel like you are drowning and the temptation to just give up can be strong.
But there is hope.
The first thing to do is just stop. Stop trying to catch up and take a day off. Okay, I know, you are thinking how can a day off solve this problem? Well, the thing to realise is continuing as you are is obviously not working. What will happen if you don’t stop and change the way you are working currently? Something is going to break. Either your health will or your career will. Neither of which are particularly good outcomes.
So, what do you do in this day off?
Well, the first thing to understand is by stopping you put a stop to all inputs for 24 hours. I know, your email inbox will continue to fill up and if you are using Slack, Microsoft Teams or Twist, I am sure those inboxes will continue to fill up too. Let them. You need to put a 24 hour stop in new inputs.
A good tip here is before you take that day off, tell everyone you are away and will not be checking messages and emails—you can set up an auto-reply for this.
Now the reason for taking a day off is to set up a basic system. You need to Implement COD. COD stands for Collect, Organise and Do and what that means is you need to set up a system to collect all these inputs quickly and efficiently, you then need to organise these inputs somewhere and you need to be spending enough time each day doing.
Now, I am not sure what tools you are using at the moment, but you do need a task manager, a calendar and a notes app. Set up your task manager so you can collect tasks both on your mobile phone and your computer as quickly as you can.
Now to get fast at collecting takes a little time and practice, but you must do this. With all the inputs coming at you, you need a simple list of everything coming in so you can stay focused on whatever work you are doing at the moment.
Collecting everything into one place—a place you need to trust—means you are by-passing your head. As David Allen points out, “your head is a terrible office”, it is not going to remember everything. Your brain is designed to solve problems and be alert to threats to your life. Calling back a customer may be important to your work, but your brain will never treat it as urgent. It’s not a threat to your life, so it drops very quickly to the bottom of your brain’s priorities. Never trust you will remember something later. You won’t, not if you begin to feel hungry—your brain will always prioritise that over remembering to reply to your boss’s email.
Write it down. Get it into your inbox.
Now, once you have a collection system set up, you need to have a system for organising your work. Now, here is where things get interesting. I could give you a long, detailed explanation of a system of managing your projects and files, but there is no guarantee it will work for you. The best organisation system is always going to be personal to you.
For example, I manage my tasks by when I will do them—the Time Sector System. My project files are managed in my cloud storage system and my project notes are managed in my notes app. That works for a lot of people, but not everyone. A lot of people prefer the old fashioned way of managing their tasks by projects and tags. If that works for you, that’s great. Find the best way to manage your tasks and projects that works for you.
But the basics still apply. You need a place to keep your project files—that could be your customer files instead of projects if you are in customer support. You need a way to organise your tasks. Not all tasks need doing today or even this week. I have around twenty tasks that can be done next month, so these are in my next month folder. I also have seven tasks in next week already and we are only on Tuesday.
Once you have that structure set up, you can process everything you have collected once or twice a day depending on how busy you are. I process my inbox at the end of the day, you may find you need to do it twice a day. In that case process your inbox just before you go to lunch—decide what needs to be done that afternoon and what can be put off until another day. Do the same before you close down the day.
Now the purpose here is to get you to start prioritising. The reality is we cannot do everything. No matter how much we want to do everything. Somethings are best done by other people or we just have to put our hands up and admit we do not have the time or skills to do whatever we are being asked to do.
I get a lot of students on my courses asking me to show them how to set up the Time Sector System in Things 3 or Notion. The reality is, I do not know enough about these apps and the time it would take for me to learn them and then put together a video would be too long. I just don’t have time for it and I have to politely decline. You have got to understand you cannot do everything and you have to learn how to say no.
Now, when you are processing at the end of the day, you will discover a lot of the things you collected earlier have either been done, resolved themselves or are no longer necessary. Delete these. Deleting tasks is not bad. It is one of the best things you can do.
Processing is simple. You start at the top of the list, decide what something is, whether you need to do anything about it and if so, when will you do it and where will you store it.?
You may have collected a task about a customer who needs to set up a meeting with one of your sales team. Is this something for you to do or should you send the request to your sales team? In most cases this is a sales team task, so send the customer details to your sales team. Now, do you want to follow up on this? Hopefully, you trust your sales team enough to know they will act on it, so you can now remove the task.
You may have a task where you need to send a file to one of your colleagues, if you have the file handy, then do it now. Just get it off your plate and move on to the next task.
Now, the trick is to process frequently so you get faster at it. It takes time to develop these skills. I can process twenty or so tasks in less than five minutes. But then I have been doing this for nearly twelve years, so it has become natural for me to go through an inbox and make decisions about what something is and what needs doing. I can go through 100 emails in less than 20 minutes.
Processing, organising and doing are two entirely different things. When I process my email inbox, for instance, I do not do email. I go through the list and decide what something is, do I have to do anything about it? And if not, is it important or can I delete it? I then put actionable email into a folder called “Action This Day” and give myself thirty or so minutes at the end of the day to clear that folder.
A quick tip here. If you reply to email too fast you end up in email ping pong. That just increases the number of emails you get each day. Instead, reply to email once a day. That way you control the speed and you stop people from using email as a way to contact you urgently. Once they learn you only reply to email once a day if something is urgent they will find a better way to communicate with you.
And here is another thing you need to be aware of. If you make yourself too available, you will always be overwhelmed. Make it difficult to contact or interrupt you. Even if you are low down in the command chain you can still do this by controlling when you reply. Reply instantly and people will soon expect that of you at all times. You need to manage expectations. Slow down your replies.
Taking this day off will do wonders for you, Tina. It will allow you to set up a system, put into place a way of managing your work and to get everything on your mind off it and into your system.
Once you have your system set up, you must commit to it. Always collect the inputs into your inbox. Always process your inbox at the end of the day and always have a plan for the day. I know, that sounds like a lot to do, but if you commit to it, stick with, it soon becomes a habit and then you will find all that stress, overwhelm and overwork starts to disappear. I know It is not easy, but what will the consequences be if you do not do it?
Thank you, Tina, for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like answering, then please email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week the question we all ask: How to be more productive
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
How To be More productive Blog Post
Time And life Mastery
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 155
Hello and welcome to episode 155 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Last week, I wrote about how to be more productive on my blog and it elicited a lot of questions related to that question: How can we become more productive.
The reality is, it’s not rocket science. More of than not what causes out difficulties with productivity are the tools we are using. For some it’s that they are not using any tools, for others it’s they are using the wrong tools altogether. This week, I will explain all so you too can begin down the road of improving your overall productivity.
Now before we get to the answer, as I mentioned last week, October is the best time to begin planning the coming year. And, well, 2020 has not turned out exactly as many of us planned.
In order to help as many people as I can to develop an achievable plan to really help you dive deep into your dreams and goals and bring them forward so you can begin making progress on them. I know it is difficult to maintain focus on these goals and dreams, but while it may be difficult it is not impossible, and I devised a course a few years ago that helps you to uncover those goals and dreams and to show you how to build them into your everyday life so you can start making progress on them.
Time And Life Mastery is my premium course and it is packed full of ideas, methods and strategies that will help you to turn dreams into actionable goals. So for the next few days, you can buy this course, which is normally $99.00 for just $74.99. That’s a 25% saving and it’s a course that will not only show you how to build a life you want, it will also inspire you to take action.
I do hope you will join me on the course. I put my heart and soul into this because I know it works. I know because I took delivery of my Range Rover Velar two weeks ago, and that is the start for my wife and me to begin building the lifestyle we want for our long-term future. (Those of you who have taken the course will understand that reference to the Range Rover)
I hope you will join me in this course and turn 2021 into the year you wanted for 2020.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Laura. Laura asks, Hi Carl, I’ve been trying to find ways of getting my work done. I’ve tried all the apps, and read blog posts, books and watched videos, yet I still find I cannot get all my work done. I always feel overwhelmed. Can you tell me how someone can become more productive and better with their time management? Is there some secret?
Hi Laura, thank you for your question and thank you to everyone else who wrote to me about this very topic.
Now, As I wrote in my blog post, to become more productive you need to become very aware of how you spend your time. Now when I. Say become aware of how you are spending your time, I mean from a bigger picture point of view.
Let me explain.
The bigger picture view is where you can see how much time you are spending on doing the work—work that matters, and how much time you spend not doing the work that matters.
Now, of course, this means identifying what “work that matters” means. Work that matters is work you have decided needs doing. It is the tasks and your task list and it is the meetings and obligations you have on your calendar.
You also need to be very aware of how much time you are spending inside your productivity apps. Now let’s get something straight here. While planning and knowing what you need to do is important, I do not deny that time spent planning, processing and reorganising your lists of work is not doing the work. In the COD system that is the “O” - organising. Organising is not doing. Doing is doing.
I remember when I was first introduced to Notion. I had seen the videos on YouTube, I had read their website and I was so excited. Finally, I thought, here was an app that would help my planning better than any app that had come before it.
I hurriedly installed it on my computer and began setting it up.
Six hours later, I was still not quite happy with my set up, so I skipped dinner and carried on. A further two hours later, I was tired. I stopped. I then opened up Todoist to see what work needed doing. I had begun the day with ten tasks. And there, in my today view, were still ten tasks. I had done none of my work. I had spent over eight hours trying to set up Notion how I wanted it and had done nothing important all afternoon.
What a complete waste of time. I gave up with Notion, deleted the app snd swore I would never again make that mistake.
What you need to realise is when an app developer creates an app, one of the metrics used to convince investors to invest in their startup is the amount of time a user spends using the app every day. So, it is in the best interests of the app developer to encourage you to spend time inside the app.
Now, I am not suggesting that is Notion’s intention, I do not know their intentions. But you look at almost any pitch an app startup gives and somewhere in their pitch will be that metric.
Now if your goal is to become more productive, spending more time inside a, so-called, “productivity” app is not being more productive. Being more productive is getting your work done to the highest possible standard in the least amount of time.
So how do you do that?
Well, firstly make sure you are spending enough time each day doing your work. Of course, that is much easier to say than do.
But once you become very aware of how you are spending your time it does become easier. For instance, I use my calendar app to block time out each day to work on my core work. The work that really matters. Blocking time on my calendar takes around thirty-seconds. I do it the night before and I only block time out for the next day. I look for the gaps and if I feel I need an hour or two to do some specific work, I will block that time out.
Let’s say, for example, I want to write a blog post. I know I need ninety minutes for that task. I look at my calendar and see that between 1:30 pm and 3:00 pm my calendar is clear of meetings. So I will block it.
At 1:15 pm the next day I get an alert on my computer to say “writing time in 15 minutes”. So, I will start to finish off whatever I was doing. Take a quick five or ten-minute break and then start writing. I did not need to go to my to-do list manager. I know already my plan was to write the blog post, so my calendar alerted me and I begin.
Now, here’s the thing. It’s great to say “I have to do my work”, but how serious are you about your work if you allow distractions to get in your way? I’ve heard all the excuses. I have to be available for my customers, my boss, my colleagues and on and on that list goes.
Okay, that may be true. So, what’s more important? Doing your important work or being available 24/7 for your boss, customers, colleagues etc? You can’t really do both. You need to make a decision.
Here’s the thing though, you customers, boss and colleagues will never ever be upset or angry with you if you are not available for an hour or so because you are doing the work that matters. Seriously, if you want to become more productive you do need to make those decisions. Yes, they are difficult decisions, but again, what’s important here?
Now, what do you do about all those meeting invitations? There’s a lot of those and somehow you need to get control of them. If you find you are attending meetings five to six hours a day you are going to need to have a conversation with your boss. Let’s say three out of the five days you spend five hours in meetings. That leaves you will just three hours to get your work done.
If you struggle to finish your work because you are attending so many meetings, then you need to develop a different strategy. One way that can help is to make sure you plan out your week. Planning out your week is not something you can do in five or ten minutes. It takes a little longer than that. When you plan out the week what you are doing is deciding what needs to be done that week.
Now what I have found is when I have a set of outcomes for the week—work that I want to get completed by the end of the week—I can create a preliminary plan and if I cannot complete something one day, I can move it forward to another day that week. The goal is to achieve my outcomes by the end of the week not try and do everything in one day. This means if I am flooded with meetings, I can designate Thursday or Friday as a no meetings day and make my excuses or ask for the meeting to rearranged.
If you have some control over your schedule you could create a permanent day as a no-meetings day. I do this on Tuesdays. I don’t allow any meetings or calls to be scheduled on a Tuesday. This means I can use Tuesdays as a focus day to do those bigger tasks that require more than two or three hours to work on.
Ultimately, you need to set some boundaries. I know if you are low down in the command chain this can be difficult, but having that conversation with the powers that be can help here. What’s the worst that can happen?
The key really is having a plan and a set of outcomes for the week. If you have these written down and you remind yourself each day of your outcomes for the week, you will be surprised how much you actually get done each week. This is a far better strategy than having no plan and not knowing what you need to do each day. I can assure you if you don’t have a plan, you will end up working on someone else’s plan and that is never ever a good strategy for you. That way you end up helping other people to do their work and find yourself in meaningless meetings wasting your valuable time.
So, if you want to get serious about becoming more productive, then monitor how you currently spend your time. How much time are you doing work that matters? How much time are you planning and organising (or as we used to call it shuffling paper)? If you are spending more than 5% of your time planning and processing then your system is far too complex. Simplify it. Do you really need all those sub-projects and tasks? Do you need all those tags and labels? Maybe you do, but perhaps you do not. If you are not ever searching or using tags then don’t use them.
I hope that has helped, Laura. Thank you for your question
Don’t forget if you have a question you would like answering, then all you need do is email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s podcast, how do you stay focused on your plan for the week?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Why Your System Must Start At An Area of Focus Level
Your Digital Life 3.0 Online
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 154
Hello and welcome to episode 154 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So, if you are listening to this podcast you obviously have some interest in becoming better organised and more productive. And, I guess you have set up a system… Hopefully, that system is based around COD (Collecting, organising and doing).
Now if you are also doing your weekly planning, how many of you are able to stick with your weekly plan? In theory, if you sit down on the weekend and give yourself twenty to thirty minutes to plan out what you want to accomplish in the week, then you should be getting a lot of your important work done… In theory. In practice, that’s a lot harder to do, and it takes a lot of effort and focus to accomplish.
But it is possible and this week I will share with you some of the strategies I use to make sure I stay focused on my plan throughout the week.
Now, before we get to the question, If you haven’t already done so, you can download my annual planning sheet as well as my areas of focus worksheet (for free) so you can begin planning out next year. Yep, 2020 has not turned out how we expected, and I am sure many of you have had to make some pretty dramatic changes to your plans, but no matter how well or badly this year has gone for you, we all get another chance next year and taking the time over the next three months to plan out what you want to accomplish next year will reap some incredible rewards.
So, head over to my website, carlpullein.com and download these very helpful planning sheets and make sure you are setting yourself up for an incredible 2021.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Beth. Beth asks: Hi Carl, I’ve followed David Allen’s Getting Things Done and recently your Time Sector System and the problem I have is no matter how well I plan out the week, I very rarely do what I plan to do. I am constantly interrupted by my colleagues and staff as well as my customers. Is this normal or is there anything I can do to help me stay focused on my plans?
Hi Beth, thank you for your question.
I think we all struggle here. It’s very easy to make a plan on a Sunday afternoon when we are away from our normal environment and then arrive at work on a Monday morning and thrown into the emergencies and crises of the day and our carefully crafted plan is thrown out of the window.
As Mike Tyson apparently famously said: “We all have a plan until we get punched in the face”.
So how can we stay focused on our plan for the week and still manage the emergencies and crises that will inevitably come up in the week?
The first thing to do is plan to do less.
It’s very easy to plan things out when our phones are not ringing and our colleagues and staff are not asking questions all day. This often leads us into a false sense that we can do a lot more than we really can. If I am being truthful to myself I know that I can realistically only focus on one or two projects each week.
Sure, I would love to be able to work on five or six projects, but realistically, with everything being thrown at me, as well as my core work, no matter how much I want to work on those five or six projects it just isn’t going to happen.
That said, in my team, there is only one person. Me. It might be different if you manage a team of people where you can delegate responsibility to your team members, but even then there is only a limited amount of work you can focus on each week.
It is far better to focus on one or two things each week and make sure they are done to the highest possible standard than to try and do everything and find your standards fall and you miss very important tasks.
So, when you are doing your weekly plan, choose the projects that are the most important or urgent and prioritise those for the week.
If you have a lot of projects falling due around the same time, you may need to renegotiate the deadlines. Never be afraid of doing this. This is not a reflection on your abilities to do your work. This is you demonstrating you are in control of your time and if you renegotiate a deadline giving your customer or boss enough notice you are unlikely to be refused.
Problems occur when you call your customer or your boss the day before the deadline and inform them you are not going to make the deadline. Then you are asking for trouble and you are going upset your customer and your boss.
So when doing your weekly plan make sure you review your project deadlines and take care not to have too many deadlines at the same time.
Next up, is to put some structure into your day. Now by this, I mean set aside two or three hours each day for focused work. This is usually best done first thing in the morning. If you start work at 8:30 AM, then set aside 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM for your focused work.
By “focused work” I mean you turn off notifications and email and just focus on the work you have planned to do for the day. If you can get yourself those two to three hours each day, you are going to get a lot done. Problems happen when we allow ourselves to be interrupted by every notification we receive—it’s just not conducive to getting important work.
I know we think we have to be available 24/7, but that is just not true, no matter who you are.
When it comes to email the way I see it is, if my house was on fire, my neighbour is never going to email me to tell me. They are either going to call me or bang on my door. Real emergencies are never communicated to via email so stop thinking email (or Slack or MS Teams etc) are emergency channels. They are not. Real emergencies are delivered either in person or via your phone.
If you do lead a team, explain the communication channels to your team. Make sure they understand that between certain times of the day you should not be interrupted unless it is a real emergency and make sure you explain what a ‘real emergency’ is.
Another tip I would give you is to set aside some time towards the end of the day for communications. I find if I dedicate an hour or so towards the end of the day to deal with my communications I can stay on top of all my email and messages without much effort. You will find trying to stay on top of all your communications sporadically throughout the day tiresome and things will inevitably slip through the net.
There’s no problem doing two or three processing sessions through the day, I generally process first thing in the morning, just after lunch and before I start my evening coaching calls. Here to emphasis is on processing, not doing.
What I mean is I go through my inbox and move any actionable emails to my Action This Day folder. Then, when I finish my coaching calls for the day, I sit down for an hour and do my communications. I respond to my actionable emails and messages in one go.
One of the advantages of this method is you do not get caught up in email ping pong. You are only sending one reply to an individual per day. And remember, if something is urgent, then don’t use email as the main method of communication. Jump on a call, explain what needs to be done and if necessary follow up the action steps by email. But don’t rely on email as the main source of communication.
Another area that helps to keep you focused on your plan for the week is to do a daily mini-review. Now the keyword here is “mini”. It should not take you more than ten to fifteen minutes to review what you have done for the day, making sure you are moving forward on your plan for the week and make any adjustments required in order to put you back on or keep you on track for the week.
You see, no matter how well we plan our week, as I mentioned at the beginning, your plan is going to change once it hits the emergencies and urgencies of the week and sometimes you are going to have to drop everything to deal with those emergency. By having a few minutes at the end of the day to reassess and adjust the plan, you are going to find you get a lot more done than if you just give up the plan and allow the week’s events to drag you each day.
So, when planning the week, make sure you plan less than you think you can do. If you do have an incredible week, you can always add more work later.
Have a structure to your week. Give yourself two to three hours each day for focused work and some time towards the end of the day for dealing with your communications. In between those times, keep things as flexible as you can soy do have time each day to deal with the unknowns.
Make sure you are clear about how to communicate with you. Keep only a few channels open—you do not have to be available on all channels. Make sure the key people you work with understand exactly how to communicate with you in an emergency.
And finally, set aside ten to fifteen minutes each day to review progress against your plan so you can make any necessary adjustments.
It’s not difficult, but you do need to commit to maintaining a structure and to resist the temptation to let everything fall down once the inevitable crises of the week begin.
Thank you, Beth, for sending in your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Remember, if you have a question you would like answering all you need do is email me—carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
So, you have all your tools—great notes apps, great writing apps and a fantastic system set up but how do all these tools come together and work for you rather than the other way round? That’s the question I am answering this week.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Why Your System Must Start At An Area of Focus Level
Your Digital Life 3.0 Online
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 153
Hello and welcome to episode 153 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Well, 2020 is into its final leg now. The final quarter has begun and it is this time of year that I love. Not only because we get to see amazing autumnal colours here in Korea, but I also start my planning for the next year. And while 2020 has not worked out exactly how I expected—I think we have all found that—it does mean things can get better and we will one day be able to start travelling and seeing this amazing world.
What I mean by beginning my planning season is I use a templated note I keep in Evernote that covers different areas of my life and encourages me to think about ways I can improve those areas. Areas such as my business, my family life, my health and fitness and my goals. It’s a review of where I am and where I want to be and I seek ways to bridge the gap.
The next two months is where I brainstorm ideas and in December I start to make decisions about which of those areas I will focus on and how I will achieve the outcomes I want. Because I give myself plenty of time to plan things out, it means I am not scrambling at the end of December to put together a list of New Year's resolutions, instead, I have a carefully curated list of real areas I want to improve and grow.
I have put a link in the show notes to my downloads page where you can get yourself a copy of this planning sheet and you too can start the process of making those improvements to your life that you feel need improving.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Gustav. Gustav asks: Hi Carl, I am a great fan of your COD system and in terms of collecting and organising things, my system fits like a glove. But when it comes to the “Do“part where I produce articles, conference papers, blog posts etc. I still encounter difficulties.
Would you mind giving some insights of your content production flow and handover between your tools as this where I find the biggest difficulties?
Hi Gustav. Thank you for your question.
I thought the best way to answer your question would be to go through how I develop different types of content starting with my regular content such as this podcast, my blog and YouTube videos and then onto bigger content such as an online course.
So, let’s start with my blog as I think this is the easiest one.
I write a blog post every week, and so I need a consistent stream of topics and for that, I have a simple note in Evernote where I keep all topics. Now, the problem I encountered when I began writing regularly was getting my topic ideas into the note in Evernote. That problem was solved by the brilliant app, Drafts. Drafts is a simple, yet very powerful notes app. Now, it’s not really your traditional notes app in that while you can keep your notes in Drafts, Drafts is at it’s best when you use it as a launcher for your other apps.
Drafts makes it incredibly easy to grab an idea into your iPhone or iPad (or desktop) and then send it to a predetermined note in Evernote. So let’s say as I am driving, I get an idea for a blog post. All I need do is tap the bottom left of my Apple Watch and that will start the dictation feature of the Drafts app on my watch and I can dictate the idea straight into Drafts. Later, I can then pull up the actions sheet in Drafts and append that idea to a note in Evernote. I never need to open Evernote.
This saves so much time and reduces the resistance. When you have thousands of notes in Evernote it can be difficult to find the note you want to add an idea to. With Drafts, you don’t need to find the note as it does it all for you.
This means on a Sunday night before I go to bed, I look at my blog post ideas list in Evernote and choose the topic I want to write about tomorrow.
And that nicely brings me on to the writing process. I write my blog posts every Monday morning. Once my morning calls are complete, I open up my writing App, Ulysses and I begin writing. As I have already chosen the topic I will write about, I don’t need to go looking for a topic. I just begin writing and for the next ninety minutes, that’s what I do.
As I am writing, if I find a statement or example requires a link, I will look for a suitable link as I am writing or as I am editing the article.
Editing is done the next day. I like to leave the first draft for 24 hours to settle. I also find when I come back to an article the next day I see more mistakes than I would if I tried editing the article immediately after writing it.
Once edited, I will select the image using Unsplash.com or Pexels, create a duotone image from the file and then schedule the article to be published at 10 AM on a Wednesday (that’s Korean time) and it’s done.
That really is pretty much the process I follow for all my content. This podcast script is written on a Tuesday morning and edited on a Wednesday or Thursday. The script is written again in Ulysses and the questions I get from you wonderful listeners are kept in a note in… You guessed it, Evernote.
Now, for my YouTube videos, the process is slightly different. I have a note in Evernote that has space for three videos. I write out the topic for each video into a table in the note and then add notes and ideas for the video.
The capturing process is the same as everything else. Ideas begin in Drafts then get moved to Evernote and then that Evernote note is my reference material for when I am preparing the content. If I find any links, images, videos or anything else I want to include in any of this content, it is added to the note.
Why I do things this way is because I have everything I need to write the article or record the video in one place instead of having everything all over the place. It reduces the chance I will be side-tracked by a distraction and allows me to just get started and create.
For the bigger projects such as writing a book, again, all my research materials are in Evernote. Now for a project like writing a book, I would create a notebook for the project. That way I can clip webpages, create project timelines and a separate note for chapter ideas.
Now, for online courses, I use Apple’s Numbers spreadsheets. That’s because each lesson in the course requires a lot of notes and learning points and I want to be able to add additional information such as whether something would be a talking head lesson, a presentation slide or a demonstration. An online course takes a lot of work to make sure it fits logically together and having an outline in Numbers helps me to see the bigger picture plus I can drill down into details when I am developing the course.
However, again, the outcome for the course will be contained in a note in Evernote as well as anything else that may be relevant to creating the course.
The way I see things is Evernote is my project support app. I can keep all relevant reference materials, links, screenshots and anything else I may want to develop the content I am creating.
For written work, I use Ulysses where I have a drafts folder for all the content I am working in developing and once it has been completed I move the article to an archive folder. My goal is to keep things as simple as I possibly can with as few steps as I can make it. So, having two apps—Drafts for collecting materials on the fly, Evernote for storing all that material and Ulysses for writing the actual content does that for me.
So where does Todoist come into this? Todoist is my to-do list, so all Todoist is doing is telling me what to work on. So, on a Monday morning, I have a recurring task called “write blog post” which is linked to my blog post ideas Evernote note. My calendar has a block between 9:00 AM and 10:30 AM called “Writing time” and Ulysses is where I write.
I find structuring my days and weeks in this way ensures all the content I want to create each week is done. I keep Thursdays and Fridays as free as I can for content creation such as videos recording and editing and Wednesdays are for online course development. But everything starts and ends using these apps: Drafts, Evernote and Ulysses for writing.
Now, I use Ulysses because it’s a simple writing app with a lot of power. It also syncs seamlessly between my devices. I often begin writing my podcast script while on a bus or train and as Ulysses on my iPhone is fantastic I often find I have written over a thousand words before I get home and I can finish it off on my computer. Trying to write in Microsoft Word on a phone is not the easiest task.
Hopefully, that has given you some food for thought, Gustav. The key is to try and keep things as simple as you possibly can and use tools that work for you. Trying to use a lot of different tools because they promise to do one thing well, might not always be the best solution. Evernote can do many things, in fact, I could use it for writing my blog posts, but getting content out of Evernote is it’s Achilles heel. Ulysses has some incredibly powerful export features which makes it so much better for writing.
Thank you, Gustav, for the question and thank you to all of you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is about once you have collected your ideas, tasks and commitments how do you know where to put those collected items?
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Why Your System Must Start At An Area of Focus Level
Your Digital Life 3.0 Online
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 152
Hello and welcome to episode 152 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
One of the fundamental parts of the whole COD system (that’s Collect, Organise and Do) is the collection part. After all, if you are not collecting the stuff that gets thrown at you each day, you get nothing into your system and you will continue to rely on your brain to remember things and we all know—well, I hope you do—that your brain is a terrible place to try and remember everything.
But, if you are throwing everything into your inboxes, how do you manage those inputs and decide where everything goes? That’s the question I am answering this week.
Now before we get to the question and answer, I just want to let you know that I have added the areas of focus sample and workbook to the Time Sector course now. So, you have a new video lesson explaining why your areas of focus are important, and you also have a downloadable workbook to help you set these up in your notes app.
If you are already enrolled in the course, you can find these new resources in the final section of the course, and if you have not enrolled in the TIme Sector Course… Err why not? (Hahaha)—seriously, if you want a simple, easy to maintain time management system that is built for the way we work today, then the Time Sector System is for you. And at only $49.99, it’s incredible value for something that will change your life and put you back in control of your time. You can get yourself enrolled by clicking on the links in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show, which means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jörg. Jörg asks: Hi Carl, two cornerstones of your productivity system are a note app and cloud storage. When using Evernote as a notes app, how do you distinguish which material goes in which channel and where to place your created files?
Hi Jörg, thank you for your question.
I think the best way to start with this is to run through where things should go in general.
Events, appointments and anything where you need to be and with someone at a specific time and a specific place should go on your calendar. So these are your meetings, appointments and time blocks for you to do some focused work—appointments with yourself so you are not disturbed.
Tasks—that’s things you need to do should go into your task manager. These could be your routines like take the garbage out, do your expenses etc. Or project tasks such as work on a presentation or call Phil about the soundtrack to a new marketing campaign.
Then we have your notes app and here is where you keep your project notes, ideas, links to reference materials and anything that you need to quickly access in order to do your work.
Finally, we have your cloud storage. This is where you put your files such as PowerPoint or Keynote presentations or Word documents, Photoshop and Illustrator files etc.
Now the great thing about using cloud storage is you can generate links directly to the files you need which can be put in your project notes so you can access the right files when you need them.
Why is this important?
What we are trying to avoid is having project files all over the place. What we want is one file that is accessible with just one click whether we are in our project note or to-do list.
Now, most cloud storage such as iCloud and Dropbox have something called version history which means that if you want to go back to a previous version of your document, you can using the history feature. I think Microsoft OneDrive has this feature too, but I am not sure about Google Drive. So, you do not have to keep multiple iterations of the same file, you can always go back if you need to.
So, how this all comes together is your task manager, tells you on a day to day basis what work you should or need to do. Ideally, you want to start each day with a prioritised list of your tasks for the day. To achieve this, you do your daily planning and use the 2+8 Prioritisation method to prioritise your two objectives for the day—the two tasks that you will complete no matter what, and eight other should do tasks—tasks that you will do your best to do, but it would not be the end of the world if you cannot complete them all.
Your calendar is telling you where you need to be and with who and at what time and it tells you how much time you have available to do your project and task work. Your calendar is also where you can block time off for uninterrupted focus work should you need it.
For me, I block 9:00 AM to 11:00 AM for my focus work each morning. I avoid scheduling meetings and appointments at that time… if I can—of course, that is not always possible, but by having that goal—to keep those two hours free each day for focused work, I achieve it more often than not.
So, what happens, is I start my project work for the day from my task manager. That task is a clickable link that takes me directly to my project note in my notes app. That gives me all the relevant information related to that project. The note has links to the file or files I am working on, any important information that I may have added from my own ideas or an email or Twist message I have received. I also have my project timeline in there so I can see where I am, where I need to be and be reminded of the project deadline.
It all works seamlessly together.
So, in the example above, I do my daily planning the evening before. I review the tasks I need to complete, clear my inbox and prioritise my tasks for the next day based on what appointments I have in my calendar—if I have a busy day of back to back meetings and classes, I will reduce the number of tasks I have for the day. Because I am planning the week ahead, I can reschedule any tasks that are not urgent and make sure the work I have assigned myself for the day is manageable.
When I start the day, I already know what I am going to focus on and so I can just get started. No procrastination, no time wasted planning the day—it’s already done. This means by the time I need to look at my task manager for the first time, it’s usually after 11 AM.
By having a link directly to my project note, I avoid the risk of going down a rabbit hole looking for work. It’s all directly linked together and all I need do is click and start. Simple.
Now, what goes in Evernote and what goes in my cloud storage is quite straight forward. Files, PDFs and documents go into my cloud storage in the correct project folder. Notes, copy and pasted email references and links to files go into Evernote. And I am very strict with this.
Now, what do I do with documents that I need to annotate? Usually, these will be PDFs (or images) and for that, I use an app called GoodNotes. GoodNotes is brilliant on the iPad with Apple Pencil and so I can bring a document into GoodNotes, annotate it and once finished I can save a copy of the annotation file to my cloud storage.
I would like to be able to do this in Evernote, but Evernote’s annotation features are terrible and it would mean I would have multiple copies of the same file. The very thing I am trying to avoid. So, I don’t mind bringing the document out of my usual system to annotate it with a great annotation tool and then send it back. It only takes a few seconds to save the file to my cloud folder so it’s not much of an inconvenience.
Because of that, I am currently testing out OneNote as a possible replacement to Evernote in the future, but for now, I am sticking with Evernote. We’ll see what happens with my test in the future.
The key to making this work is to have strict boundaries for where things go. You want to be able to access your work files from wherever you are so having these in a dedicated current projects folder in your cloud storage ticks that box. I don’t separate my work and personal projects because to me a project is a project it doesn’t matter whether it is personal. I want to have a folder that. I can access quickly that has all my current projects in one place.
Once a project is complete I put the cloud project folder into my completed projects folder, I put the project note into my notes’ archive notebook and that’s it. All done. All organised and I know exactly where everything is.
At the end of the year, I will move most of those completed projects on to an external hard drive for future reference although if I think I might need to reference an old project I will leave it in my cloud storage.
So there you go, Jörg. I hope that helps and gives you some ideas about how best to manage your work. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like me to answer, all you need do is email me, carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is all about managing multiple projects, a full calendar and incessant daily interruptions so that you stay on top of what’s important.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Why Your System Must Start At An Area of Focus Level
Your Digital Life 3.0 Online
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 151
Hello and welcome to episode 151 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Now, this week I have a fantastic question about how to manage essentially a ton of stuff being thrown at you every day as well as making sure multiple projects are moving forward.
Now before I get to the question, just a heads up for those of you who are enrolled in the Time Sector Course. Last week, I added a new lesson on bringing your areas of focus into the daily mix of tasks. In that lesson, I take you through how to create your areas of focus and how they need to be filtering into the Time Sector System.
Of course, if you are not enrolled in the course, then you can still do so. It’s an amazing course and will transform the way you manage your work by simplifying your structure and making sure that you are focused on what is important today, and not worrying about what’s coming up next week, later this month or next month. After all, what matters is the here and now. As long as you have done your weekly planning session, you should not be needing to worry about next week and beyond.
Anyway. I hope you do join in the course. Full details are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Heather. Heather asks: Hi Carl, I’ve watched your videos and agree that separating projects from to-dos would simplify my life significantly. However, as a school principal I have a million projects, some new and some repeating quarterly, and a full calendar. How do you advise using a notes app to help prioritise and see next actions that should go into your task manager?
Hi Heather, thank you for this question.
Let’s start at the foundations. There is only a certain amount of time each day for us to do our work. We are not able to work 24 hours a day seven days a week. Aside from the need to sleep and eat it is neither sustainable nor healthy. So, what we need to do is to build some structure into our day and really understand what our core work is.
You see, knowing what work only we can do and what work we can delegate to our team helps with prioritising. If there is some work only you can do, as a principle, then, of course, this is going to be your priority. Nobody else can do it, so if you do not do it, nobody else will.
This goes for any team leader or manager. If there is work your team can do, then you need to let go of that work and delegate it. This means, of course, you must trust your team. You must also ensure they are shown exactly what you want and that means you will need to allocate some time to train your team.
Now, I’ve come across a few people who say “yeah yeah I know that, but I just don’t have any time to train my staff”. Sure, it’s a dilemma, isn’t it? But, if you are unable to manage your workload now, what is going to happen in the long-term? Something important is going to get missed, or you’re just going to have a breakdown. Either option is not a good option.
In this case, what I would do, is schedule a day for training.
How do you do this? first, decide what work you can and will delegate, to whom and have a clear set of outcomes for that work.
Then set up a training day. For that, you schedule appointments with your team individually and allocate the work you have decided to delegate and make sure the people you are delegating the work to know exactly what you want—the outcomes—and when it is due each week or month etc.
Can you afford to spend a day training your team? How about asking a different question: can you continue doing your work with its current workload?
Okay, so how do you manage all this in a notes app.
Of course, this is going to depend on which notes app you use. The best ones are Microsoft OneNote, Evernote and Notion for this kind of thing.
So, the first thing you will need to do is create a notebook called “Current Projects”. Inside there you create a new note or section for the project you are working on.
Now, what you put inside that note or section depends on the type of project it is. For your delegated projects you can create a table to manage key information such as who you delegated the work to and when you expect the work to be done. You can also create tables to manage the outcomes and anything else you need that will be related to that project.
I have a pinned note that lists all my active projects and where they are at, as well as information such as what the expected outcome is and milestones and deadlines. This note is used for reviewing and planning.
With this note, I am very careful. Sure it would be very nice to be able to add all my projects and say they are all due this quarter, but the reality is you are unlikely to be able to complete all your projects in one quarter. So, I get realistic and spread these out so they are manageable and doable. And, yes, sometimes I do need to renegotiate deadlines. You need to get okay with that. Renegotiating a deadline can be done if you give the project owner enough time. Trying to renegotiate a project deadline one week before it is due is not going to help you.
Just having a master projects list (for that is what I call this note) gives me a big picture view of what is due and when and that highlights any projects that I feel are just not going to get done by the deadline. I can then negotiate a new deadline.
For example, I do a lot of online workshops and conferences. For these events, I deliver a lecture or presentation and I also give each participant a workbook. Now sometimes a conference organiser will ask me to provide the workbook materials a few weeks before the event. Sometimes that is no problem, but last month I had several of these workshops and getting the materials to the organisers by their deadline was going to be very difficult. So, I asked the organisers if I could provide the workbook a couple of weeks later.
How did I know this was going to be difficult? It was because every week when I do my weekly planning, I review this master project list. I know what my core work is—the work only I can do—and I have that already blocked off in my calendar. So when I look at my week, I can see very clearly how much time I have available to work on these projects. As soon as I saw that in one week I had to prepare four workbooks I knew that was not going happen—well not if I wanted to complete my core work, which is non-negotiable—so I contacted the organisers and negotiated a few extra days to get the materials to them. In all cases, they were happy to accommodate me and I got the workbooks to them within the new deadline.
This is one reason why your notes app helps. It gives you the big picture view that a task list manager cannot do.
Another advantage of having this master projects list is you have a place where all the information you want to see, and in the way, you want to see it can be stored. A task list manager forces you to follow a template—which may not provide you with the information you want. Your notes app allows you to create the format you want. You have complete freedom.
So how, and when, do you move next actions over to your task manager?
For this, again I do it when I do my weekly planning session. But I also will add tasks when I am working on the project.
For example, imagine I am doing some work on a new online course. Now, a lot of the prep work for that involves a spreadsheet. This is my outline document and so a lot of information is added to that. As I am working on it, I may decide I need to research something. I will add that task to my task manager immediately. I will decide what needs researching and when I will do it. For something like this, I will add it to either my “this week” or “next week” folder in my task manager. The details of what needs researching will be added to the project note if necessary.
During my weekly planning session, I go through all my active projects. Inactive projects don’t need reviewing if they are not moving forward, but sometimes I do need to add a start date. That can be created as a task and added to one of my longer-term time sectors. For instance, I have a task in my task manager in my Next month folder that is dated that says “start work on Time And Life Mastery update” That task will come up on the day I have allocated and I can then decide if I want to, or need to, start right then. If not, I can re-date the task or I can start the project by moving the project note to my active projects list.
So for the most part, my task manager tells me what work I need to work on today. Today, I have a task that says “Write podcast script”. When I did my daily planning session last night, I saw that on my list and I flagged it as a morning task because morning is when I do my focused work.
Saturday mornings are when I work on my online courses. I have a recurring task in my task manager that tells me “work on online courses” and I have a direct link to the project note for the online course I am currently working on. So I see the task, click it and I am transported directly to the project note to start work on it.
The glue that brings everything together is the daily and weekly planning sessions. Seriously, if you are not doing those you will never feel you are on top of everything coming at you. These sessions do not need to be long. The daily one, once you have a settled routine should only take you around ten to fifteen minutes. And the weekly planning session normally takes around thirty minutes or so. It could be longer if you have a lot of active projects, but remember, you only have 168 hours each week, and not all of those will be spent working. On average you will be working between forty and fifty hours. So, for your weekly planning session, you are only able to allocate so much time for your projects.
That’s why your calendar is important too. If your calendar is already full, then there’s no hope. Sorry to be so blunt. But if you want to have time to work on your projects, you are not going to be able to change the laws of physics. Time just is. So, get control of your calendar. Do you really have to attend every meeting you are invited to? Would it not be possible to delegate some of those meetings to other people?
As a school principal, Heather, you should be able to block some time out for focused work sessions. Choose those times carefully. Often the best time for focused work is in the morning when you are at your freshest, but here we are all different. Find a time slot that you can block each day for your own focused work. Ideally, two hours each day where everyone who works with you knows you are not available.
Setting some boundaries is important. If you have no boundaries then other people will fill your time. In a typical working day, not being available for two hours is not a lot of time. But it is a lot of time to get focused work done.
I hope that has helped in some way, Heather. Good luck and thank you for your question.
Thank you to all of you for listening too. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
We’ve reached a rather special milestone this week. This is the 150th episode of the Working With… Podcast so I thought this week I would explain something important about how great productivity systems are built.
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Why Your System Must Start At An Area of Focus Level
Steve Jobs’s Crazy Ones recording
Your Digital Life 3.0 Online
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 150
Hello and welcome to episode 150 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So, in a little change from the usual format, today I want to explain how to build your very own productivity system from the basic foundations.
As with all building, it starts with solid foundations and most people’s productivity systems fall apart not because of a lack of discipline but because the foundations on which the system is built are not strong.
There are three essential parts to any productivity system. There is the daily level—the tasks you complete. There is the project level, the group of connected tasks that when completed results is a finished project and then there is the areas of focus—the foundations of the system.
Now, It does not matter about the app you are using, it does not matter what industry you are working in. What matters are the foundations on which your whole system is built. I actually think this is a weakness in the Getting Things Done methodology. In the GTD book, there is a lot of stuff about collecting, managing your stuff and creating file folders for the different projects you create as a result of what you collected, but there is very little on why you are collecting that stuff. GTD focuses too much on the daily and project level and not enough on the foundational level.
You see, everything begins with your areas of focus or areas of responsibility. (There are many different ways of describing these). Essentially what this means are the very things you consider to be important in your life.
For most people, these will be things like:
- Family and relationships
- Your career
- Your health
- Your spirituality
- Personal development
- Life experiences — the places you want to visit, the things you want to experience.
- Your finances
- And your purpose in life.
There are more, but essentially most people would consider these areas of life as being important.
Now the funny thing is each of these areas will have a different level of importance depending on where you are in your life. If you are in your twenties, your relationships, career and life experiences are likely to be your top priorities. In your thirties, your family, life experiences and career. In your forties, it’s likely to be your personal development, finances and purpose in life. Fifties; finances will be near the top, your health and your family and so on. It changes with us and we are all different so the mix will be different for each of us.
But wherever you are in life, if you have not got these down, your system will be built on a foundation of sand. You will have no direction, no levels of importance that match where you are in life and so you will be operating from the level of your projects. Essentially your daily to-do list will be just that. A daily to-do list of tasks that are not connected in any way to what is really important to you.
And if you don’t know what your areas of focus are, where will your projects generally come from? Your work projects are likely to come from your company and boss. Your family projects will be a compromise with your partner. Only about a quarter of your projects will be self-generated, so you operate your daily life on other people’s agendas.
And if you are operating from the task level, then almost all your time is spent on small insignificant gains, fire fighting and other people’s requests. Rarely, if ever, do you do anything for your long-term self.
I’ve noticed another problem with operating a system from a project or task level. You will never be satisfied with your apps either. You will be constantly changing them, playing around with dangerous apps like Notion where there are so many bells and whistles you are led to believe that if only you can find the right database, then everything will start to work for you. It won’t, of course, because the app is never a substitute for what is important to you.
What apps you use is not important. What really matters is you have a place where your areas of focus are written down and that can be anywhere. A notebook, a simple notes app, or Notion, Evernote, OneNote or Apple Notes. It really doesn’t matter where you write these down. All that matters is you have them written down. So apps like Notion can be great, but only if you use them so they serve you instead of the other way round.
And that means you start by clearly defining your areas of focus.
Start with the framework of:
- Family and relationships
- career
- health
- spirituality
- Personal development
- Life experiences
- finances
- And purpose in life.
Now, the reason you start here is that all your projects and goals need to start from here. What do I mean by that?
Well, any project given to you by your boss, will be related to your career area. If you do a great job in doing your part of the project, you will help advance your career.
If you decide you want to learn a new skill or a foreign language, these could be related to your personal development or your career or both. Saving money will be related to your finances, embarking on a regular fitness programme is related to your health and so on.
So building your system from the foundation of your areas of focus creates a solid foundation on which to build your goals and your projects.
So what do you put in your areas of focus? Well, here you want to be writing out a sentence or two on what is important to you. For example, your family and relationships could be something like:
“I provide a stable, caring and loving home for my family and I am always there for my friends and family when they need me.”
For your career, you can write out the kind of employee or employer you want to be. Perhaps write out where you want your career to go.
What you will notice is your areas of focus are like your big overreaching goals and values.
Looking back over my own productivity journey, the first book on productivity I read was a book by a gentleman called Hyrum Smith called 10 Natural Laws of Successful Time and Life Management. It’s a great book and is still available today.
The book begins with getting you to identify your governing values. Before identifying your goals and then your tasks. (Sound familiar?)
I also studied Tony Robbins’ time management system which is explained in his course Time of Your Life. Again, where does it start? It starts with your areas of focus, your life’s purpose, goals and of course your values.
All great systems begin at your areas level because without knowing what your values, life goals and what is important to you is, you will always be operating at a superficial level. You will feel unfulfilled and your days will pass in a blur of “what the hell happened today?”
Now, I don’t know what system Elon Musk uses, but watch any interview with him and you can see he is operating from his values. In particular, he’s operating at his life purpose level. Everything he does is focused on achieving his life’s purpose. To colonise Mars. Space X will provide him with the means to get to Mars. The Boring Company will provide him with the tools to build a way to sustainably live on Mars, and Teslar will provide a way to transport people around Mars.
Steve Jobs was the same. He operated at his areas of focus level. To provide tools for creative people to change to world for the better. His values were clearly centred around simplicity, ease of use and beauty. The whole Think Different campaign was built around what Steve Jobs valued most.
“The people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do”
If you’ve never seen the original ad that Apple recorded with Steve’s voice saying the above quote you should. You can hear the passion, the drive and purpose in his voice. I’ve put a link in the show notes for you… Well worth a minute of your time.
Now, if your projects and daily tasks are not being driven from your areas of focus you are not going to be motivated to do either a good job or complete them. It’s the same with your goals. If your goals are not built on your areas of focus you are just not going to motivated enough to keep going when things get boring, difficult and monotonous.
Let’s take an example.
If you have in your health area of focus a sentence that states:
“I take care of my health and maintain a high level of fitness so I can continue to enjoy playing with my kids and grandkids long into my life”
And one day, you notice your waistline has expanded a little and it feels like an effort to get up a flight of stairs. That should alert you to your area of focus on health.
Now you can create a goal that will reduce your weight down to a level you are happy with, change your lifestyle a little so you move more and find more time to exercise.
Because that goal is coming from an area of focus you have identified as being important to you, you are much more likely to stick with it.
However, let’s say you are happy with your weight, and fitness is not something you particularly enjoy, but your co-workers persuade you to join them in a fitness and weight loss drive.
When you are feeling hungry a week or two into the drive and it’s raining outside but you are supposed to go out for a thirty-minute walk, how likely are you going to stick with your plan? Not likely. You just won’t have the motivation because the goal is not coming from your areas of focus. (Unless one of your values is related to being the best at everything you do—that would give you the motivation to complete the goal)
This is one of the reasons I spent time in my Time Sector course getting you to write out your core work—the work that is important to you. It’s also why the Time Sector System has a unique, dedicated folder for ‘recurring areas of focus’. These are the tasks that if you do consistently every day, week or month you are maintaining the areas of your life you identified as being important to you. It is such an important part of building a solid, sustainable productivity system.
So I urge you to take a little time this week to really think about your areas of focus. Write them down in your notes app, journal or notebook. I’ve given you a list in this podcast of where you can start with your areas but feel free to add others. We are all different but we all have one thing in common, to live a life of fulfilment, joy and happiness you need to be spending more of your valuable time nurturing and growing at your areas of focus and values level, not the projects and daily task level.
If you have a strong set of motivating and—more importantly, true to you—areas of focus, then 90% of what you do each day will be fulfilling and you will not be ending your day asking “what the hell happened today?”
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. I hope you found it motivating enough for you to begin writing out your areas of focus. Last week, I wrote a blog post on this topic and again, I’ve linked that in the show notes. In that post, I shared a few diagrams that show you how a productivity system should be working. Take a look, it will help you with your areas of focus development.
Now go build that fulfilling life.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week the question I am answering is all about managing change in a rapidly changing, and uncertain, world. Something most of us are experiencing right now.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
The Super 10 PLUS Course Bundle
Your Digital Life 3.0 Online
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Script
Episode 149
Hello and welcome to episode 149 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
How have you been affected by COVID-19? Has the way you do your work changed dramatically? Are your productivity tools living up to your expectations? And how are things likely to change in the coming months?
We do live in unprecedented times, changes to the way we live and work have not changed this fast in the Second World War and yet, as humans, we have done a remarkable job in adapting to new ways of living and working. We always will, That’s part of the human condition. We are exceptional when it comes to adapting.
This week, the question I am answering is how to manage all this change so we remain focused on what is important, stay on top of our core work and deliver our work to outstanding levels of quality and on time.
Now, before we get to the question, I wanted to give you a heads up on a new bundle in my Learning Centre. I have been asked numerous times over the last few years if it was possible to create a bundle of my courses that includes a personal one on one coaching element. Well, I have found a way to do and that bundle is now available in my learning centre.
You can now buy all ten of my courses AND get three months of one on one coaching included. Now, I understand this bundle is not going to be for everyone. But if you are searching for a way to change the way you work. To prepare yourself for what comes in the post-pandemic world and want to start 2021 knowing you have the skills to adapt and create and produce outstanding work, then this bundle is for you.
You will get everything you need to build your own productivity system. To create achievable goals and bring everything together so you are in complete control of your time and life. It is an amazing package and will save you over $400 off the full price. And once you have learnt the systems, you then get three months with me personally as your coach to implement everything you have learned so that at the end of the process you will have changed your habits, built an amazing system and be ready to face whatever comes in the new world in 2021.
Full details of this bundle are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Joseph. Joseph asks: Hi Carl, in May this year our company told us to work from home until further notice. This was hard for me as I have always liked the camaraderie of working in my office. We are still working from home and my company has told us we shall be continuing to work from home until March next year. Do you have any tips and tricks on managing change because I am worried everything I have set up now will change again in March?
Hi Joseph. Thank you for sending me your question.
I suspect a lot of people are facing the same disruption you are, Joseph. And it’s one of the inevitabilities of life that things will change. Change never stops. The difference now is the speed of change has gone from manageable to, for most, unmanageable and incredibly disruptive and it has left us with a lot of unanswered questions about the future.
For one, will we ever go back to the way we worked before March 2020? My feeling on this is no we won’t. If we take the changes to the way people lived their lives before 1939 and the way they lived after 1945, the huge changes that occurred in societies across the world and the changes in technology that were developed for the war effort, filtered into our lives very quickly changing the way we went about our lives forever. And the same is happening now.
Just six months ago, many companies believed it was impossible for them to allow their staff to work from home. Now, because of the varying degrees of lockdowns around the world, they discovered it was possible to allow their staff to work from home.
Online communications have dramatically improved in just the last four months. Many people had never heard of Zoom before March, now almost everyone knows what Zoom is and have used it in one form or another. Microsoft and Google have upgraded their video communication tools to such a level that jumping on a call is quick, simple and very fast.
The thing about technology is once it has been adopted, we don’t abandon it and go back to the way we were before. The reverse happens, we advance it. It gets better, faster and more tools come along that improve the experience.
Think back to 2007 when the iPhone was first launched. There was no App Store, you couldn’t copy and paste and share files. Compare that today to the phones we all carry around with us. Sharing files is easy, doing a video call is as simple as clicking a button and the app stores offer us millions of apps to solve our immediate needs.
So, there’s no way we will be going back to the way we worked pre-March 2020. But, that does not mean the office is dead. We will still have offices, but rather than being places we have to be between 9 AM and 5 PM, they will be places we go when we have a reason to be there. In-person meetings, or because we need to use something that is only available in the office for example.
So how can you build a system that will manage this disruption and be as future proof as you can make it?
Well, the key to that is in the question itself. “Build a system”. It’s your system that needs to be flexible, and more importantly mobile. You see, when you no longer have a fixed place to work, keeping your files and documents in an offline format is not going to work. You are going to need access to those files wherever you are working from and that means embracing cloud storage.
My whole system works around iCloud. As I am in the Apple ecosystem, it makes sense for me to keep all the documents I am working on in iCloud. Yesterday, I was working on a spreadsheet updating the outline for my Time And Life Mastery course. That file is in the cloud, and so when I went to a local coffee shop to spend a couple of hours in deep focused work, I did not have to worry about whether I had the file. It was in iCloud and I could open it up immediately on my iPad to work on it.
When I got back home, it was there on my laptop to do a little more work on. There was no lag, no refreshing to do. It was just there. It’s something I no longer need to think about.
Now, for you, you may work in the Microsoft or Google ecosystem. Whichever system you work in, look at those tools first. They may not meet your needs, and with cloud storage, you have other options such as Dropbox. Choose one that you like and feel confident with.
Next, look at your todo list. Is your chosen to-do list available everywhere? You see, you may not always have your personal laptop with you and find yourself in your office using a different computer. Can you access your todo list from a strange computer? One thing I like about Todoist is I can access it through the built-in apps (my preferred choice) as well as through the web which means it does not matter whether I am using a Mac or a Windows machine, as long as I have a browser and an internet connection I have access to my todos for the day.
The same goes with apps such as Evernote, Apple Notes, OneNote and Google Keep, all of these notes apps are available whether you are using a dedicated app or a browser.
Making sure your tools can be accessed anywhere from any machine gives you the flexibility you will need to navigate the future way of working.
How have you got your working environment at home set up? This is important because no matter what happens to the way we work in the future, one element that will become very common is more working from home.
Now, here the key is where you do your work and in that respect, one of the most important items you will need is a good chair. Using your old wooden dining chair might be okay for paying bills and filling in your kid’s Judo class joining form, but for hours of sitting down and doing your work, they are going to do untold damage to your back and neck. Invest in a good quality chair. Seriously, do not go cheap here. Spend a little less on your computer and desktop accessories and a little more on your chair.
That’s a lesson I learned a few years ago when I started doing a lot more work from home. It was only a few weeks before I was waking up with a very stiff back and neck.
I listened to the warning signs and invested in a proper office chair. That solved those back and neck issues very quickly.
Another issue you will soon find with working from home is you move a lot less. There’s been a lot of discussion on the so-called ‘pandemic weight’—the weight many people have gained because, while they are still eating the same amount of food they usually do, they are moving a lot less.
You need to become very intentional about moving. I advise people to take at least an hour off for lunch and make part of your lunchtime a thirty-minute walk. You can do your chores—go to the shops, or if you are lucky and have a dog, take your dog for a walk.
What I found very useful was my Apple Watch—any smartwatch will do this though. A smartwatch tracks your movement and your steps. Set yourself a goal of walking at least 10,000 steps each day. That way you are making sure you are moving.
You can also do your housework during your breaks. So rather than checking Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, do some housework. Clean the breakfast dishes, make your bed, sweep the house. Just do something that does not involve sitting down. Move.
If you don’t have a smartwatch, then use your phone’s alarm to remind you to get up and move every hour or so. Your waistline will thank you for it.
A funny thing here, as we generally wear less smart clothes when we work from home—well, at least the bottom half —we wear loose-fitting clothes which means we are often not aware our waistline is expanding. So, try to wear something that involves a belt. That way you can monitor your waistline. When things start to feel a little more tight than usual, it’s time to either reduce your food intake or move more… Or both.
Finally, have a morning routine. One of the things about having to wake up at a certain time and prepare to go to our workplace is we all had a morning routine of some sort whether we were aware of it or not. When I worked in a language institute several years ago, my first class was at 6:30 AM. This meant for me to have a shower, shave and a coffee before I went to teach, I needed to get up at 5:30 AM. It was not an intentional morning routine back then, but it was still something I did every morning.
Now, I am much more intentional. No matter where I am working, I wake up, make coffee, drink a glass of lemon juice and take my probiotic. Then I do a series of stretches for my shoulders and back before sitting down to write my journal and check my email. Once that is done, I take a shower and then prepare for the day. It takes around 45 minutes to do. So, whether my day starts at home or I go out to teach, I know I need to wake up 45 minutes before I start.
Having that routine gives me a structure to the day. If I just rolled out of bed, sat at my computer and started work, I would be starting the day in an unhealthy way. Health is vital if you want to perform at your best, so create a morning routine for yourself that involves some quiet time for you and your health. It will put you in a much better mood and give you the energy to begin the day.
One more tip before we end. Every day I read blogs from McKinsey, KPMG and EY. These companies specialise in change management and have some excellent resources on the future of work. Being aware of how different industries are changing to meet the new environment will better help you see what is likely to come and help you to make better decisions about what will work best for you.
Well, I hope that answers your question, Joseph. Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening.
Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering, then all you need do is email me: carl@calrpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 148
Over the last few weeks, I’ve received a number of questions about how my whole productivity fits together. From COD to The Time Sector System to PACT. So.,this week that’s the question I will answer.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Your Digital Life 3.0 Online
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Script
Episode 148
Hello and welcome to episode 148 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Over the last three or four years, I have introduced a number of concepts, models and systems and the question is, how do all these fit together to make a workable, effective productivity system? That’s a great question because there are a lot of different ways you can manage your work, but for me, ultimately it’s less about the actual system and more about the workflow that you use.
Ultimately, how you manage your work in the time you have available is the key. It does not matter how brilliantly you have all your stuff organised if you don’t know where to start, or even how or when to start, you will not have an effective system. You workflow—the way to start your day, how you manage your work throughout the day and how you end the day is where everything comes together. And the best workflows need little thought or decision making. It’s just what you do. So that’s what I will be explaining in this week’s episode.
Now, before we get to the question, don’t forget, for those of you already enrolled in the Your Digital Life 2.0 course, you now have a brand new update waiting for you. All you need do is go to your dashboard on my Learning Centre and you will find everything there.
This year, you get the Time Sector System, and almost all the classes have been updated with better content and better explanations.
PLUS… You also get my Email productivity and goal planning courses absolutely free!
Now would be a great time re-take the course so you can refocus your system and workflows and go into the final quarter of 2020 refreshed and working at your most productive.
And, of course, if you have not joined the Your Digital Life programme, you can do so. For just $74.99, you get a complete course that will give you everything you need to become better organised and more productive. You learn how to build your own digital system as well as how to manage your email and goals and bring everything together in a fantastic workflow. Full details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Angela. Angela asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been following your on YouTube for quite some time now, and I have seen you talk about COD, PACT, the Golden 10 and now the TIme Sector System. Is this just an evolution of your system or do al these things play an important part in the way you do your work each day?
Hi Angela, thank you for your question.
To answer your question, I thought it would be a good idea to explain how everything works and how each part fits together.
So let’s start with COD. COD stands for “Collect, Organise and Do”, it’s the foundation of every great productivity system. You see, you need to collect everything that comes your way that you feel is important or something you need to do something about. You then need to organise all that stuff you collect and of course, you need to do your work.
So, whenever you start building a productivity system you need to start with COD. How are you going to collect your stuff? Will you use your phone, computer or a paper notebook? Or, will you use a combination of all of those?
The key is to develop a collection system that is quick and easy. Having a complex method to collect stuff might look cool, but if it’s complex you will resist. It needs to be fast and you need to think carefully about how you will do that.
I use an app called Drafts to collect around 95% of my stuff. Drafts is an app on my phone, Watch, iPad and computer and when I open it up, it starts off with a blank sheet and I can type or dictate whatever I want to collect. It’s incredibly fast.
Now once I have an item in Drafts, I can then choose where to send it. The two main areas are Todoist for a task I have to do or Evernote for an idea or a note.
I’ve been using Drafts for years now, and it’s just automatic for me to open it and add an item whenever the thought comes to me. There’s no thinking. It’s now intuitive and automatic.
Next comes the organising. Organising means where will you process what you collected? For this, you need a to-do list manager and a notes app. So, tasks go into the folders you have set up in your task manager. You can organise your folders in whatever way you want. The simplest would be a “home” folder and a “work” folder. So anything related to your work goes into your work folder and anything related to your personal life goes to your home folder.
Now, the reason you need folders is to prevent your task manager’s inbox from becoming overwhelming. You need somewhere to put your tasks.
Personally, I use the Time Sector System, this is where I organise my tasks by “when” I will do them. That could be this week, next week, this month, next month or long-term. But you may prefer to organise things differently. The key is to have a place where you can group similar tasks together.
If you are a Getting Things Done person, you will organise by context, that’s by people, place or thing. For example, you would have folders called Home, office, computer, phone, boss, spouse etc.
How you organise your tasks is up to you.
The key to the organising part of your system is you want to spend as little time as you can organising. You see, organising can become a productivity drain if your structure is too complex or you have too many apps. You will spend too much time adding folders, sub-folders, labels, tags and trying to decide where to put something.
The simpler you can make it, the less time you will spend organising and that is a good thing. I would say, that the goal is to spend around 5% of your time organising each day. That works out at around 20 minutes a day cleaning up your inboxes and managing your tasks and notes.
The rest of the time you want to be doing the work. That’s the “D” part of COD. Do. If your organisation structure is simple, then each day you will have a list of things you want or need to do and you just get on and do them.
And that’s where the Golden 10 comes in.
A few years ago, I decided to find out what the optimum number of tasks a person could reasonably expect to be able to complete each day. I discovered that number to be about ten.
When you take into consideration all the unknowns in a day, the unexpected urgencies and emergencies from customers, bosses and co-workers, then realistically you will only be able to complete around ten meaningful tasks a day.
I say meaningful because there are always little routines we have to do—take the dog for a walk, do the grocery shopping, clean the house etc. These just have to be done when they need doing. I don’t include these in the 10 meaningful tasks. These just have to be done when they need doing.
So, before you finish the day, you do your Golden 10. That means you look at your calendar and your task list and see what you have scheduled for tomorrow. You assign the ten most important tasks a flag or something that highlights them for you. This should take you no more than ten minutes.
Now the ten comes from the 2+8 Prioritisation method. This is where you choose two objective tasks—the two tasks you absolutely must do tomorrow whatever happens. No excuses. These could be something important for your work, or they could be goal-related. You get to choose. The eight other tasks are the eight tasks you would like to get done—the should dos if you like—but it would not be the end of the world if you did not manage to complete them.
Finally, where does PACT come into it? Well, PACT is; patience, action, consistency and time. To get good at anything you need to have patience, you need to take action consistently over a period of time.
This works for your goals and for developing your own productivity system. If you want to build a functional, productivity system then you will need to be patient. It does not come together overnight and it takes time to get used to managing your tasks, processing and organising things. But you do need to take action and you do need to consistently do it.
I’ve found if you consistently do your Golden ten at the end of the day, you are 95% of the way there. You see the Golden Ten gives you an opportunity each day to step back and look at what you have on your plate. It allows you a little time each day to prioritise what you need to get done and focuses you on the 20% of tasks that will give you 80% of your results.
When you do not do any planning, you find you pick the low hanging fruit—the 80% that only gives you 20% of your results. When you do that, you will feel busy all the time, but also feel you are making little to no progress on the things you have identified as being important.
So that in a nutshell, is how everything comes together. Start with COD. Look at how you are collecting your stuff. Is it easy, fast and not feel like a burden or too much effort? Make sure you organise everything you collected consistently. I generally do that every 24 to 48 hours and spend at least 90% of your time each day doing the work.
At the end of the day, spend ten minutes planning tomorrow. Decide what your ten most important tasks for the day will be. And don’t worry if you don’t have ten. The less you have to do the better. I often start days with only six or seven tasks for the day.
And most important of all, if you are serious about becoming better organised and more productive, be PACT. Be patient, take action consistently over time and soon you will find you intuitively follow a workflow that grows with you and removes a lot of stress, keeps you focused on the work you have identified is important and you start to feel each day you have completed a lot of meaningful work.
Thank you, Angela, for your wonderful question and for all you for listening. I feel so honoured to be able to help you in whatever way I can each week.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is all about managing your tasks and managing your events. Where does everything go? Your calendar or your task list?
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Your Digital Life 3.0 Online
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Script
Episode 147
Hello and welcome to episode 147 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So, I’ve had a few questions recently on how best to schedule your day and what should be on a task list and what should go on your calendar. It’s a good question and it goes to the heart of managing your time and your days and weeks.
Now, before we get to that, If you are sick and tired of endlessly rescheduling tasks and starting the day with a lot of overdue tasks, it may be time for you to consider the Time Sector System.
The Time Sector System shows you a different way to manage your tasks, a way of being more realistic about what you can get done each day and each week. It encourages you to become better at prioritising your time and the work you have to do and it makes your daily and weekly planning easier and faster and a lot less complex.
It’s a system designed in the 21st century for the 21 century and will help you eliminate all those overdue tasks and give you a simple time management system that you can build on and learn new habits that will ultimately put you back in charge of your time.
Full details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, its time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question,
This week’s question comes from Benjamin. Benjamin asks: Hi Carl, I’ve seen a few of your videos recently on using your calendar but I’m a bit confused. Are you saying you should manage everything from your calendar or from both your calendar and your task list?
Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question and I’m sorry for any confusion. Hopefully, in this episode I can clear things up for you.
So let’s start with the calendar. Your calendar is your most powerful productivity tool because it is the one tool you have that will never lie to you. It shows you the number of hours you have each day and it will not allow you to over-schedule yourself. Well, I suppose you could do that, but you would very quickly see the impossible situation you have created for yourself.
So, how do you use your calendar? First, you want to schedule your non-negotiable events. These could be meetings, family commitments, your exercise time and classes or other commitments you have that are important to you.
For me, each week, I have a number of classes that are at the same time each week. These are on my calendar as repeating events. They are non-negotiable for the most part—although from time to time I will cancel these if I need some time to record a course or if I need to take a few days break for thinking and planning.
I also schedule my exercise time on my calendar too. I do this at the beginning of the week because each week the type of exercise I do is likely to be different. To do some weights at home—because at the moment gyms are not the safest of places to be— takes around 45 minutes. And a quick shower afterwards means I need an hour. But there’s no travel time or cooling off time—which I usually need if I have been out for a run or to the gym.
If I go out for a run, I usually need ninety minutes. So I schedule my exercise when I do my weekly planning.
That takes care of my core commitments for the week.
And that’s what you should be doing when you plan the week. Start with your calendar. Make sure you non-negotiable commitments are on there first. After all, they are non-negotiable. They must happen at a specific time and on a specific day.
Once your non-negotiables are on your calendar, look for blocks of time you can block off for focused work. Now when I say “focused work” I mean projects or goals you know you need to commit a certain amount of time in order to get them done.
Here it will be up to you how and when you do this work. Because my week is largely fixed, I have recurring blocks of time for writing, recording and creating. For example, Monday morning I have an online class between 8 AM and 9 AM and once that is finished I have a block between 9:15 AM and 11 AM for writing my blog post for the week. It’s fixed and it’s recurring every week. I do the same on a Tuesday morning. Every Tuesday I have an outside class at 7:30AM and I get home around 9:30AM. So between 9:30 AM and 11:30 AM I have a recurring block of time for writing this podcast script.
These ‘events’ are fixed and recur every week. They are non-negotiable. If I did not block these times, my blog post and podcast script would not get done, or I would find it difficult to find the time to do them. I need that structure and I need that consistency to do it.
You could do the same. If you have a regular meeting that requires planning for, you can block time on your calendar to prepare for the meeting. Once it’s blocked and it recurs at the same time each week, you know you have the time available to prepare for your meeting. Of course, if you ignore the time block, then it won’t work and you would quickly find you run out of time because other, less important but louder things will inevitably crop up.
This is also how I have time each week to prepare and record my videos for YouTube and write the two newsletters I produce each week. Each piece of content has a block of time scheduled on my calendar that recurs. So, my newsletters are written on a Wednesday and Friday morning. My videos are recorded on a Thursday afternoon and a Friday morning and edited on a Friday afternoon. Producing and publishing content each week is important to me and the work I do. So, it is non-negotiable and is fixed on my calendar each week.
The way to look at it is if it is important and must get done, then schedule the time required to do it on your calendar when you do your weekly plan. If you are not scheduling the time to do the work that is a “must’ how will you find the time to do it when your week starts? There will always be ‘emergencies’, demands on your time and requests from bosses, colleagues and customers. These demands are often loud, but not really important—unless you think every request you get at work is important (seriously, that is not true at all)
So, what goes on your task list?
Your task list is for all the little things that need to be done on a daily or weekly basis. The things that come up and gets added to your inbox. Let me give you a few examples.
Yesterday, as I was feeding my dog, I used that last of his supplement tablets. That went into my inbox; “Buy Barney some more heart supplements”. Another one was from this morning, I said I would send my students a link to a video I was watching last night. So I added that to my inbox.
Now, let’s take those two examples. They are now in my task list inbox. Do I need to schedule a time to do them? No. They just need doing. My dog’s vet is a ten-minute walk from my house and I already know I will need to drop into the supermarket at some point in the day today anyway. So, when I go to the supermarket I will take a small detour and call into the vet to get the supplement.
Sending the video to my students will take less than two minutes, so I will do that this evening when I process my inbox. I do not need to schedule these on my calendar. I will do them when I get a break in my day.
Now of course, there are other things in my task list. I have an amendment to do to a proposal I sent out for a workshop. It’s a small amendment and I was asked to do it last week. It was not urgent and I scheduled it in my task list to do this afternoon. It will take me around ten to fifteen minutes to do and it is non-urgent. So, it is on my list of tasks to do today and I will probably do it after I finish my exercise today. It is not on my calendar—it does not need to be. It will get done later today when I have some free time.
Now I have other recurring tasks on my task list. Things like do my admin, write my journal, clear my action today folder in my email etc. All these tasks do not need time scheduling on my calendar, they can be anytime throughout the day when I get a moment. And there will always be moments of time to do these things.
And that’s an important point. You should not be blocking out your whole calendar with work. You need space to do your regular tasks, deal with things that come up throughout the day and anything else that just needs doing.
For me, I generally use the morning to block time out for important work that needs an hour or two of focused time. I try to keep late afternoons free so I can deal with anything on my task list that needs doing.
You see, morning times for me is when Europe is asleep and the US is preparing to go to sleep, so very little comes in at that time. Late afternoons Europe is waking up, but as so many people check email in the morning I know I am unlikely to be disturbed by anything urgent, and the US is fast asleep.
And that’s a good point. If you are going to do this and block time out on your calendar for your important focused work, block times out when you are least likely to be disturbed. If you get the majority of your calls and emails in the morning, then do your focused work after lunch. Likewise, if you find late afternoons are your quietest times, when Slack, Twist and emails are quiet, then schedule your time blocks late afternoon. Find the right times for you.
This is why planning the week really helps. You should know what your important work is. Your core work. The work you are paid to do before you start the week. Make sure you have time scheduled each week to do that work. If you are not doing the rod you are paid to do consistently, you are not going to have a job for much longer. That work needs scheduling. Anything else does not need scheduling and can be kept in your task list to be done when you get a few moments in the day.
I hope that helps, Benjamin. I hope it has cleared up some of the confusion.
Thank you for the question and thank you to you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
What are the benefits of managing your projects in a notes app as apposed to a to-do list manager? That’s what I’ll be answering in this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Your Digital Life 3.0 Online
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 146 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I have a question about why I manage my projects in a notes app (and occasionally a spreadsheet—but you didn’t know that did you?) So, what I decided to do to answer this question is to take you through why I find to-do list managers are a terrible place to manage projects and to challenge some preconceived ideas about how best to use a to-do list manager and a notes app as well as other tools.
Now, before we get to the question and the answer, if you have missed it in the last couple of weeks, my Your Digital Life 2.0 course has become Your Digital Life 3.0 and it is practically re-recorded from the ground up. You now have the Time Sector System in there as well as how to manage your files, your email, your goals and your notes. It’s pack full of great tips and tricks.
So if you are looking at building new ways of working for the post-pandemic work life, then now would be a great time to get yourself enrolled. It’s a great course and will set you up wonderfully with a productivity system that works for you so you take full advantage of the digital tools we all carry around with us every day.
Okay onto this week’s question which means it time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question:
This week’s question comes from Abigail. Abigail asks, Hi Carl, I have been watching some of your videos on YouTube and your approach to using a to-do list seems very different from other people I have watched. My question is why do you manage your projects in your notes app and not your to-do list? Isn’t that what a to-do list is for?
Hi Abigail, thank you for your question.
Now, I spend a lot of time each day reading productivity and time management forums, blog posts and books and the biggest mistake I see is people creating elaborate and complicated systems. Complexity is the number one productivity killer. No matter how busy you are—or think you are—building yourself an elaborate and complex system is just going to make you feel even busier. it does not solve your problem.
The only way to become more productive and bring some kind of balance into your life is by creating a system where you spend very little time inside your to-do list. Your to-do list only needs to tell you what you need to do today.
Now here’s the biggest mistake I see. people trying to manage projects inside their to-do list. Now I know where this came from. It came from a misinterpretation of GTD—that’s Getting Things Done, by David Allen.
Now GTD never said manage your projects inside your to-do list. GTD is all about creating folders based on your contexts. That’s people, place or thing. What that means is you create a list of folders based on a place, which could be your office or home, a person, your partner, your boss or colleagues or a thing, which could be a computer, your phone or iPad.
So if you had a task that required you to use a computer, you would put that task inside your “Computer” folder. If you had a task that required you to do it at home, then you would put the task inside your “home” folder etc.
Now, you can create an additional list for your projects, but it is only a list of projects, not a list of tasks associated with those projects and this list is only used for review purposes.
All your project support materials, your plans, mind maps and documents related to your projects go into your project folders which are kept nearby.
Now GTD was written in the pre-digital age—or pre-smartphone age--and things have changed a lot since then.
What has happened now is people are trying to manage everything from their to-do list and all that does is create every increasing list of tasks that only the loudest and most urgent get done. Everything else often gets lost somewhere inside a folder and only be discovered once a task bankruptcy is declared—which when you try to manage everything from inside a to-do list will inevitably happen.
In talking with some very productive people I discovered this approach to task management is not a very efficient or effective way to manage your work.
Let’s look at a better way.
The first step I would advise anyone is to look at where you do most of your work. For me, I work out of my little studio in my home. So for the most part of the day, I am working at my desk with my laptop. I write there, plan there and do all my admin. So, my primary work tool is my laptop. If I go out for a class or a meeting I take my iPad with me so I have my teaching materials with me and I can write any meeting notes (and, of course, I always have my phone with me.)
Now, once you know where you do most of your work and you know what devices you have, the next thing to look at is software.
This is where things can get complicated very quickly. The best thing here is to use the tools built into your computer. So if you are a Windows user, use Microsoft’s tools. That would be Outlook for your email and calendar. OneNote for your notes and project support materials, To-Do for your task list and OneDrive for your documents.
Now, if you don’t like Microsoft’s software, and I know a few people don’t, then you always have the option of using Google’s suite of apps. Gmail, of course, and Google Keep and Tasks—although Google tasks is very very basic and may not meet your needs over time.
If you are an Apple user, you have some excellent apps in Apple Notes, Reminders and iCloud.
So there’s quite a lot of choice. If you are starting out on building your own productivity system, stick with the built-in apps first. As you develop your system, you can look for third-party alternatives, but I would not recommend you do that initially. You want to be focused on creating a system first and looking for the best third party alternatives will only distract you from that endeavour and likely force you into arranging things in a way that may not meet your needs.
Now how do you build a system that works for you?
Well, this depends on the type of work you do. For example, I have quite a lot of coaching clients that I need to manage. For that, I use a simple spreadsheet. I maintain all admin details related to those clients in a spreadsheet that contains their email address, how they prefer to communicate, when they started their coaching programme and when the programme is due to finish. I also can add a few notes there too just in case I need to be reminded of something later. It’s a kind of customised CRM system
For the actual notes from my calls with my clients, I keep all that in my notes app in a folder called “coaching”. That means when I have a call with the client, I can quickly find the note and have that ready on my screen so I can add notes during the call. It also means I can do a review of our previous call and remind myself of their deliverables.
Ideas for this podcast and my YouTube videos are all kept in my notes app as well as the content schedule for this week.
Each client also has a folder in my cloud storage drive too. Inside there are any documents related to that client as well as the feedback I send them after each call.
One thing I don’t do is have a project folder for each client in my to-do list as well. That would just create a huge list of unnecessary folders. Instead, if I have to do something for a client all I need do is add a task such as “send Mike Smith a copy of my email workflow” - that would go to my inbox and later when I do my planning for tomorrow, I will process that by deciding when I need to do it. For something like sending a copy of my email workflow, I would probably do it directly from my inbox as it would only take a few seconds to do.
So what you are trying to do really is build a workflow with clean, clear boundaries. Your calendar will tell you where you need to be and with who and at what time. Your to-do list will tell you what tasks you need to perform today and your notes will give you the details of those tasks and any supporting information you may need in order to do the task.
So, for example, I may have a task today to clean up my website. Now that could be a very big task with a lot of different parts to it. I may want to change some images, I may wish to rewrite some text and I may wish to change the fonts or colour scheme. Having all that in my to-do list would just be crazy. I can’t put sample images in my to-do list, I can’t have all the text changes I want to make in my to-do list because to-do lists were never designed to hold that kind of information.
Instead, all that information is contained inside my notes app (or a document in my writing app)
This means I see on my to-do list a task that says “clean up my website” and I will have linked the note related to that directly to the task—all I have to do is click on the task and I will be taken straight to the note. From there I am ready to begin work.
And yes, quite often there is a master task list in my notes app. Why? because when I check off a task in my notes app, the task stays there and is crossed out. It doesn’t disappear as it would do in a task manager. This means when I want to review progress on the project, I can quickly see what has been done, what still needs doing and any communications I have had with partners or clients about deadlines and milestones.
Everything is in one place which makes deciding what needs doing next simple.
So for me, a to-do list is exactly that. It’s a to-do list, not a project management tool. For me, there’s too much going on inside a project to effectively manage it from a to-do list. There’s too much information for one, and it is very hard to see what has been done. All a to-do list will tell you is what needs to happen next and that can be very misleading as each task is treated equally inside a task manager. There’s no indication of how long a task will take unless you start adding labels with time estimates, which starts you down the road of complexity creep.
Inside my notes app, I can create a timeline for when the different parts of a project need to be completed by. This great when I do my weekly planning because I can instantly see which projects I need to push forward next week and I can then add tasks to my to-do list based on that knowledge. For example: “work on Time and Life Mastery update” and link that task to my note related to that project. All I have to do is check my calendar to see which days I have time to it, and then add the date to my task.
The glue that brings all this together is my master projects list. This again is inside my notes app and every Sunday, when I do my weekly planning session, I check this list and review deadline dates. All this is in a single note with a table that lists all my active projects, with their deadline dates, where they currently are and what still needs to happen to complete the project. It’s simple, very quick to read, as my projects are organised by deadline date, and I find making decisions about what I need to work on next week is quick.
As I use Evernote as my projects notes app, I also link my master projects list to the individual project’s note so I all I need do is click on the note link and be instantly in the project’s note.
So, the reason I do not use my to-do list to manage projects is first, to-do lists are not project management tools. They are just task managers. There’s just far too much information required to maintain projects effectively for a to-do list. I’ve found—through a lot of trial and error—that the best place to manage projects is in a notes app, which is a modern-day equivalent to the GTD project support folders.
It also means I have instant access to what has happened on a project and what still needs to be done and a timeline that tells me how much more time I need, or if I need to extend a deadline and if I am on target to complete the project on time. A to-do list is never going to give you that kind of instant information or feedback. All it will ever do is give you a list of tasks with varying degrees of difficulty and not tell you what you have already done (unless you go hunting for your completed tasks which is an incredible waste of time)
Now I know it is hard to let go of old habits. There is a perverse comfort seeing a long list of tasks to do because it makes us feel busy. But I for one do not want to feel busy. I want to feel in control and know that what I am working on right now is exactly what I need to be working on right now and not have to worry about other things that may have got lost inside a task list manager that is full of tasks and I don’t know where they all are.
So there you go. Abigail. I hope that has explained how and why I do not use a task list manager to manage my projects. I just found it never worked well with the more longer projects I have to do. Managing a simple home improvement project could be done quite easily inside a to-do list, but the type of projects I and most people are working on, there is just far too much additional information coming in to be able to effectively manage all that from a to-do list manager. They were not built for that level of information.
I do get a lot of questions about this system—a system I call the Time Sector System—where your to-do list manager is organised by time sectors. If you want to learn more about this, then I wrote a Blog post about the basics of the system which I have linked to in the show notes and if you want to build a similar system for yourself I do have the Time Sector Course—again the link to this is in the show notes.
Thank you for your question, Abigail and thank you to all of you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 145
This week, I am answering a question on priorities and more specifically, how to prioritise your days and your weeks in an increasingly distracting world.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Your Digital Life 3.0 Online
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
You can subscribe to this podcast on:
Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN
Script
Episode 145
Hello and welcome to episode 145 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
are you struggling to stay focused on your priorities? Do you even have the time to decide what your priorities are? I come across this a lot where when so much is being thrown at us by our bosses, colleagues and customers, it feels impossible to decide what our priorities are and even if we know what our priorities are, it feels like the world is conspiring against us to actually get them done.
Well, fear not. in this episode, I will give you everything I’ve learned and practice that keeps me pretty much focused on the things I have decided are my priorities for the day and the week.
Now before we get to the question, I’d like to thank all of you who enrolled in Your Digital Life 3.0. Without your support, I would not be able to do what I do and help so many people. So thank you. I am so grateful to you all.
And don’t forget if you are already enrolled in Your Digital Life, the new version is now in your dashboard on my learning centre, and if you haven’t enrolled, and would like to get yourself enrolled in this amazing course—a course designed to help you build a complete digital productivity and time management system, then you can do so right now. All the details are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Kurt. Kurt asks, Hi Carl, I’ve started using Todoist recently and I have copied your Time Sector method for managing my tasks. I like the simplicity. The problem I have is by Tuesday all my plans for the week seems to have been destroyed by all the demands from my boss and my customers. Is there anything you would advise to help stay on my plan?
Hi Kurt, thanks for the question. I know this is an issue for so many people. It comes up in my coaching calls a lot and I receive a lot of emails about it.
How to stay focused on what you have prioritised for the week?
Well, the good thing, Kurt, is you have a plan. That’s a great start. Most people do not have a plan and allow the week and their environment to control what happens to them. That’s never a recipe for success at anything. If you want to get from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow you need a plan and you need to follow that plan.
That’s the simple answer. But of course, as with most things in life, things are never that simple and distractions, demands and interruptions have a bad habit of getting in the way. So how do you deal with those?
First up, let’s take a step back. Most prioritising problems come about because we are trying to achieve too much at one time. As I am sure you have heard before, life is not a sprint. It’s a marathon and if you start a marathon with your sprint finish you are not going to do very well. You need to pace yourself.
Part of doing that is finding the right balance between the work you want to focus on and the unknown work that will inevitably come in as the week starts. None of us lives in a sealed-off bubble, we are all interacting in some way or another every day and with those interactions will come additional commitments and tasks. So before we even start planning the week, we need to accept those inevitabilities.
That said, knowing that you will get additional work on top of what you planned for means that you are forced to build flexibility into your calendar, and when you allow extra time in your week for the unknowns and they don’t happen (rare, I know) you get a lot of free time. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I take full advantage of that extra time to do whatever I want to do at that moment in time.
So, let’s look at how to stay on the plan in the week.
First up, what is your core work each day and each week? We all have core work. Work you just have to do. If you are in sales that could be meeting your customers, following up prospects and making appointments to see both existing and potential customers. Or if you were a website designer, creating websites would be your core work. The reality is, if you are not doing your core work each day, you would not have a job or a business for very long. So, you need to establish what your core work is and then make sure you are allocating enough time each day to do that work. That is your priority. Your core work. It’s where your income comes from and it’s where your value as an employee or a business owner comes from.
For me, I create content every day. That could be writing a blog post, creating the script for this podcast, recording a YouTube video or an online course. If I allowed other people’s priorities and demands get in the way of creating that content, it would not be long before I would not have a business and therefore a way to help people become better organised and more productive.
So, it is crucial I get my content done first. And that for me is key. As I prepare this script it is 5:30 AM. Not my usual hour of work, but I have a busy day ahead of teaching and I could not see any other time to prepare this script today. My priority for the day is to get this script written. So, when I planned the day last night, I realised I would have wake up early and get it written.
Now, the thing is, I do not normally have to get up so early. But I knew if I left it until the end of the day I would find an excuse not to do it—I would say to myself I could do it Thursday instead of Tuesday, and sure, on Tuesday morning Thursday might look like a quiet day. But there are no guarantees that it would stay that way.
I’ve been down that road before—pushing off work until later in the week only to find I end up with more work to do than I have week left.
So one day of getting up a bit earlier to get the most important task done is a very small sacrifice to make in order to get my priorities done.
So step one is to know what your priority is for the day.
And I use the singular for a reason. As I mentioned above, often the problem is we have far too many priorities. Now, this comes about because you are treating everything as a priority and the reality is not everything is a priority.
I am reminded of a quote by Patrick Lencioni who said:
“If everything is important then nothing is important”
You have to make the decision about what is important and what is not important and I know that can be hard. Often the least important task is the loudest and we are lulled into doing that instead of the quieter, more important task. Knowing what your core work is, understanding what tasks bring you the greatest gain, whether that is financial, professional or personal. These are the things you need to know before you begin planning out your week and your day.
This is why I advise you to do your daily planning the night before and not in the morning. Planning the night before removes you from the hustle and bustle, it allows you to step back and take a bigger picture view of what you have to do. It gives you greater clarity and you are free from the distractions that a workplace brings—even if that workplace right now is your home. It allows you to compare where you are, and where you hoped to be according to your plan. You can then make the necessary adjustments.
Again, when it comes to making adjustments you will need to look at what your priorities are. I’m no longer afraid of cancelling a few appointments or meetings if it means I get my core, prioritised work done.
Not that was not always the case. I used to prioritise meetings and appointments. But over time I discovered that a lot of my meetings and appointments were not achieving the desired results and certainly did not take my objectives forward as much as doing my core work. Once I discovered that it became much easier to make my excuses and not attend the meeting.
Once you have your plan for the day, start the day with your number one priority. Get it started, I may not finish this script by the time I need to prepare to leave, but if I get 75% of it done, then later in the day, knowing I only have 25% to do, I am much more likely to sit down for 30 minutes later in the day to get it finished.
Often the hardest part of any task is just getting started. So, knowing that, if you can just do something with your most important task for the day first thing, you start the momentum and that gives you a greater chance of getting it finished before the day ends.
The next thing I would advise is to make sure your priorities for the day are written down somewhere you will see them.
We know we are going to get distracted and interrupted. There’s nothing you can do about that, but once you have dealt with the interruption, you need a way to quickly get back on track. Having your priorities written down either on a piece of paper on your desk or in a To-do list manager you actually look at, will make it much easier for you to get back on track.
Now, when I say have a list of your priorities for the day written down, I do not mean have them listed in amongst all the low-priority tasks. I mean you have a single list with just your top one or two tasks for the day on. Nothing else. It’s this list that will keep you focused.
If you have them on a list with all your other tasks for the day, you are just going to start looking for the low hanging tasks—the easy ones—in the false belief that if you can just get you list down in number you will have had a productive day. Sure, you may have got a lot done, but you got a lot of low-value work done at the expense of the more important high-value work. Just do not do that.
If you are using a digital to-do list manager, like Todoist, you can use the flags to highlight your priority tasks and then use filters to hide away all your other tasks until you have completed those high-value ones.
Ultimately, it comes down to this, Kurt. Stop trying to do everything all at once. For one, you will never do it and secondly, you’ll either get so frustrated you will give up planning altogether or you will burn yourself out. Neither option seems very appealing.
Instead, decide what your core, high-value work is. Make that the foundation of your priorities every day and spread out the bigger tasks throughout the week, rather than trying to do them all in one day.
There’s a saying in British politics attributed to former Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, that “a week is a long time in politics”. The truth is a week is a lot longer than you think and when you plan out the week, decide what your must do, high priority tasks are and keep them to a minimum, you will find you have plenty of time to get the sudden, unplanned for emergencies done as well as those high-value tasks you decided you were going to get done that week.
It takes time, it takes consistent practice, but as long as you persevere, adjust where necessary and stay focused on the task at hand, you will get there and making sure your priorities take priority every day will become second nature.
Good luck and thank you for the question.
Thank you also to you for listening and just a heads up, This podcast is now, finally, on Spotify. So if you are a Spotify user, you can now subscribe to this podcast right there.
It just remains for me now to wish you all, a very very productive week.
Podcast 144
In this week’s episode, I answer a question on developing a system that works for you.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin
Your Digital Life 3.0 Online
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 144
Hello and welcome to episode 144 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, the question is all about building your own system, something I feel very passionate about because it’s only when you have a system that works for you that you can finally start to trust your system and when you trust your system you use properly that’s when you start to see huge increases in your productivity and your time management.
But first...
The early-bird discount for my latest Your Digital Life 3.0 course will be ending Tuesday 4 August at midnight PST (That’s LA time). Right now, if you have not enrolled in this amazing course, you can get it for $59.99–that’s a 20% discount on the normal price of $74.99.
Remember, with Your Digital Life you get a course that covers your whole digital life including your calendar, notes app, to-do list and cloud storage. PLUS... I also give you free access to my Complete Guide To Creating Your Goals and Email Productivity Mastery courses (which alone is worth $99.00)
So don’t miss out on this amazing offer. Remember this offer will be ending tomorrow at midnight LA time. So get yourself enrolled today. Full details of the course are in the show notes.
If you are already enrolled in the course, this is a free update and you do not need to do anything. The new, updated course is available for you in your dashboard on my learning centre right now.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Abdul. Abdul asks; Hi Carl, I’ve struggled for many years to find a productivity system that works. I’ve tried GTD and that is too complicated for me, I’ve tried a digital version of the Franklin Planner—which was okay, and I’ve tried so many other ‘systems’. Is there something wrong with me or do you know of any other systems that might work?
Hi Abdul, thank you for your question.
First up, I can promise you there is nothing wrong with you. So many people I’ve met feel exactly the same way you do. That’s partly because there’s so much advice out there, it’s hard to know what works and what doesn’t work. Plus, the technology available to us today is changing so fast it’s hard to find a settled set of apps and really learn those before a new app comes out promising to revolutionise how we manage our projects and tasks.
The reality is, no one system will work for everyone. We are all different and that is a good thing. Life would be very boring if we were all the same; liking the same things and doing things in the same way.
I think it’s also a good thing we have so many different apps to choose from. With all this choice there are so many different ways we can build a system that will meet our own individual needs.
Of course, with choice comes confusion. We find ourselves asking if the tools we are using today are the best tools and wondering if there are better tools we could be using that would make out systems better. That is a dangerous way to think. That can lead to app switching which never creates a trusted system. All app switching does is creates distrust and wastes a lot of time moving all your data from one app to a new app and then finding you have data, tasks and notes all over the place.
One of the best approaches is to do a little research on how successful people manage their time. Try to find what apps they are using. For example, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO uses Apple Notes for everything. It’s his to-do list manager, his journal and his notes app. Now the way my brain works that would not work for me, but I do admire the simplicity of creating lists in Apple Notes to manage the work I have to do each day.
And that is another consideration for you. What kind of work do you do? I would consider my work as creating content. It’s what I love doing and I am fortunate to be able to make a living from it. As I create content for different platforms each week, all I need to do is manage when I will write and record each week. I know at the beginning of the week I need to write a blog post, a podcast script, two newsletters, record this podcast and record two to three YouTube videos. Knowing that at the beginning of the week means I can schedule the time for that in my calendar and fix it each week.
But if you were an emergency room doctor you are unlikely to have a fixed schedule like that. Your work will be shift based and so no one week would be the same. Your calendar would be changing on a week to week basis and you are likely to be dealing with working some weeks during the day and some weeks at night. I find shift workers are better using their calendars as their primary time management tool.
If your work is largely project-based and your projects change frequently, then calendars will be useful for managing your meetings but not helpful managing all the different tasks you will have for the different projects you are working on. So a to-do list manager would likely be your primary tool for managing your time.
So, the starting point is to look at the work you do. If you are in sales, for example, often the driver of a sales process is the company’s CRM system. If you try to run a hybrid CRM system alongside your company’s CRM system you end up duplicating everything which is not the most efficient or effective way of managing your work. With that situation, it is far better to work with your company’s system, or at least give it a try before looking for alternatives.
Another consideration is to figure out how you yourself like to see things. Are you a visual thinker—preferring to see things visually? If so, then apps like Asana or Trello would work best for you. These apps use boards to show you where your tasks and projects are and you get to choose how many boards you have, what the columns are and all you do is move things around your columns.
Alternatively, if you are like me where I am a bit of a visual thinker and a linear thinker, you could use an app like Todoist or Microsoft To-Do to manage your tasks and Asana or Trello to visually represent your projects progress.
So there quite a few different ways to build a trusted system.
That said, if I were to start from scratch myself today, then I would begin with my calendar. Your calendar is your best friend because it will never lie to you. It shows you exactly how much time you have available each day and from there you can allocate the work you want to do on a daily and weekly basis.
I use my calendar to schedule out my work. I don’t go too deep with what I put on there but I use it to tell me if I am writing, doing exercise, teaching or recording. When I do my weekly planning session, I can schedule out the time I need to complete my content and do my exercise. I can get that fixed before the week starts and I know I have time then to complete all my content for the week.
The details of what I write about will be in my notes app and tasks that need doing—updating my website, scheduling my social media posts and errands will be in my to-do list. All I have on my calendar is an ‘event’ called “writing time” or “audio/visual time” once I see that I can refer to my notes and see what I have planning to create that week.
I’ve also a few clients who use a to-do list as a capture tool only—ie they collect tasks and then later in the day transfer those tasks directly to their calendar. This is a great way to make sure you are not over-scheduling yourself and it also helps with prioritising. With this system, you only need an inbox in a to-do list manager.
So, first, understand the kind of work you do and what you need to manage that work. Secondly, sort out your calendar. Make sure you are using it properly and you have your ‘must-do’ work scheduled on there at the beginning of the week.
Next up, as I eluded to above, make sure you have a good capturing system. This means you need to learn keyboard shortcuts, use widgets on your phone and set up Siri. You want collecting to be as easy and simple as you can possibly make it. You see, the thing with collecting is if you are not collecting everything then your whole system falls apart before you begin. If you know you don’t have everything collected, there’s no way you will trust your system. So, make sure you collect everything. Work on developing that habit right now.
Should you use labels or tags (contexts in the old GTD system) in your to-do list manager? That’s an interesting question. For the kind of work I do, I don’t need them. In the old days when if you were to do writing you needed a computer, then I did use them. But today, when I can write on my phone, reply to emails and listen to podcasts, I really do not need them. But...
If I were in sales or real estate, then I probably would. I would like to see all my calls and follow-ups, so a labelling or tagging system for calls and follow-ups would be good. But as a content creator, I really do not need them. This one really is up to you. But be careful. Don’t add labels and tags and not use them. I’ve seen a lot of people say they need them, but then never use them to filter down their lists. If you’re not using them, delete them. Just because your app has the ability to add tags or labels or contexts, does not mean you have to use them.
So as you can see, Abdul, with all the choices you have today, you want to be thinking about how you work, how you think and what you like.
One caveat, Whatever way you want to build your system, keep it simple and keep the apps you are using to a minimum. There are four core apps you really need: a calendar, a to-do list, a note app and a cloys storage system and you only need one of each. It’s when you start adding additional apps to manage your work that things get complex and you find your duplicating and losing a lot of tasks. Think “Project One” as I like to call it. One app for each part of my life. One writing app, Ulysses for me, one To-to list manager (Todoist) and one notes app (Evernote)
Hopefully, that has helped, Abdul. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering, then please email me at carl@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, How should you be managing your goals and projects?
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Your Digital Life 3.0 Online
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 143
Hello and welcome to episode 142 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, it’s all about managing your projects and goals and how to make sure you are focused on the right things.
Now before we get to that, don’t forget if you are enrolled in my Your Digital Life 2.0 online course, head over to your dashboard, there’s a very nice surprise for you. Your course has just become Your Digital Life 3.0 and it’s a huge update. I’ve updated the time management part to include the Time Sector System and I have re-recorded almost all of the videos so they are better quality and more educational than ever before.
If you are not enrolled in the course, you can enrol this week in the course and save yourself 20%. It’s a fantastic course that shows you how to manage your digital life including your to-do list manager, your notes, your email. Your goals and your digital files. There’s so much content in there and for less than $60 it is also incredible value. So get yourself signed up today and start building a digital system that will finally get you better organised and more productive without al the stress and overwhelm most of us feel today.
Ok, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Brian. Brian asks: hi Carl, There’s a lot of advice out there about how to manage your projects and goals. Is there a right way to manage everything?
Hi, Brian thank you for your question. I know this can be a dilemma for a lot of people when they start out on the road to becoming better organised and more productive. There is a lot of conflicting advice out there.
The problem I find is we are dealing with people, and all people are different. That’s what makes the human race so fascinating. However, it does cause a few problems when people like me try to help other people. Because we are all different we all think differently and we all like to organise things differently.
If my wife is putting away clothes, she bundles socks very differently from the way I bundle socks. I like to fold them together in the Marie Kondo fashion. My wife prefers to bundle them up and fold them inside out… Really annoying hahaha
And that’s my point. I have a preferred way and my wife has a preferred way. We are all different.
So we have to know how we personally like to organise things. Are you a linear thinker or a visual thinker? Or are you, like me, a little bit of both?
You see if you are a linear thinker, then managing your projects and goals in an app like Asana or Trello is not going to be the most effective way for you. Likewise, if you are a visual thinker, apps like Todoist and Things 3 will not be the best way for you.
This is why following the latest trending productivity apps is never going to satisfy you. Each new app on the market will always be built on the developers own preferences and not yours. I know these developers do plenty of research asking where the ‘pain points’ in users’ current apps are, and we, as users, are very happy to tell them. But, these extra features are not going to improve your productivity—they don’t make your work any easier and they don’t help you to do more work in less time—often the reverse.
Let me give you an example of this. Snoozing emails. I know a lot of people who want this feature and use this feature, but let be perfectly honest here, it’s a useless feature. What does it do? It delays the inevitable. Someone has taken the time to write you an email and because you believe you are busy you hit the snooze feature and the email disappears. And then what? You now cannot deal with it if you get a few spare moments, and you know it is coming back. It’s just lazy. Instead, a more effective way of managing email is to just make the decision “what is it?’ And “what do I need to do with it?” Then just move it to the appropriate folder. Simple really.
Okay, so once you know what kind of thinker you are when it comes to managing projects your need to know your outcome. What exactly is it you want to accomplish?
Now with respect to goals and projects, you should adopt the same approach. That is to have absolute clarity on what you want to achieve.
Ask the question: what’s my outcome here?
Without absolute clarity on what it is you want to accomplish you will find yourself running around in circles and not really knowing when or if you have completed your project.
When that happens you won't want to review the project and when you do review it you won't really know what needs to happen next which creates a vicious circle of not knowing what to do next and not wanting to review the project because of that.
This is why if you ever learn about leadership, one of the most important skills in leadership is to be able to communicate, with absolute clarity, what you want your team to do. All great leaders know how to communicate their outcomes with absolute clarity.
So, step one whenever you begin a project or goal get really clear on what your outcome is.
Now, what do I mean about clarity? Well, let’s take losing weight. If you just say to yourself “I want to lose weight”, well that might appear clear, but how much weight do you want to lose? You see it’s very easy to lose weight. Weigh yourself just after you have eaten dinner, go out for a thirty-minute walk, go to bed and weight yourself again in the morning after you have been to the bathroom and before you eat or drink anything. I can guarantee you will have lost weight.
But I am sure that is not really what you meant when you said you wanted to lose weight. So be very clear. How much weight do you want to lose and by when?
The same principle applies to projects. I have an online workshop to do later this week. The topic of the workshop is how to manage and complete projects and goals. So what’s my outcome here? The outcome is to deliver an online workshop to around 100 people that is entertaining, educational and inspiring so the participants take what I teach them and do something with it to improve their project and goal management.
That description is at the top of the note I created when I began planning the project. Because I have that written down at the top of the note, I see it every time I work on the project. I never lose sight of my outcome.
As I develop the workshop, I keep referring to my outcome. I am asking myself does this meet my project’s outcome? I often break things down to a slide level too. Does this slide meet the project’s outcome? Could I make it clearer? Does this section inspire and educate? Will my message motivate the participants to take immediate action?
By having that clarity, working on the project is much easier. Certainly a lot easier than having a vague idea of what the workshop will be about.
So, before you start any project or goal, make sure you have absolute clarity on what your outcome is.
Once you know what your outcome is, the next step is to list out everything you need to do to achieve that outcome. Now at this stage, you want to be writing out everything and anything. This is, in a sense, a brainstorming session. What do you have to do to go from where you are today to where you want to be when the project or goal is complete? Where’s the gap and how do you close the gap?
Now, for me, this is where a lot of people go wrong. What most people do is they just transfer all those tasks to their to-do list manager. Now the problem with this approach is you end up with a lot of tasks that really don’t need doing and you end up with a long list of important and not so important tasks. It’s not a very effective way to do it.
A better way is to go through your list and decide which of all the steps you have written down in your brainstorming session would give you the biggest impact. Which of those tasks would drive the project forward?
For the workshop, that is developing the slide deck and the workbook. This means any time I spend developing my slide deck and the workbook is quality time. Time spent deciding on the slide deck theme—the colours, fonts and background—is not a priority. That’s the icing on the cake, so to speak, and can be done once the important content has been created.
The same with losing weight. What are the tasks that will move that goal towards completion fastest? “Eat less move more”. Trying to decide what exercise to do, what gym to join, what clothes to buy and how frequently to exercise will not move the goal forward. You want to lose weight? Eat less, move more. So anything that involves movement and eating less is where I would put all my effort and attention. I can always research gyms, decide on clothing and other stuff later—I could even think about it as I am going for a walk around the block. The only way to achieve my weight goal is to eat less and move more.
So, once I have decided which tasks will move the project or goal forward, only then will I add these to my to-do list manager. I don’t want the little, less impactful tasks in my to-do list because they will only distract me and often give me a false sense of progress. The little, less impactful tasks will get done as and when they need doing, but I do not want them distracting me. If they need doing fine, do them, but I only worry about then if not doing them prevents me from moving the project forward.
Now, I understand it can be difficult to decide which are the high impact tasks, but the extra effort is worth it because it is these tasks that move things forward faster and once you create momentum, projects and goals have a habit of getting accomplished without too much effort.
A final thought to add here is to stop over complicating and overthinking things. One way to prevent this is again absolutely clear what it is you want to accomplish. Let’s say you want to produce a newsletter for your organisation. Great! Where do you start? Often people start with trying to find the best newsletter platform. Why? You see when you start a newsletter you are not going to have very many subscribers at first so the platform does not matter. What matters is content. What are you going to put in the newsletter?
Once you know what you are going to put in it, start creating the content. What platform you use can come later. A quick Google search will give you the top ten newsletter platforms and when you have content you are going to make a decision much quicker. If you have no content, you will use deciding what platform to host your newsletter on as an excuse not to create content and I’ve seen so many people spend months talking about which platform and when (or if ) they finally decide another six months have passed. In six months you could have built up 500 or a 1,000 subscribers, instead, you wasted six months on a minor part and have less than ten people who once said they would be interested in your newsletter.
Another area of over-complicating things is dividing a project up into sub-projects and sub-tasks, Why? Why do you need all that complexity? For a project or goal to complete you just need to do the work. So all you need is to see what needs doing next. Most projects and goals will not get done in one day, so what do you need to do today to move it forward? Do that.
When you try to get clever and create sub-projects and sub-tasks you spend far too much time managing and organising the tasks and not enough time doing the tasks. Shuffling around your tasks does not complete projects and goals. You only complete these by doing the tasks. So do the tasks. Be clear each day what needs to happen and do it. That’s how projects and goals get accomplished.
I hope that has helped, Brian. Thank you so much for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering you can email at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, how to prioritise and more importantly how to decide what is a priority and what is not.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Your Digital Life 3.0 Course Page
The Time Sector Course
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 142
Hello and welcome to episode 142 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a question I suspect was sparked by last week’s podcast on what super-productive people have in common. This week, the question is about how to prioritise your tasks and how to decide what a priority is.
Now, before we begin, for those of you who are in my Your Digital Life online course, if you head over to your course dashboard, you will find this year’s long-awaited update. And it is a very big update! Almost all of the course has been re-recorded and updated. I have retained to the core essence of the course—how to manage your digital life—but I have updated the task management side of the course with the Time Sector System as well as going into a lot more detail on managing your notes, goals and projects.
If you have not signed up for the course yet, you can do so AND if you do so now you will be able to sign up with an early-bird discount of 20%. That a huge saving on the best productivity course around. And remember, with Your Digital Life, once you are in the course you will receive free updates every year. PLUS you get FREE access to my Complete Guide to Creating Your Own Goals and Email Productivity Mastery courses as well as a FREE copy of Your Digital Life 2.0 The Book AND a completely re-written workbook for 2020.
Your Digital Life is incredible value at less than $70. (Or less than $60 right now) So get yourself signed up right now and start building a complete digital productivity and organisation system that will make living in the digital world seamless and worry-free.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tony. Tony asks: Hi Carl, I recently heard you talk about your “core” work and why you should prioritise these tasks. I understand that, but how do you decide what is important on a day to day basis?
Thank you, Tony, for your wonderful question.
This is a hard question to answer as it will be different for everyone listening. What my “core” tasks are will be very different from a person who manages a team of people all reporting to her. However, although all our “core” tasks will be different, the process of deciding what those tasks are is the same for everyone.
Firstly, to avoid any confusion your core tasks are your high-value tasks. The tasks that earn you your income. If you did not do these tasks consistently, you would lose your job or at the very least you would damage your career or if you are self-employed you would seriously damage your business.
So, examples would be if you are in sales, being in front of your customers or clients is your core—your high-value tasks. So anything you do that puts you in front of your customers is high value and a priority. That could be calling or visiting your customers. It could be prospecting for new customers or asking for referrals.
The low-value tasks in sales are completing your reports. I’ve worked with a lot of companies that insist their sales teams complete elaborate sales reporting forms every day. The only people these forms benefit are office-bound sales managers who are more concerned about keeping their sales documents up to date and who have lost sight of the important part of their team’s work—sales.
If you are in the medical field as a healthcare professional your core work is being in front of your patients. Treating them and making sure they are receiving the best care you can give them which may mean spending time each week learning about the latest medical procedures and drug breakthroughs so you can pass on these benefits to your patients.
If you struggle to see where your core work is, the clue is usually in your title. Salesperson? Your core work is sales. Healthcare professional? Your core work is taking care of the health of your patients.
Spending hours in diversity classes or IT training is not a core part of your work. Those classes may be important for the organisation—after all a diverse, culturally sensitive workplace is important as well as knowing how to operate your company’s IT platforms—but to sacrifice time for these when there are customers waiting or patients to be seen means you have your priorities the wrong way round.
So the first step is to make a list of the task you consider to be important to the work that you do. The vital, high-value tasks that complete the purpose of your work.
Now, one part of this that I feel is very important is to do the same with your long and short term goals. While it is important to make sure you have your core work prioritised, it is also important to make sure your goals are also feeding into your day. I know how easy it is to fill your day with work tasks that benefit your employer—I spent fifteen years doing that—when you do that, you neglect what is important to you and that can have devastating effects on your overall wellbeing and motivation.
This why a crucial part of learning how to prioritise is to consistently do a weekly planning session at the end of the week.
Now a quick point on where and when to do your weekly planning session. Don’t do it at work and don’t do it on a Monday morning. The best place and time to do a weekly planning session is on a weekend away from your place of work. Why? Because removing yourself from the hustle and bustle of your workplace allows you to see the bigger picture of your life as a whole instead of just seeing your work life. Your life is not just made up of your work. There are your family and friends. Your goals, your hobbies and your health and wellbeing. If you are not taking care of these areas of your life you will feel out of control and have that sense you are making no progress on the important things in your life. In effect, you feel like you are always putting out fires not doing anything to build the life you desire. So, do your weekly planning session on a weekend wither at home or in a local cafe away from your usual working environment.
Okay, so once you have established what you high value, core tasks are, take a look at your calendar for next week. How many of those tasks have you allocated time for? I ask that because if these are genuinely your high-value core tasks you must make sure each week you have time carved out to make sure they happen.
You see, if you are not blocking time each day and each week to work on these high-value tasks, other, less important—but often louder—tasks will take over your day. Low-value tasks have a loud voice—they don’t want you to think about their low value so they often come bundled up in layers of urgency. You boss emails you and asks a question that if your boss spent five minutes in your company’s system could get the answer themselves, or a client calls you to say their shipment has not arrived—when the delivery company has already emailed them with the tracking number and given an estimated delivery day.
These tasks, when they pop up, appear urgent and cause us to think they are now a priority, yet, if you stop for thirty seconds you would realise they are not priorities and can be dealt with diplomatically and quickly—“sorry boss I’m in a meeting” or “have you received a confirmation email from the delivery company yet?”
These types of tasks do not need you to drop everything to rush around and spend an hour panicking. Stop, think, evaluate and make a decision. What’s more important? Only you can answer that.
The final part of this is to use the 2+8 Prioritisation method. This is where you take ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day and process your to-do list’s inbox and look at what you have on your list of tasks for tomorrow. Pick two tasks and make these your objectives—The two tasks you must complete no matter what else happens. And select up to eight other tasks, that while you will do everything you can to complete them, it would not be the end of the world if you were unable to do so.
These are your priorities for tomorrow. It does not mean you ignore everything else you need to do, but these ten tasks are your priorities. Make sure these get done first. If, and only if, you have time at the end of the day will you begin work on the other low-value tasks.
When I began the day today, I had eight of these tasks on my priorities list. Two priorities—prepare this script and write my blog post. I have identified content creation as one of my core, high-value tasks so the content gets done first. When I look at the list now, of the six remaining tasks for today, four of them relate to content, one relates to my health and fitness—exercise and one relates to a client matter. As long as I complete these eight tasks today, I know I have moved the important things forward. I have taken care of all the high-value tasks I needed to take care of today and if I don’t do anything else today, I can be happy knowing the right things were done.
That is why the 2+8 Prioritisation Method works. It keeps you focused on the work you have identified as being important. If you are not completing these tasks on a daily basis, then you are allowing the less important, low value—but noisy—tasks take control of your day and you need to stop and evaluate why that is happening.
You could be saying “yes” too easily. If so learn how to say “no”. It’s a skill, but a skill worth learning nonetheless. It could be you have made the wrong decisions, look at your decision-making process and see how and where you can improve.
Adopt the CANI approach—the Constant And Never-ending Improvement approach. How can I improve my decision-making process? How can I make sure I stay focused on my priorities every day? All of these questions help you to stay focused on your core, high-value tasks.
I am not pretending this is easy. It is not. The truth is it is a constant battle because as humans we are programmed to take the easy path. But, when you make the decision to no longer accept the easy way and instead do it the right way, then you will start to see huge improvements in your productivity, your time management, your career and your overall sense of happiness and well-being.
Good luck, Tony and thank you try much for your question. Thank you also to all of you for listening.
Don’t forget to take the new Your Digital Life 3.0 course—if you are already signed up for the Your Digital Life programme. If not, you can still get yourself in and right now save yourself 20% with the early-bird discount.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, What makes a super-productive person? What do the most productive people do that other people do not do? That’s the question I am tackling this week.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Time Sector Course
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 141
Hello and welcome to episode 141 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I have a fascinating and challenging question to answer. What habits and actions do the most productive people use to male them so productive. It’s a question that has interested me for years and I have quite a long list of ideas I have collected over the years that this week I will share with you.
But first… If you are struggling to make a time management system work for you, or you feel your personal time management is terrible, then I may have a solution for you. Earlier this year I developed a new way of managing your workload called the Time Sector System. It’s a system designed for the twenty-first century and shows you that the only thing you can control is when you will do something.
It does not matter what it is you need to do, in what order or how many tasks you have to complete within a project. The only thing that matters is when are you going to do it. After all, no matter how urgent, pressing or important a task is, if you do not have time to do it, it will not get done.
So, if you want to learn a system that shows you how to manage your time properly, take a look at the Time Sector System. Full details of which are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now thank you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Helena. Helena asks: HI Carl. As someone who has been interested in productivity and time management for a long time, what do you know about how really successful people manage their time and get the important things done?
Hi Helena. Thank you for your excellent question.
Before we get started, I need to address the elephant in the room. Whenever I talk about what I have learned from super-productive people I have met and read about, cynics will always point out that these people have an army of personal assistants doing a lot of their work for them.
And while this is true to a point. It is far too defeatist and simplistic. You see, super-productive and successful people were not always super productive and successful. What helped them to become the way they are is not an army of assistants, but a clear sense of what is important and what is not.
What these people know, and many others have not figured out yet, is that your work is divided up between high-value tasks and low-value tasks.
The high-value tasks take your goals and projects forward faster and more effectively than the low-value tasks. Low-value tasks need doing, but the super-productive among us demote their value on their to-do lists and where possible delegate those tasks to other people.
Let me give you a simple example. Imagine you are paid $30.00 per hour when you are working and you have six shirts to iron for next week. Now I know from personal experience to iron six shirts would take around an hour to do—well it would for me. If you spend one hour doing your ironing, you have lost $30. Alternatively, if you took those same six shirts to a cleaners around the corner it would cost you $10.00.
So, which is the better use of your time? Doing work that will pay you $30.00 or ironing the shirts that will pay you nothing?
If you take the shirts to the cleaners the net gain to you financially is $20.00.
That’s how the super-success manage their time. They understand the cost/benefit of the work they do. It’s how they think and that way of thinking is very different from the way most people think.
So while you may not have your own personal assistant, it does not mean that you have to do everything yourself. There are ways you can delegate your work. All you need do is get a little creative and know the value of your time.
For those of you starting our with your own business, maybe you could look into hiring a virtual assistant to do some of your admin tasks. You do not need to pay a virtual assistant for a forty-hour week, you only pay them for the time it takes to do the tasks you want them to do.
All you need do is work out how much it would cost you to delegate the task against the time you save and the amount you would make by better leveraging your time.
What it comes down to is knowing which tasks are important and which are not. I know that sounds simple and obvious, but it is surprising how many people do not do it. Most people treat every task as equally important and this is why most are stressed out, overwhelmed and feel they are making no progress at all on their goals or their projects. Not all tasks are equal. Most of them are not at all important.
Another way of working this out is to think in terms of the 80:20 principle. 80% of your results will come from 20% of the tasks you perform. So what you need to decide is what those 20% tasks—the ones that will give you the 80% return. Once you have established that, you can then try and delegate the 80% that do not do very much.
Another area where I see highly productive people excel is in how they manage their calendars. Your calendar is sacred territory and you should never ever allow anyone else to have control of it.
Now if you work in an organisation where your boss or anyone else can arrange meetings on your calendar you need to find ways to prevent that from happening. One way, for example, is to block time out on your calendar so you are shown as not being available. You can create ‘fictional’ meetings with yourself to do focused work so your calendar shows you are busy at certain times of the day.
Another trick you can use is to plan sessions of work a month or two in advance. If you know you have a project at the end of August, for example, you could block two days off around the 20th August. When you do this two things will happen. Firstly, your sub-conscious mind prepares you for it and secondly, if you tell people in advance—like a few weeks in advance—they are less likely to be upset or concerned about it. I learn that trick from one of the most productive people I have ever met. It works brilliantly.
The final thing super-successful and productive people do is they say no a lot more than they say yes. You see what these people understand is that if they spend more of their time each day on the high-value tasks, they will become more successful. If they spread their attention and say yes more often, they end up spending far more time on low-value tasks and they know when that happens their income and productivity suffer.
There’s a wonderful story about Steve Jobs where if you asked him for his time and it judged what you were asking him to do was low value, he would just ignore your request. He would give you a blank stare—if you asked him in person—or would ignore your email/text message. Now that’s going beyond saying no. That’s saying nothing. People soon got the message.
So, Helena, if you want to become a super-productive person and enjoy the benefits that come with that, you are going to have to make some uncomfortable decisions. For most people making these changes requires them to come outside their comfort zone and ask some very difficult questions. It’s easy to delegate blame to your company, your boss or your clients. When you do that, you are taking the easy road and it will banish you to a life of regret. And I do mean that. When you look back on your life in ten or twenty years time you will regret being so available to other people. You will regret not accomplishing the things you always wanted to accomplish and that is not a nice place to be.
So if you are ready to start the journey, the first thing you can do is establish what your high value and low-value tasks are—this is why a “do not do” list can often be useful. It shows you what are low value and what you should delegate or just find a better and faster way of doing them.
I hope this has been useful to you all. You do have the power to become highly productive, you just need to decide how much you are willing to sacrifice.
Thank you for your question, Helena, and thank you to all of you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish all a very very productive week.
This week, should you switch to the latest app? Well, it depends and that’s the question I am answering this week.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Time Sector Course
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 140
Hello and welcome to episode 140 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Over the last few months, we’ve seen the launch of the noting taking app Roam Research and the email app HEY! Both of these apps have received quite a lot of publicity. The question is should you switch to any of these new apps? Well, it does depend on a number of things and that is what I shall talk about in this weeks episode.
Now, before we get to that, I just want to give you a heads up that the 2020 Your Digital Life course will be launching very soon. It’s a little late this year because I’ve completely re-recorded it and updated it with the Time Sector System.
Although this version is now the 3.0 version, anyone already enrolled in the Your Digital Life 2.0 course will, of course, get this huge update completely free. I know, I’m mad! But for me, it’s always about helping you to become better organised and more productive. So, keep an eye out for the launch. It’s coming very very soon.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jez. Jez asks; hi Carl, what do you think of the new notes app Roam Research and Notion? These new players look like they are taking over from Evernote.
Hi Jez, thank you for your question.
Every few months I get a lot of questions like this on Twitter and my inbox is inundated with app developers asking me to promote their latest offerings and I think it is fantastic that these amazing people are working hard to make our lives easier.
That said, though, App stores can be very dangerous places. You see one of the biggest issues is people app switching every few months because the latest and newest shiny object in the App Store is offering to solve all your productivity problems.
Let's get one thing straight first. No app whether it’s new or old, will solve your productivity problems. Ever. Full stop.
You see if you have productivity issues it is not the app that is the problem. I mean, let's be honest here, as a species we survived pretty well with paper-based desk diaries and legal note pads for to-do lists. The issues many faces today, are the exact same issues knowledge workers have faced for decades. It’s not the apps. It’s the system you use, or not use.
So, there are two parts to this.
If you enjoy trying new apps and your productivity and time management systems keep you on top of your work, then that’s great. Go ahead, play, research and learn. It can be fun trying out new apps and seeing what they can do. I do that myself. Last week I played around with HEY! The new email app. And for those you interested, it’s not for me. I cannot send emails from my business email address only my HEY! Address. So it’s a non-starter. I also do not like being forced to manage my emails in the way the app developer wants me to manage my emails.
There are also some marketing issues here too. Picking a fight with Apple may seem a noble cause, but to me, it smacks of a publicity stunt to get attention. And forcing people to only use their HEY! Email address seems to be exactly the same way Hotmail developed a following in the 1990s. It all feels very fake to me. But that’s just my opinion.
Then there’s the other side to this. If you believe that if only you have the right set of apps your productivity issues will somehow miraculously be solved, then you are deluding yourself. They won't.
In fact, if you are constantly switching apps, you are compounding your problems because you never give any app a chance to become a part of who you are. You will be constantly playing with feature sets, trying to figure out how to do something and importing your notes, tasks or events into another new app. All of which takes you away from actually doing the work.
The truth is no app with be a perfect fit. You will have to compromise. When I moved to Todoist five or six years ago, I did so coming from an OmniFocus background. I was used to start and due dates. With Todoist you don’t get start dates. But the reasons for my move was much bigger than having start and due dates. It was because I was spending too much time in OmniFocus playing with perspectives and was not spending enough time doing the work. Todoist offered me a much simpler way of managing my tasks and it was the right move for me. It solved an issue of productivity for me. I quickly learned I did not need start dates anyway and I was only using them because they were a feature of OmniFocus.
And that is the point. If switching to a new app improves your workflow and overall productivity, then your switch was the right thing to do. If, however, it solves nothing and you find yourself back with the same issues you had before, then you’ve just wasted a lot of precious time. Time you will never get back.
Now with a notes app, this is an interesting place for me. You see, the right notes app for you depends on the way your mind works. I have clients who are incredibly creative and love to doodle in meetings. They love the feel of pen on paper, They think better in images and drawings and charts. For these people, a notes app that allows you to drop images, scans of written notes and use an Apple Pencil or stylus would work fantastically for them.
Then I have clients who think more linearly and prefer written outlining with links to connected ideas and notes. For these people, something like Roam Research or even Workflowy, OmniOutliner or Google Docs works best.
The right notes app for you depends on the way you think.
The same actually goes for your to-do list. If you are a visual person, Trello or Asana are likely to be the best for you. If you are more of a linear thinker, then Todoist, Microsoft ToDo or Apple Reminders would work better.
So, when it comes to choosing the right apps for you, you need to consider the way you think and work.
The problem with constant switching is you never learn how to use your app properly or build the all-important trust. If you do not trust your apps, you are less likely to use them properly.
The key to having a great set of apps is you instinctively collect everything into the app without thinking. I’ve used Todoist and Evernote for so long now, I don’t need to think of the steps to get something into my system. It just happens. I have an idea, I pick up my phone or activate the keyboard shortcut on my computer and collect the idea or task. It’s an automatic reflex. This is great because I stay focused on what I want to collect, instead of having to take my mind off that and try to remember how to save an idea.
And then we get to processing or organising what you collected. If you are constantly changing your apps you never really learn how to process quickly and efficiently. And with apps like Notion where there are so many customisable elements, the temptation to be constantly fiddling with your set up, the background colours or image means you spend a disproportionate amount of time playing and not enough time getting on with the work that matters.
What it all boils down to is what is it you want to achieve? Do you want to get better organised and become more productive, or do you want distractions and toys?
I agree it is important to keep up with the latest technology, but that should not be at the expense of your efficiency. I know plenty of productive people who still use a Franklin Planner. They routinely do their daily planning, they sharpen the saw and their planners are a gold mine of plans, appointments and tasks. They stick with it because it works and it is a system they trust.
It’s your system that really determines whether you are productive or not. Developing your system, and making it work for you is what will improve your time management. The app you use really doesn’t matter.
I think about the years I have been using Evernote and the incredible depository of notes, ideas and reference materials I have collected over the ten years of using Evernote is wonderful. Comparing Evernote to it’s newer rivals makes Evernote look and feel old fashioned, but it works, it’s never let me down (except on iOS which seems to have been fixed now) and I know how to find my notes in seconds. There’s no temptation to customise it—you can’t anyway— and because it has a fixed structure, I instinctively know how I want to organise my notes.
If I consider the time it would take for me to transfer all my notes from Evernote to something like Notion, it would just be a complete waste of time. I’m sure Notion in many ways looks and feels better than Evernote, but the real question is would it make me more effective? The answer to that is a resounding no. So, while I did try Notion a while ago, I quickly realised it was not going to make my system better or make me more efficient so the time cost involved in switching would not be worth it.
So, fix your system first. Make sure that works and that you use it automatically. Then find apps that work for the way you think, not because they look pretty or are the latest thing reviewers are talking about. All those reviewers will move on to the next things in a few weeks anyway. You will never be able to keep up with them and if you try your productivity will suffer. Just don’t do that.
Hopefully, that helps, Jez. Thank you for your question and once again, thank you to you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all. Very very productive week.
This week, a slightly different episode. I’m answering a question about how to start a podcast, a blog or a YouTube channel.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Time Sector Course
Carl’s Time Sector System Blog Post
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 139
Hello and welcome to episode 139 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
A question I am asked more and more these days is how do you start a blog, podcast, YouTube channel or even a newsletter, so I thought okay, I will answer that question this week because it is linked to productivity and being better with your time management.
Now, before we get to the question, if you are ready to take your time management and productivity to the next level and build a system fit for the twenty-first century and be ready for when we return to a semblance of normalcy, then now is a great time to get yourself enrolled in the course.
And if you are not yet ready to buy the course, I do have a number of resources that will give you an overview of the fundamentals of building the system. All the links are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jim. Jim asks: Hi Carl, how do you start and run an effective YouTube channel (or podcast or blog)? I think this is a valuable question for people, like me, who would like to start a podcast or YouTube channel in their specific area of expertise.
Hi Jim, thank you very much for your question.
Now, before you get started with something like this you do need to understand the time sacrifice you are going to have to make each week or each month. It’s great that you have the idea of wanting to start a podcast, YouTube channel or blog, but the consideration I see a lot of people missing is just how much time it takes to create something like this every week. So let me tell you how much time I need to commit each week to produce the content I produce each week.
First my blog. To write a 1,000-word blog, edit and publish it takes me three hours. I allocate ninety minutes for writing the draft. Then I have a further hour of editing and finally thirty minutes to post the blog post and create the blog’s image.
My YouTube videos take around four to five hours each week. It depends on how many videos I produce. If I am publishing two videos in a given week, I need around three to four hours and three videos would need the full five hours to record, edit and publish with subtitles.
This podcast takes around two hours each week. There’s the script to write and the recording, editing and posting.
I also write two newsletters each week. Each one of those takes around two hours to produce and publish.
In total, I spend around fourteen hours each week producing my content.
Now, of course, you probably won’t be producing six to seven pieces of content each week, but those time estimates should give a rough figure to base your estimates on.
So, if you already feel overwhelmed by the amount of work you have each week, will you be able to commit to a further three hours of work?
And that brings me conveniently to my next tip. You have to commit to this every week (or month) for the next four to five years.
Creating a blog, podcast or YouTube channel is not a one-off event. It is a long-term commitment. This is not just about writing one post and thinking you have done it. It’s about writing or recording multiple posts.
Over the last four years, I have written nearly 300 blog posts, produced 138 podcasts and over 700 YouTube videos. It’s a big commitment.
So the first question you will have to ask yourself is; are you willing to commit to that time? Is so, then let’s move on to the next tip.
Now, you may have read all sorts of advice on starting something like this. And there will inevitably be a list of questions about who your target audience is, what your branding should be and how will you host it.
In my experience, that’s all complete rubbish and it invites you to spend far too much time procrastinating. I’ve known so many people that after three or four years are still trying to figure out who their target audience will be, what branding they should use and where to host their podcast.
None of this matters in the beginning. While you are figuring all that out. You have nothing. All you have is an idea. It would be far better to take your idea and start writing. Start publishing blogs, podcasts or whatever on the cheapest—preferably free—platform. You will never really know who your audience is until you get something out there. Then you will find out.
Once you have an audience, it is very easy to move your blog or podcast to your own website where you can maintain and curate your own content.
Trust me on this one. I made those mistakes in the beginning. I spent far too long thinking about who my target audience should be, and once I began publishing, I soon discovered I was completely wrong.
So, just get something out there. Once you have content out, you will start to get some analytics and that will tell you the truth far faster than if you try and guess.
As you produce more content, you will also develop your branding. Take my blog, for example, my first year or two of writing I just added a random picture I found on Pexels.com. After a year or so, I decided to use duotone images with a subtitle in the picture. That was how I developed my blog’s brand. It evolved over time. I did not, indeed, could not have created that right from the start. It took time.
The same went for my YouTube channel. If you look at my first few videos and compare them to how I do my videos today, you will see it has been an evolution. The more I learned about my audience the better I was able to ‘brand’ my channels and deliver content that people were asking for. In the early days, the only way I could develop a content list was to think of content that I would find interesting and make that.
And speaking of content or topics: How do you come up with ideas week after week? That’s a good question. The only way that has worked for me is to create a content list in my notes app and add topics as and when I thought of them.
Now, here I would advise that before you begin creating your content you draw up a list of at least twenty topics. The goal in these early days is to get twenty pieces of content out. As you write or record you will get more ideas. I find as I read articles, watch other YouTube videos or listen to podcasts I get ideas I think would be helpful and interesting. I then add these to my topic’s list. So you do not need to worry about coming up with ideas. Once you get started, you develop a keen sense of what will be interesting to your audience.
Now a couple of other points I feel you do need to understand. First is don’t go for perfection. You will not be perfect in your early days. You will get it wrong sometimes. You will make great content and not so great content. That’s fine and that’s perfectly normal. What is more important is that you ’ship’. Whatever your publishing schedule is, stick to it.
For your audience what’s worse than the occasional uninteresting post, is inconsistent posts. I subscribe to James Clear’s 3,2,1 weekly newsletter. (For those of you who don’t know, James Clear is the author of Atomic Habits). Every Thursday evening that newsletter arrives. Tony Robbins is another newsletter that is consistent every week. Every Sunday evening, I get Tony’s newsletter.
Then there are other newsletters I subscribe to that are woefully inconsistent. They start off with a bang, and then slowly disappear.
And the worst kind of content are those that come out in a flurry of emails, podcasts and blog posts when they are trying to sell you something and once the sales are over, these newsletters disappear. That just leaves a very bad taste and is guaranteed to lose you your audience.
The most effective way I have found for ensuring I maintain consistency is to set aside a fixed time each week to create my content. As I prepare this script, it is Tuesday morning. I always prepare the podcast script on a Tuesday morning. I have the same fixed time for my blog posts. Monday morning is when I write my blog post and Friday afternoons is my audio/visual day where I record my YouTube videos.
The only way I can build in the consistency needed to create my content is to fix the time in my calendar. For me, what goes on my calendar gets done. So, if it’s on my calendar it will get done.
The reality is if you want to create a blog, podcast or YouTube channel you need to be serious. You need to be in it for the long-term and that means a minimum of four to six years.
One final point. Don’t go looking at your numbers in the first six to twelve months. If you are writing or recording to build an audience you are never going to build a large audience in the first year or so. If you start obsessing about how many people are following you or how many subscribers you have you will be very very disappointed. It is a slow process. The only way you build an audience is through consistently putting out content week after week. There are no short cuts.
Create content because you want to help people. You want to teach people something, educate them on a topic close to your heart or because you want to enjoy the journey of building something from scratch. Never do it to become an ‘influencer’.
If the only reason you want to create a YouTube channel or an Instagram page is to become an influencer, you will fail today. There are far too many people doing that, and the vast majority of those people fail. Give people something of value and you will succeed.
All you need is PACT. Patience, Action, Consistency and Time. With those four elements, you will build something you can be very proud of.
Thank you, Jim, for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, how do you build structure into your day so you stay focused on what is important?
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Building a 21st Century Time Management System
Script
Episode 138
Hello and welcome to episode 138 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So, you have yourself organised. Your to-do list is set up, your projects are being managed from your notes app and your calendar is serving you (rather than the other way round) but you are still struggling to get your most important work done each day. Why is it going wrong?
Well, that depends and that’s what I’m going to answer this week.
Now before get started, have you joined the time management revolution yet? Are you using the Time Sector System? If not, there a couple of ways you can join. The first, of course, is take the course. For just $49.99 you can learn everything you need to get started with this fantastic system.
If you're not ready to take a course, then don't worry, I have a comprehensive blog post detailing the outline as well as plenty of set up videos on my YouTube channel.
All the details are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Sarah. Sarah asks: Hi Carl, one of the things I’ve always struggled with is getting my planning done each day. When I do plan (which, to be honest, is not often) I end up not following my plan and not getting my work done. Are there any tricks that you use that help you stay focused on your work?
Hi Sarah, thank you for your question.
I find this is a common issue for many people when they decide they want to get themselves better organised and become more productive. Setting things up is generally quite easy. The motivation is high and you set aside time to do it. The issues arise once you begin implementing the process.
The problem here is that the process can be boring. And the habits haven't formed yet. So if you have not embedded the habit of planning the day the day before and setting up some structure into your day, your old habits will do their very best to prevent you from following your plan.
So step back for a moment and ask what one new habit would have the biggest impact on your time management?
This could be taking ten minutes at the end of the day and creating a plan of action in your calendar for the next day. Or it could be to focus your attention on collecting items into your to-do list manager—an important first habit to develop.
It’s really about establishing which 20% of your efforts will give you 80% of the results you desire.
If you try to change everything at once, all you need is one slip up and you feel everything has failed. And more importantly, trying to change everything all at once is hard. I would say it’s almost impossible because you are going to be constantly pulled back to your previous habits. Our brains hate change.
Change takes a lot of energy and we will resist it. You have to be determined to change and you have to focus on making that change. So make it easier for yourself and focus on one thing at a time.
So if you have never spent any time planning a day, it is something you are not used to doing, so at the end of a day, you’re tired and just want to crash out in your favourite armchair, you are not going to sit down with your laptop and spend ten minutes planning tomorrow.
That said, one simple way to start is to do two things. The first is to make sure you develop the habit of collecting everything. It does not matter if you think something is silly, just collect it. You can delete it later. And don’t worry about how much you collect. If you are using the Time Sector System it won’t take long to process what you collected.
The second part is to dedicate ten minutes at the end of the day to look at your calendar for the next day and decide what you will get done.
That’s it. Collect and plan.
Now, this is not the complete picture, but developing these two habits first will set you up for success later.
You see, if you are not in the habit of collecting everything that comes your way, you will forget something. And if you are not planning your day, all your old, unproductive habits will stay around. The goal in the initial stages is to change those habits. To build a little structure into your day.
So, the building of your daily structure involves two steps:
The first, before you begin the day, while you are drinking your morning coffee, open up your calendar and look to see what your day looks like. Then review your to-do list for the day. In total, that should only take 5 minutes. You do not need to do anything else. Just look to see what you have planned for the day.
The second is doing the same thing again in the evening. Give yourself ten to fifteen minutes to review your day’s tasks. Look at what you didn’t do, reschedule those for another day, look at your calendar for tomorrow and decide what needs doing. Then stop.
Now, here’s the essential part. Commit to doing that every day for a week.
In total, you are committing yourself to twenty to thirty minutes every day for seven days.
If you really want a way of motivating yourself, then draw out a sheet of paper with seven boxes on it and every day you do it put a cross in it. You are looking to create an uninterrupted chain of seven crosses to indicate you completed these two processes for seven days.
Now, after a week, and with seven crosses, create another seven boxes and do the same the following week.
As the ‘chain’ grows you are going to find it increasingly difficult to skip a day. The rule is, if you skip one day, you must start a new piece of paper and draw out seven boxes and begin again.
What you are doing is using Seinfeld’s “don’t break the chain’ methodology to keep you focused on what you are trying to do.
What I’ve found with many of my coaching clients is as they focus on the morning review and the evening planning sessions, they make tiny adjustments to their set up. As they do this they begin to feel they are making progress—which they are doing—and at the same time, they are beginning to embed new habits. And habits are so much easier to manage than trying to restart things every week.
The next thing is self-discipline. Now here I notice a frequent problem. I’ve come across a lot of people who have developed a false belief over the years believing they are just not the disciplined type. This is complete rubbish! It’s just an excuse to avoid doing something that is quite hard to do.
We all have bundles of self-discipline. It is not that you are not the self-disciplined ‘type’, it’s that you are human. And humans are naturally lazy. So, really not following through on your commitment is just laziness. Apologies for being so brutally honest.
This is why you need to start small. Self-discipline is just like a muscle and to grow your self-discipline you need to exercise it. Exercising self-discipline does begin with small things. For example, sitting down at the end of the day for ten minutes with your calendar and to-do list open and planning tomorrow, while quite a small task, if you do it every day and practice resisting the urges to skip it, you build your self-discipline. Every time you resist the temptation to skip it, your self-discipline becomes stronger. Every time you give in to the temptation, you weaken your self-discipline because there is no pain associated with giving in.
Instead, every time you skip a planning session you need to feel bad. Feel guilty. Be angry with yourself. You failed and you will need to restart your seven-day chain.
Once you have committed yourself to doing a daily planning session, when you give in and don’t do it, then you must associate that with failing. Tell yourself: you failed!
Our feelings about failure cause us pain. We hate to fail. Failing at something is one fear we all have. Failing at a presentation, failing to achieve something leaves us feeling bad. Use that bad feeling to motivate yourself to not fail. After all, we are only talking about ten minutes here.
You can help yourself by doing something pleasurable while you do your planning session. Get yourself a glass of wine or a beer. Treat yourself to a nice cup of relaxing tea. Whatever you enjoy, use that to motivate yourself to do your daily planning.
As with anything worthwhile, the key is your motivation. Why have you decided you want to get better organised and more productive? Is it because of the disappointment you feel when you let someone down and miss a deadline? Or is it because you want to have more time to do things you really want to do? Whatever your motivation for becoming better at managing your time, use that to motivate yourself.
Whenever you feel like not doing that planning session, remind yourself why you are doing it. Write down your reasons why and stick them somewhere in your work station so you can see it every time you sit down. Don’t lose sight of your why.
Once you have embedded your daily planning session, create s structure to your day. Use your calendar to block off time for your important work. You can use the same strategy with building this structure.
For example, if you decide you want to exercise four days a week, put your exercise days on your calendar. Let’s say you decide to exercise Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday every week, put that on your calendar. Fix it there are create recurring events. This way, you will gradually begin to see those days as your exercise days and you will just do your exercise without thinking too much about it.
And you can gradually build in more of the things you want to consistently do. As each week passes your self-discipline grows, your habits change for the better and after three of four months, you find your new habits are embedded.
Now, the reality is you will still have bad days and weeks. That’s natural. We all get thrown out of our routines. Going away on holiday, spending a week on a training session etc. All these throw us out of our routines. The trick is to recognise these changes and to refocus ourselves when we return to our normal daily lives.
A trick I learned a while ago is with morning routines. If you try and create morning routines around a particular time every day, your chances of success are limited. All it takes is a night out on the town and being late to bed, and you will wake up a little later, you will skip your morning routine.
If, however, you create your morning routines around a series of actions you take from the moment you wake up, it means that no matter what time you wake up, you will follow the same routine and that way you are much more likely to follow through with your plan.
So there you go, Sarah. I hope that helps and has given you something to think about. Start small. Build that chain and your self-discipline and remember, if you fall off the wagon, you can always get back on it again.
Becoming more intentional about how you spend your time is a journey. There will be hills and mountains to climb. You will fall done, trip up and have to restart. But it’s a journey. You find out a lot about yourself on this journey and if you stick with it, the results are profoundly fulfilling and often lead for more positive changes in our lives.
Thank you so much for your question and thank you to all of you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, how do you reset your time management system when things have gone wrong?
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
How to Stay Productive When Everything Gets Thrown Out of Sync
Script
Episode 137
Hello and welcome to episode 137 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week it’s all about getting back into your system when you have been thrown out of sync by external events or just because you have drifted off course. And that happens a lot more frequently than you might think.
Now I wrote about this a while ago and I have linked to that post in the show notes. For me, it generally happens after I have been travelling. Coming back to Asia after a trip to Europe throws me right out of sync and it can take me around ten days to get back on track.
That said when it does happen you there are a few strategies that can help guide you back on course.
So let me now hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question:
This week’s question comes from Sam. Sam asks, hi Carl, can you help me? I love the idea of being organised and having time to do my work, yet every time I do get organised a few days later I stop and everything just falls apart. Is this normal?
Hi Sam, yes it is perfectly normal. It happens to all of us from time to time. So you are certainly not alone. The question is how do you prevent it from happening?
A lot of this comes down to our habits and our routines. In particular the habit of processing what you collected at the end of the day (or at least every 48 hours or so) Not clearing your inboxes frequently creates a lot of overwhelm and when that happens we resist and usually give up.
Now, this is one of those areas I found interesting many years ago. When I was in sales we were permitted to claim our expenses. The salesperson who trained me out in the field did her expenses the day before the deadline for submitting expenses. She would go into the glove box of her car and pull out all the receipts for fuel, lunches and other expenses, and then write them all out onto the expenses sheet. It took her around three to four hours to do it all.
My sales manager was a little better, he would begin doing his expenses a couple of days before. It was easier for him as he was based mainly in the office and he kept all his receipts in the top drawer of his desk.
Naturally, as I was a young twenty-something, I looked up to these experts and so followed their example. Soon I began to see this as a very inefficient way of managing expenses. Spending four or five hours painstakingly writing out the receipts onto a sheet once a month just seemed a bad way of doing it. I decided I would do my expenses every day instead. For me, this meant all I had to do was spend five or ten minutes at the end of the day and write my day’s expenses onto the expenses sheet.
One of the additional benefits of this practice was I did not lose any of my receipts. On the day the expenses were due, all I had to was calculate the total, add that to the sheet and hand it in—five minutes at the most.
This practice of having a closing down routine every day has stuck with me ever since. When I used a Franklin Planner in the 1990s, I practised the same philosophy. At the end of the day, I would spend ten to fifteen minutes collecting all my notes, adding the relevant bits to my projects section at the back of the planner and planning out the next day with my diary and to-do list. New to-dos were put where they needed to be and any admin sheets required for my work were updated and filed.
It was a small daily sacrifice that meant I was never in a position where I had to stop every I was doing just to get everything up to date.
My advice to you all is to develop a closing down routine that you follow every day. It does not have to be long. Ten minutes is fine. In this closing down routine, clear your to-do list inbox—decide when you are going to do the tasks, check your calendar for tomorrow, and clean up anything else that needs clearing up.
Clearing inboxes is how we get back on track. Clearing our inboxes—whether that is email or to-do list—the act of cleaning it up is enough to make us feel better and organised. It’s when we allow this area to slip when things go wrong.
Set aside some time each day for processing, Sam. It’s the first place to start. The purpose here is to avoid the build-up of overwhelm. That’s what often causes us to throw in the towel.
Developing the right habits can be very hard though, particularly if you try and do too much at once. And with a closing down routine, there is going to be a lot of trial and error. What you are looking for is efficiency and consistency. Spend a week or two testing out different ways of doing it. Decide what you want to clear at the end of each day and create a checklist.
Once you are happy with your checklist, set yourself a thirty-day challenge. For the next thirty days follow your closing down routine each day. Make sure you do as per your checklist.
Of course, if you feel you need to refine your list, by all means, refine it. After all, it is your list. The key is to commit to doing it every day for thirty days without missing a single day. That will begin the habit embedding process.
I find, having a set time each day to do the closing down routine is the best way. I often advise my coaching clients to set an alarm or a reminder on their phone or computer to come up fifteen minutes before they finish the day to remind them to do the losing down.
So for example, if you finish work at 6:00 pm set a reminder to come up at 5:45 pm and begin the closing down session. Stop whatever you are doing at 5:45, do the closing down and if needs be, finish what you were doing once you have closed down the day.
There are a lot of benefits in doing things this way. First of all, you give yourself time to process your inbox and review your calendar. It also gives you time to see what you need to do tomorrow and plan your objectives and tasks for tomorrow.
Back in the day when I worked in an office, there were many days when I left work, and because I had not looked at my calendar or cleared out my inbox, I had this nagging feeling I had missed something important. It was not the best way to spend the evening, worrying about what I had forgotten. Now When I worked in an office, we did not have smartphones and computers and iPads connected to our work life. Our work-life stayed in the office—a very nice state of affairs. So once I left the office I had no way of knowing what was missing until I arrived back at the office the next day.
Closing down the day, cleaning your inbox and knowing what’s on your calendar for tomorrow leaves you feeling relaxed and stress-free and that always leaves you free to actually enjoy the evening doing what you enjoy doing.
And while you may think having to find more time each day to plan and prepare is going to be hard, this is where you will have to make a decision. You see, if you are not prepared to do the backend work—processing your inboxes, keeping on top of your email and planning the next day—then where does that leave you?
Without the backend work, you will have overflowing inboxes, un-replied to emails and a lot of stress. Not exactly the position you want to be in. Quite the reverse, I’m sure.
The next part of the conundrum, Sam, is to have a system in place. And there are a lot of systems to choose from. There’s my Time Sector System, where you manage your work by when you need to do it. There’s the traditional GTD method (Getting Things Done) where you manage your work by context (people, place and things) and the Kanban method where your work is managed by what stage it is at.
Without a system, you will be flying by the seat of your pants. You will be in a reactive rather than a proactive state for most of the day. Being reactive means you are reacting to the loudest and latest rather than anticipating the pressures on your time and taking action to mitigate it before it happens.
Using those ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day to clean up and process puts you into a proactive state because it’s like stepping back and looking at what you have to do and making decisions about when you are going to do it or would like to do it.
It’s when you have that level of organisation that you gain the clarity to plan better and faster and because you have turned it into a habit—helped by doing a thirty-day challenge—you are much less likely to fall off the proverbial productivity wagon.
The final part is the make sure you do a weekly planning session. Like the daily planning session, this does not need to be long. But it will take you around twenty to thirty minutes each week. Here all you need do is review the tasks you want to do next week and compare those against your calendar of events to make sure that what you plan to do is realistic when place alongside your daily commitments.
It’s no good scheduling fifteen tasks for Wednesday when you are going to be on a training course all day. You are not going to get your tasks done.
If you are using the Time Sector System, all you need do is move your tasks from your next week’s sector to this week, date your tasks, based on what you days look like for next week, and do a quick review of your project notes in your chosen notes app to make sure your projects are moving forward as you expect them to do so.
The weekly planning session is also a good time to catch up with anything that needs cleaning up. I usually process my Evernote inbox during this session because the notes I collect in Evernote during the week are not too many and can easily be filed once my weekly planning session is complete. It just feels like a natural step, to plan the week then clean up the previous week and make sure everything is reset for the following week.
It’s a great feeling knowing that everything is done, all your tasks and emails are clear and up to date and you are ready to begin the new week with a clear mind.
I hope these tips have helped, Sam. Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. If you are interested in learning more about the Time Sector System, then I have put a link in the show note to my blog post where I explained how it works and what you need to create the system. It’s simple, easy to develop and will do a lot for your time management and productivity.
It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.
Podcast 136
This week, it’s all about using daily routines to build a structure to your day so you remain focused on what is important and keep the momentum going with your goals
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
The Time Sector Course
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 136
Hello and welcome to episode 136 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So how do you make progress on your projects and goals consistently? It’s a question I get asked frequently and it is one of the secrets of the super successful.
Now the truth is there is no real secret to this, all you need do is look at the way people like Dwayne The Rock Johnson, Warren Buffett and Charles Darwin (yes the Origin of Species author) managed their time and you will see a pattern because really it is a pattern.
Oh, before we start, don't forget, if you have found that managing your tasks by project creates overwhelm and a lot of tasks slip through the cracks—never to be seen again—then it just might be time for you to try the Time Sector System.
The Time Sector System is a time management system designed in the twenty-first century, for the way we work today. It takes the overwhelm out of your work and helps to get you realistic about what you can achieve each day.
If you have tried other systems and not found anything to work, then take a look at the Time Sector System. This might just be the way for you to manage your work and your goals.
Full details of the Time Sector System are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Terri. Terri asks: hi Carl. I wonder if you have any tips on getting my projects finished. I seem to be very good at starting projects, but after a few weeks, I lose interest and then forget about them.
Hi Terri, thank you for your question.
This is something I used to really struggle with myself. I’ve always been very good at coming up with ideas and starting them—whether they are goals or projects— but terrible at finishing. I either got bored or just lost interest in doing them because something else, and seemingly more exciting came up. I felt I was an expert at accumulating projects and goals but terrible at following through.
In the end, I realised every achievement, every success I had ever had was built on one simple factor. Consistency.
You see things only move forward when you take action. But for you to get to the end of anything, whether that is a project or a goal you need to take that action consistently. There is no escaping that. There simply is no other way around it and there are no shortcuts.
This is how Dwayne Johnson built his successful acting career. He knows his success is built on three things. His personality, charisma and his physique. He’s not a classically trained actor, but he has natural charm and charisma, and that comes through, but to maintain his physique he has to work out every day and maintain a strict diet.
Every day, Dwayne Johnson will wake up four hours before he is due on set. That means if he is due on set at 7:30 am, he will wake up at 3:30 am and begin his exercise with forty-five minutes to one hour of cardio. He then has breakfast (eggs and steak yummy!) and does an hour and fifteen-minute weights session. He repeats that six days a week, taking one rest day on a Saturday.
Question: Would you be willing to do that every day for the rest of your life?
If you want to be a successful action star, that is the kind of consistent commitment you are going to have to make.
Now for you to build the momentum you first need to establish what are the tasks and activities you need to complete every day or week in order for you to move things forward? Without really understanding that you are just not going to make any progress.
Let’s say you want to create a number of income streams in preparation for your retirement. The first step is to identify what needs to be done to do that. What kind of income streams are you considering? Which ones are viable? Which ones are not? And what steps can you take each day that will develop and build those income streams?
You see if you don’t make those decisions and establish what needs to be done every day or week, you will never begin taking action. This project will become a dormant project. It will be in your project list making you feel comfortable because seeing it there makes you feel something is happening but the reality is you are doing nothing to move it forward so it does not move forward. It is stuck, dead, dormant and until you start doing something, anything, it will remain dead.
That reminds me of the Monty Python dead parrot sketch there.
Imagine you want to start a podcast. You have the equipment—a laptop, a microphone and some audio editing software. Great. You have the equipment. So what next? How can you build your podcast? You need to begin recording your podcast. Now recording just one is not going to create a successful podcast, you need to be recording one every week.
So, what do you have to do each week to be able to record a podcast every week? Write a script, record it, edit it and then publish. So, each week you need to set aside time for writing the script, editing and recording.
I know how long it takes me to do this podcast every week, and that means I need to find around three hours each week. Two hours to prepare the script, thirty minutes to record it and thirty minutes for editing. So, on my calendar I prepare the script on a Tuesday morning, I record it Sunday morning and edit it Sunday afternoon and publish on a Monday morning.
These tasks are part of my recurring areas of focus and get done consistently every week. If I don’t do all these tasks every week, no podcast will be published. Period.
I’ve frequently spoken about Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, on this podcast and how he wrote a book every year. The routine was simple. Begin writing at 9:00 am and continue until 12 pm. Then return and do the editing of that day’s writing between 4 pm and 6 pm every day. After six weeks, a book was written.
And that is the secret. Consistency and routines. Turn the action steps that will take you towards completion into your routines and do them consistently until your project is finished or your goal is accomplished.
As Robin Sharma says: “all great things are difficult at the beginning, messy in the middle and beautiful at the end.”
Getting started is hard, keeping going when you doubt yourself is very messy, but by making sure you do whatever needs doing consistently over a period of time you will eventually have a completed project.
So how do you keep yourself motivated to keep going when things are hard. I remember when I began my YouTube channel, my videos were getting a few views, and I was picking up a few subscribers here and there. It was slow, it was hard and it was very difficult sometimes to give up five or six hours each week to make the videos.
But I knew the only way to grow and develop the channel was to keep going no matter how hard it sometimes seemed. I can promise you is was very hard to start. It was incredibly messy in the middle because a lot of time I had no idea what I was doing. But with each video, I made I was learning. I was getting better and my confidence was growing.
Today I have almost 50,000 subscribers—nowhere near the number the really successful YouTubers have, but to me, that is not important. For me, it’s about learning and helping. Each video I make I learn. And each video, I hope, helps at least a few people learn something that will help them to reduce their stress and become more productive. I am achieving my goal.
So, you need to develop the routines and build the structures into your days and weeks that will sustain your momentum. That is the only way you will build anything.
So once you have established the action steps you need to take consistently, get those action steps set up as recurring action steps in your to-do list manager or your calendar. Make them non-negotiable. Be determined to make them happen every day or week and understand that unless you are prepared to do that you will fail.
Another important factor here is to not confuse thinking and planning with taking action. Of course, you do need to do some thinking and you will need to do some planning, but all your thinking and planning is not moving anything forward. The only way to start moving things forward is to actually start taking real action.
Write that script, record that first episode and publish it. You will learn far more from doing that than you ever will researching and talking about it.
I often read articles that tell you to develop your branding, to establish who your audience is and to research your area. All that is complete rubbish. You will never know who your real audience is until you begin publishing. You could spend weeks developing a brand image only to discover that the people attracted to your message are not the people you thought would be attracted to it and you then have to waste a lot of time re-branding and rethinking your strategy. Publishing and getting whatever you want to do out there will teach you far more and a lot faster than ‘strategising’.
As Nike says: Just do it!
So Terri, make a decision about what needs to happen consistently. Make sure you plan when you will do those action steps every week and get started. The sooner you start the sooner you will get the kind of feedback you need to adjust and improve and the sooner you will get to the end of the project or achieve your goal. It’s all about turning action steps into routines and habits and making sure those steps happen every week.
I hope that helps. And thank you so much for your question.
Thank you also to all of you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, I answer a question about work/life balance and how to bring balance into your life when you feel you have too much work to do every day.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
The Time Sector Course
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 135
Hello and welcome to episode 135 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Do you ever feel you have far too much work to do and that you spend all your waking moments doing or thinking about your work? You are not alone. Many many people feel the same way, yet no matter what industry you work in and no matter how busy you feel you are, it is possible to bring a little balance into your life and have a better perspective on your work and your life.
So let’s get straight into the question this week and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Daniel. Daniel asks: Hi Carl, do you have any advice on achieving a good work/life balance. This is something I am really struggling with.
Hi Daniel, thank you for your question.
Firstly, I do need to be honest with you here. I don’t believe in attaining a work/life balance. To me, this is a misnomer that can cause a lot of unnecessary stress.
You see when we become focused on achieving a work/life balance it puts a demand on us to stop doing something at a certain time because if we don’t we won’t have balance. So, for example, if I am working on developing a slide deck and I am ‘in the zone’, and I look up and see that it is 5:50 pm, now I feel pressured to stop working on the slide deck at 6 pm because if I don’t I won’t have any balance.
But what if you are enjoying being in the zone? I know I often am when I am working on a slide deck. I love that creative process and building ways to explain a point. For me, and many other people I have worked with, having a time pressure such as stopping work at a fixed time each day is not only impractical, it just adds additional stress you do not need.
Then there are cases where you have a deadline coming up and whatever it is you need to finish you cannot miss that deadline. In these situations, the added pressure of making sure you finish working at fixed times do not help your flow or your ability to finish your work on time.
Part of this problem is when we think of creating a work/life balance, we think in definitive times. For example, we think of a work-life balance of 8 hours sleep, 8 hours work and 8 hours play. Yet, life is not like that. It never has been. Sure, it would be nice to be able to consistently get eight hours sleep every night, to get all our work done in eight hours each day and to have eight hours to spend with our friends and family, but life is not like that at all.
We don’t always get those eight hours of sleep. We can easily allow ourselves to spend just a little too much time watching YouTube videos at night. Sometimes, the work we do needs a little extra time in the day—we may have got a few more emails than usual to reply to or a piece of work we are working on needs an extra hour or so to finish. That’s more like the reality we live in.
Now, there are jobs that help to make working fixed hours each day easier. In factories where we work on an assembly line in shifts. We begin our shift at 7 AM and finish when our colleague comes on shift at 3 PM. Or if you are a firefighter, nurse or call centre worker. These jobs generally have fixed hours. Yet, even with these jobs, particularly in the healthcare profession, once your shift is over, you often have training to attend and self-study to do.
So we do have to be careful about what we wish for. Trying to build a consistent work/life balance often leads to additional stress you do not need.
Instead, I find building your work/life on a weekly basis works far better and reduces a lot of the pressure we add by trying to stick to a daily work/life balance.
What I mean by building a weekly work/life balance is you first decide what is important to you. For example, if spending two or three hours every evening playing with you kids in something you feel is important to you, then you can schedule that time each day in your calendar. I know, for example, that despite Gary Vaynerchuk’s work ethic, which is impressive, he makes sure that whenever he is home in New York, he is home each evening and has dinner with his family. We don’t see that in his videos, but each evening he will go home and have dinner with his family. Once his kids are in bed, he may have a meeting or two late on, but he still makes sure the time he spends with his family is fixed.
Likewise, for me exercise is important and I make sure that at 2 PM, I stop whatever I am doing and spend an hour exercising. I might go out for a run, got to the gym or do some home exercises. That time is fixed in my calendar every day. For me, exercising at 2 PM gives me a nice break in the day and gives me a mental boost to be able to do a strong session of work in the evening.
Establishing what is important to you and what you want to do each day is a crucial first step to building a week of balance in your life.
To do that, either use pen and paper or your notes app and write out what you would like to be able to do every week. How much time do you want to spend with your friends and family? How much time do you want to spend on recreation? Etc. Write whatever you want to do each week down.
Then, open up your calendar and block time out each week to do these activities.
When I lived in the UK, in the summer, every Friday night was blocked out for going to watch the Leeds Rhinos play. If they were not playing at home and their game was not featured on TV, I had a free evening.
Saturday nights were Top Banana night at the Town and Country night club where my friends and I would start at the local pub, the Fox and Hounds, and once we were all gathered we would head out to the city centre and dance the night away. We would finish the evening with a curry at the Rajput in Headingley.
Those we great times and I have a lot of fond memories of those days. These were fixed events. I knew where I was going and what I was doing and it made my life so much simpler.
Now, what happens if you have an important project to finish? If you have been realistic about how you spend your time each day, there should not be any difficulty in finding the time to finish the project.
Imagine if you decided to redecorate your living room one weekend. You would block the weekend out your calendar and focus solely on completing that project. If you planned ahead and scheduled the redecorating, then when that weekend arrived everyone in your circle would know what you planned to do and so you would not be inundated with requests for your time. The trick is the make sure all the relevant people know what you wanted to do that weekend.
The same applies to your work projects. Often as we approach the deadline we realise we are going to need more time to finish the project. In these situations, if you have flexibility built-in, spending a couple of extra hours each day to complete the project would not be an issue. You would still have time to do the things you want to do but may have to reduce the time you spent doing those activities in order to free up a little extra time to complete the project. Instead of spending an hour in the gym, you reduce it to thirty minutes for a week.
In these situations, your body would probably thank you for giving it a little extra rest time, but you still get your exercise in and you get to complete your project.
When you plan your week ahead, you get to see what needs your attention, you can build in the extra time needed to complete those activities while at the same time you are aware of your obligations to your friends and family. No week need be the same, you can build in the flexibility to get your work done and spend time on your leisure activities.
What I have found is not planning the week ahead, often leaves us at the mercy of events. Now while I accept there will always be unplanned for emergencies and obligations, if we plan the week ahead we make better decisions about where to spend our time and although it is unlikely your plan for the week will not have to change throughout the week—that’s where the daily planning session comes in—on the whole, the work you planned to do will get done.
This is why in the Time Sector System, once you have established what your recurring areas of focus are—the things you identify are important to you—you can build a week that allows you to fit your work around those things that you want to do and enjoy doing.
We all have a bad habit of overestimating what we can do in a day and underestimating what we can do in a week. If you write 500 words of an important report every day for five days, you have a 2,500-word report at the end of the week. Thirty minutes every day instead of two and a half hours on Friday afternoon when you are tired out and are just looking forward to the weekend. Which is better?
By planning the week, you can better distribute your workload and give yourself a better balance to your day and your week.
Another advantage of planning your week is you will find you reduce the sense of urgency that causes a lot of our stress. Knowing you have time in the week to finish your projects and obligations will give you a sense of calm and you will be able to manage the unknowns that will inevitably crop up through the week.
So, Daniel, if you establish some routines where you spend time doing the things you want to do, plan out your week so you get better at managing your time and not try and balance your days but instead balance your week, you will have a greater sense of calm, get a lot of work done and feel much more accomplished at the end of the week.
Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast, you can email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the details are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, what is the difference between an area of focus and a routine? It’s a question I am frequently asked, so this week I’m answering that one.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
The Time Sector Course
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 134
Hello and welcome to episode 134 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I am answering a frequently asked question about areas of focus and routines. What are the differences? It’s a question I am often asked and it is a difficult question to answer because we will all have different priorities and different things that are important to us. If you are just starting out building a new business your areas of focus will be very different from a student managing their PhD thesis or a person just starting out on their career in architecture.
That said, understanding which tasks need to be performed frequently and consistently in order for a goal or project to be successfully completed, that is relatively easy. It’s a skill well worth developing as it will help you to focus on what’s important.
Now, before we get to the question, if you have joined the Time Sector Course, check out the additional lessons I have added. I have added a lesson on managing your actionable email and developing a project in Microsoft OneNote. OneNote is a great app to develop your projects as you have a lot of features that can help. I will add an Evernote one once the promised Evernote update is released and in the coming weeks, I will be adding a Google setup for those of you who have asked for it.
Also, a Time Sector System for teams course is in development that can be rolled out within a company. I’m excited about that as I believe this system in a team will simplify the way projects and work are managed within a team.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Carlo. Carlo asks: Hi Carl, thank you for your excellent Time Sector Course. it has changed the way I manage my tasks in such a positive way. Yesterday, my weekly review only took 25 minutes—it used to take me nearly an hour every week. My question is: you talk about “recurring areas of focus” and “routines”. I don’t completely understand the difference between the two. Could you explain a bit more?
Thank you, Carlo, for this question. I am regularly asked it and I know it can be a difficult one because there is a grey area between the two.
The simple answer is routines do not improve your life or take your projects and goals forward. They are just things you have to do. Take the garbage out, wash the car, dog, cat etc. Do your expenses, check your bank accounts or update your time card. It would not be the end of the world if you missed doing a routine for a few days. They are just life’s less important necessities that we all have to do.
Areas of focus are the opposite of routines. Areas of focus do contribute to your goals and projects and do help to improve your life.
Doing your exercise, writing your journal, spending time talking with your partner, your kids and your friends. All these could be part of your areas of focus. Any activity you do that moves a project or goal forward would be classed as an area of focus.
Anything that is important to you and your wellbeing can be classed as an area of focus. This is why it is hard for me to give a precise definition. We all have different goals. Interests and priorities. Only you can decide what these are, nobody else can. I am afraid if I give a list of what can be classed as an area of focus people will copy it and think only things on that list can be an area of focus.
That is not the case. Areas of focus are deeply personal. They are whatever you decide is important, not me.
In a way you can think of an area of focus as any task you want to focus on that enhances your life or moves a goal or project forward.
So why separate them? Well,
One of the difficulties many of us have is we confuse activity with progress. We do a lot of tasks and feel like we have been busy but if we stop and analyse what we have done we have not moved any project or goal forward. We have been like the proverbial hamster running around on a hamster wheel. We are moving, but we are going nowhere.
This was a problem I identified in myself a long time ago. I felt busy all the time, I was doing a lot of stuff, running around and feeling stressed but my projects and goals were hardly moving anywhere. It was only when I stopped and analysed what I was doing each day did I discover that 80% of what I was doing was not important. It would not have been a big issue had I not done those tasks. It certainly would have made no difference whether a project completed on time or not. Yet, I felt these tasks had to be done.
This was something I learned from Tony Robbins’ Time of Your Life course, we micromanage tasks too much. We break things down too small.
There’s a false belief that if you break down tasks to a ‘more manageable’ level it will make the project easier or make it easier to start the project and stop you from procrastinating. It’s complete rubbish of course. If you are going to procrastinate you are going to procrastinate.
Just because you have a task that says “open up PowerPoint” instead of “work on presentation” it’s going to make it easier is rubbish. Being explicit and clear about what you need to do - ‘work on your presentation’ - is still going to get done.
However, one thing is important, you do need to identify the difference between the tasks that are going to give you the biggest return and the ones that give you a false sense of making progress.
This is why being very clear about the tasks that will move you towards your goals and the tasks that won’t move the needle very much is important and why I recommend you make a distinction between tasks that drive goals and projects forward and tasks that won't.
Why recurring areas of focus?
If you want to complete a project or achieve a goal you are going to have to take action consistently over a period of time. You won’t learn Spanish if all you do is study for an hour once a month. If you want to learn Spanish or any other foreign language you will have study the language almost every day consistently.
Learning a foreign language is not hard in terms of the process. The process is very easy. The difficulty is maintaining the consistency. That’s why so many people fail at achieving their goals and why projects are delayed. It’s a lack of consistency. Doing the work, day after day.
Establishing what tasks you need to do frequently and consistently that drive you forward is essential. Not knowing which tasks give you 80% of your results and which ones do not is going to lead you down roads that either take you nowhere or take you on a detour away from the objective.
Once you have established what these tasks are, you can then set them up to recur when you need them to recur. For me, exercise and fitness is an important part of my life. Maintaining my weight at 80 kgs is a part of that. So, I have a recurring area of focus that tells me to schedule my exercise on my calendar every Sunday.
However, taking my weight every Friday is actually set up as a routine. If I skip taking my weight reading once or twice it will not have any serious impact on my overall goal. Doing my exercise does have an impact. For me, if I am not exercising, I gain weight. If I exercise my weight remains reasonably consistent. Not exercising also impacts my energy levels too. So, an 80% impact task is doing exercise. Knowing my current wright is a 20% impact task.
Likewise, with my content. I produce seven pieces of content each week. One blog post, one podcast episode, three YouTube videos and two newsletters. Each one of those requires planning and writing or recording. These are important areas of focus for me and they have to be done every week. They are therefore contained in my recurring areas of focus.
Updating my content scheduler—I use Asana to manage my content—is not essential to the production of my content. It is important, but not essential. So, updating my Asana boards is a routine. I have it come up on a daily basis as part of my daily routines, but it would not have an effect on my content production if I skipped a day or two.
The important work is content creation. Managing the content schedule is not going to help with creating the content.
So there you go, Carlo, hopefully, that has given a clearer picture of the difference between a routine and an area of focus.
The whole point in separating these is so you can differentiate between the tasks that will drive your projects and goals forward and the tasks that do not really contribute towards that goal. Routines can be important but remember they do not make a big impact.
Over time you will get better at this and will instinctively know what tasks need to be performed regularly that will lead to your project or goal’s success and the less important tasks that, while perhaps being important, are not going to move things forward very much.
Thank you for your question and thank you to everyone who has joined the Time Sector Course. The feedback has been tremendous and I am so grateful to have been able to help so many people.
Thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 132
This week, how do you find time each day to work on your goals?
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
The Time Sector Course
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 133
Hello and welcome to episode 133 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, it’s all about fitting in your goals and the things you really want to do when you already have a full schedule.
Now, before we get to the answer, if you have been considering joining the Time Sector Course, now is the right time to do so. The early-bird discount will be ending in the next twenty-four hours. You have until midnight, Tuesday 19th to get yourself into the course at the special introductory offer.
This is a revolutionary new way of managing your tasks and your work. It gives you back your time, by focusing more on doing the work and less on the processing and organising. It’s simple, easily maintained and will give you so much time back.
Full details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Stephen. Stephen asks: Hi Carl, I want to begin an MBA but I am too afraid to commit totally to it. It’s expensive and I will have to save money to do it, but I am worried if I do save the money and register for the degree I will not do the classes and fail. It will be a waste of money. Are there any tips that might help?
That’s a great question, Stephen! Thank you.
Now I know it’s easy for people like me to tell you to sit down with a pen and piece of paper and write out your goals. But that is the first step. If you do not have your goals written down they are only wishes, and wishes are not strong enough to motivate you to get up and take the steps you need to take. So whatever you may think of the advice about sitting down and writing out your goals, start there. You do need that list.
Next up, how you structure your goal is important. It needs to be clear and it needs to be measurable. Just saying “I want to study for my MBA” is not good enough. You need to be much more specific than that. The goal needs to be written out as “to register for an MBA programme and to complete it by July 2023”
In that example, there are two parts. The first is to enrol in the programme. Now, I know MBA programmes are expensive so your first objective might be to save up enough money so you can enrol. The second goal will be to do the studying required for you to successfully complete the programme.
In this instance, take step one first. Save the money. While you are doing that you can do any research needed to find the right course for you. The good thing about having to save money first is it will test your resolve. If your “why” is not strong enough you will not progress must further than this initial step.
And that brings me to your “Why”.
Here’s the thing about your “why”. It has to be YOUR way. You have to want to do whatever it is you want to do for you. Not for your parents, your spouse or to impress people. When you do that, the “why” is someone else’s why and that will not sustain you. Your reason for doing something must come from within you.
Losing weight and building muscle so you can impress people at the beach will be short-lived. Losing weight and building muscle so you can live a long, healthy active life will be self-sustaining.
The same applies to studying for your MBA. If your real “why” is to impress people by having “MBA” after your name, your “why” will be weak. When you plan to spend a weekend studying and your friends suggest you go out for a few beers on a Friday night, you’re going to go for the beers (because you can tell everyone how hard you are going to study over the weekend) The problem will be when you wake up Saturday morning and you feel hungover and tired. The quality of your studies will be diminished.
So, if you are really serious about this goal, you are going to hand over your hard-earned cash. When you do that you are not going to want to waste your money so you are much more likely to carry through with your goal. Handing over money, or anything else of value to you, is going to give you a real incentive to put in the effort to study.
Okay, so you are enrolled, how do you make sure you consistently do your studies? Use your calendar.
This is where you are going to have to be completely honest with yourself. It’s easy to add events to a calendar and because it’s easy it’s also easy to ignore what's on your calendar. Never ignore your calendar.
Ignore your to-do list but never ignore your calendar. If you start ignoring what’s on your calendar your whole structure is going to break down. You need something on which to build your discipline. Treat your calendar as sacred territory. You know the saying - “if it’s on your calendar it gets done”
What this means to me is, if I am not sure I am going to be able to do something it does not go on my calendar. It goes on my to-do list. My to-do list is negotiable. My calendar is not.
You see you need something that you hold sacred when it comes to your time and your calendar is the best tool you have for that.
You do not have to micro-manage every minute of the day—you do need the flexibility to manage the unknowns that will inevitably come up in your day—and you need the mindset of what goes on your calendar gets done and only in exceptional situations would you ever consider not doing something on your calendar.
You can do a simple test here. Add a recurring event to your calendar to go for a 40-minute walk every evening for 30 days. Track it in a habit tracker or on a paper calendar (you can create one using Apple’s Numbers or an Excel sheet) and cross off the days. See if you can commit to 40 minutes every evening to walking. If you can do it, you will improve your self-discipline and the way you treat your calendar will improve.
So, decide how much time you want to dedicate to your studies each week. What you are looking for is a baseline… A minimum amount of time you will spend studying each week. Your lectures will be fixed. They go in your calendar first. Then you add the study time. Perhaps you decide you will dedicate two sessions of ninety minutes each week as a minimum. Fix those sessions as repeating events in your calendar each week. They are now non-negotiable. You will do whatever it takes to do those study sessions.
The key is to schedule the same time each week. Let’s say Monday evening between 8 pm and 9:30 pm and Saturday mornings between 10 am and 11:30 am. These are your fixed, non-negotiable core study times. Once you have established them, you tell everyone these times are non-negotiable.
At first, your friends and family will try and persuade you to make exceptions. Never make exceptions. Once people realise you are serious about this, they will stop trying to persuade you to do something else.
Of course, you are likely to increase these sessions once exams and written papers come due. But you still need a minimum requirement each week.
The next part of your planning is to identify the core tasks that will drive you forward with your goal. There is always something. If you listened to last week’s episode where I explained the difference between a core task and an area of focus, you will understand the importance of your core tasks.
Your core tasks are the tasks that move the goal or project forward. It's the time you spend in the gym, it’s the time you spend writing the blog posts or the book, it’s time you spend reviewing your course notes and studying. Your core, critical tasks are the tasks that get the work done.
Okay, so you know what your core tasks are, these need to go on your calendar. If you are using your calendar correctly, then your commitments will already be on your calendar. So what you are looking for are the gaps. If there are no gaps, you're overcommitted. You will need to review your commitments and reassess your priorities.
That can be very hard. Let’s say you always meet up with your friends for a Saturday morning brunch and it’s something you really look forward to. But what happens if Saturday morning is also the best time for you to do some solid studying?
Now you have the classic choice between something you love doing and doing something you know you should do for your future. This is where your “why” for doing something comes in. If you why for doing something is strong enough you will make that sacrifice. If it is not, you will not be prepared to make the sacrifice.
As I have said many times before, “if it’s important enough you’ll find a way. If not, you’ll find an excuse” and nothing illustrates this more than when you have a conflict between something you enjoy doing and something you know you should do. This is where the strength of your why will come in.
If your why is strong enough you will instinctively know that the right thing to do is to spend one or two hours on a Saturday morning studying. It could mean you wake up one or two hours earlier on a Saturday, get your studying in and then reward yourself by having brunch with your friends. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.
The important thing is that you get your scheduled study time in. That is your primary objective. Once that’s done you are free to do whatever else you want to do.
The difficulty with managing your time is the responsibility is on you. Nobody else. You cannot delegate the management of what you do with your time to someone else and then complain you don’t have enough time. This is your time. You need to protect it.
It fascinates me when people tell me they cannot manage their time because their boss is always giving them more work to do. Sure, that’s what bosses are supposed to do. But zoom out a little here. When you signed your employment contract you decided to give X amount of time five days a week to a company and in return, they agreed to pay you a certain amount of money. It’s a win for you and it’s a win for your company.
Within those hours each day, you give to your employer you need to manage the work that comes in. You can learn to become more efficient with the way you do your work, you could ask your boss to reduce your workload. There is a multitude of things you could do. Complaining is not an effective way to manage time. Accepting the problem, reviewing your options and then making a decision to do something positive about it is how you become better at your work and better at managing what you do with the time you are given each day.
I hope that has helped, Stephen. Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Do you find distinguishing between the important and the trivial difficult? Well, this week, that’s the question I’m answering this week.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
The Time Sector Course
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 132
Hello and welcome to episode 132 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
There’s a huge difference between trivial and critical tasks and I am pretty sure most of you listening know that. But, while we may think we understand this difference, how many of us actually know the difference between the two? Well. I shall be answering that question this week.
Now, before we get to the question and answer. For those of you who have already joined my Time Sector course, I just want to let you know that I have added two classes based on some of the questions that were asked. The first is how to manage actionable email and the second how to create a master projects list. So, if you have taken the course and have not seen those additional classes, they are there in the course now.
And if you have not joined yet, you can still get the course for $39.99 for a couple more days. The early bird special offer will be ending very soon, so please don’t miss out. This course is revolutionary and will change the way you manage your work and your tasks for the better. Gone will be the overwhelm of an unwieldy projects list, tasks will no longer disappear and die in a bottomless pit of tasks hidden inside old, out of date projects and instead, you will have a very active list of tasks that require a lot less time to manage.
Full details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Sonia. Sonia asks: Thank you, Carl, for the great Time Sector course. It has really simplified the way I manage my work. I have a question about what you describe as “core tasks” could you explain a bit more what you mean by these and how they are different from areas of focus?
Thank you, Sonia, for your question.
I felt adding a section about “core tasks” was important because I have noticed a lot of people get caught up in trivialities, falsely believing these trivialities are important to the success of a goal or a project. They are not and often they cause distraction from the main objective and contribute to the project’s or goal’s failure
Now, to define a “core task” you should ask yourself: what are the tasks I do that directly contributes to my income, career and life success?
Now, this may not be as easy as it first appears. Often the work that directly contributes to your income, career and life success is not obvious. To give you a simple example:
Let’s imagine you want to become a champion body-builder. What would be the “core tasks” that will help you to reach the goal of becoming a champion bodybuilder?
The two core tasks would be lifting weights and diet.
This means that as long as you make sure you do your workouts every day and you eat the right foods, you will have contributed 80% of the work you need to achieve your goal.
However, if you were just starting out with this goal you would also need to find the right gym, get the right personal trainer (at least to start with), the right workout clothes, the right supplements and the right training programmes.
There’s actually quite a lot that needs to be done in order to get close to achieving the goal of becoming a champion body-builder.
Now, in this example, if you are not focused on your core tasks—the weight lifting and diet, it does not matter how many personal trainers you interview, what the gym looks like or the training programme is, you are never going to achieve your goal. Yet, often, people focus on these trivialities and they never move their goal forward.
The same problems occur with weight loss and other lifestyle changes you may want to make. If you have not identified the core tasks that will directly contribute to your goal’s success, then you will be running round in circles making very little progress.
Take for example something that happened last week. A student in my Time Sector course wrote to tell me the editing was off in some of the classes in the course. I went through every video and checking them and discovered that one video should have been trimmed .227 of a second sooner. A cut that 99% of people would not have noticed.
Now, in this situation, the writer was correct, the edit was off. But only .227 of a second off and only in one video. The question I had to ask myself was is this relevant? Does having ‘perfectly’ edited videos contribute to the course’s overall objective? The answer is no. Not at all.
The overall objective of the course is to educate. Now, the videos do contribute to that, but they do not need to have to the second perfect edits to achieve that goal. This means editing is not a core task in this project. Editing is an ‘important’ part, but it is not a critical part of the course’s development and overall success.
My core tasks are to educate people on the subject of time management, productivity and goal planning. That to me is why I am here. I love helping people and I love being in the education field. That is my core and anything that allows me to help people and educate, those will be my core tasks.
Knowing your core tasks also helps you identify the critical tasks inside a project. For example, are a number of people I follow on YouTube. Some of them create fantastically produced videos. Thomas Frank and Matt D’Avella, for example. They tell their story in cinematic glory and have millions of people following them. Now for them, their goal is clearly to produce near-perfect videos. It is something they have identified as being important. I admire them for the work they put into their videos.
For me, my goal is to educate. That is my critical, overall objective. My videos do not come close to the quality of the videos Matt and Thomas produce. I put out three videos per week. Matt and Thomas put out one video every seven to ten days.
The number of videos you put out each week is not important, but it does go towards demonstrating where your objectives are. Matt and Thomas’s goal is to produce beautifully created videos that both entertain and educate. And they achieve that with tremendous success—just look at their subscriber count. My goal is to educate as many people as I can in using Todoist, Evernote, Apple’s productivity apps and time management in general. Doing that with beautifully crafted films is not a priority for me.
So establishing what the core tasks that will drive you towards achieving the goal of your project or goal is an important first step. Without knowing what the core tasks are that will drive you towards achieving completion of a project or the achievement of a goal you will end up making little to no progress.
So how do core tasks differ from areas of focus?
Areas of focus are tasks that support your core tasks. To demonstrate this, let’s go back to the body-building example. The core tasks are lifting weights and eating the right food. To support that you still need a training programme. You still need to list out the foods you will buy from the supermarket and you will still need to schedule your gym time. Al these are areas of focus. On their own, they will not help you achieve your goal of being a champion bodybuilder, yet they are still important because without them it will be difficult to do the right weight training and eat the right food.
Developing a course. While the overall core tasks are related to the educational content, supporting that content is the video editing. If the editing was not done, then the content would be disjointed and distracting from the educational content. So, to create an online course, the core work is developing the slides to explain the points, recording the videos and uploading them to my learning centre. The areas of focus are editing the videos and marketing the course.
To give you a business use case image you have been asked to do a presentation in ten days time. To create a presentation you need a number of tasks. Things like creating the slides, get the information, decide on the theme, decide how you will develop your story, what clothes you will wear etc.
Many of those tasks are not important. The theme, the typeface you will use etc while having an impact if you have no content to put in your slides it does not matter how beautiful the colour scheme is. The core task is to create the slide deck. Without that everything else is irrelevant. Once you have your slide deck with the information you want to share with the audience, then you can focus on the design, the typeface, the colour scheme and the clothes you will wear.
Another area I find people getting lost in trivialities is when developing a business idea, or starting a YouTube channel or writing a book.
In these cases, once you have an idea, you need to begin developing it. So the core tasks would be to sit down and begin writing the book. To record your first video, write the first blog post or create your first product. Without any of those things, you will only ever have an idea.
Yet, I see so many people with these amazing ideas getting caught up with their branding, website design, blog hosting and video recording equipment. None of these is important at all. The problem is while you are researching and deciding on brand image, messaging and website design, none of the core work is getting done. No product is being built, no blog posts are being written and no videos are being produced. Those are your core tasks. Those tasks need to be your priority.
At some point in the future branding and messaging will become important, but not until you have some content or at the very least a prototype of your product. Then these areas may come important but are very unlikely to ever become a core task. The core task will always be your content.
Hopefully, this answer will go some way to explaining the difference between areas of focus and your core tasks. Core tasks are critical must-do tasks that produce your work. Keep you in employment and drives everything forward. Areas of focus are the surrounding tasks that, while important, do not necessarily produce the work that ultimately pays your bills and puts food on your table.
I hope this explainer answers your question, Sonya. Thank you for sending it in and thank you for allowing me to use it in this podcast.
Thank you also to you for listening. I really appreciate your support and I hope I am helping you to become better organised and more productive.
It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, I have a fascinating question about the choices we have in life and what to do if you feel you made a poor decision and now what to reverse that decision.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
NEW The Time Sector Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 131
Hello and welcome to episode 131 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Have you ever felt a decision you made about your career or life many years ago is the cause of your stress and unhappiness today and you feel trapped? Well, that’s the topic of this week’s question. What to do if you feel you are travelling down the wrong path.
Now, before we get to the answer, last week, I launched a brand new course called The Time Sector course. This course is designed for the twenty-first century. Created to help you manage all the inputs that come your way every day and allow you to focus on when you will do the task.
Many people have discovered that managing and organising your tasks by project does not work for them. In today’s world, with all the inputs coming your way and the many things you have are multi-step tasks, you end up with hundreds of projects to manage that leaves you spending a disproportionate amount of time just trying to stay on top of everything.
And many of the tasks you collect get processed into one of those hundreds of projects only to die a slow death never to see the light of day again. A really bad way to manage your work.
The Time Sector System eliminates projects from your to-do list altogether and instead organises your work by when you need or want to do it. A much more logical way to manage your tasks.
If you think about it, the only thing that matters is when you will do a task. The only factor that will tell you whether you can do a task or not is available time. It does not matter how much intention, motivation or inspiration you have to complete a task if you don’t have the time to complete it you will not complete it.
The Time Sector System gives you a much simpler way to manage your tasks. It puts the planning and managing of projects where it belongs—in your notes app—and helps you to manage your available time more effectively.
A link to more details about the Time Sector System is in the show notes. I hope you take some time to have a look as this system could be the difference between continuing to struggle to manage your tasks and your time and finding an effective way to balance your work and the things you love doing.
Okay, on with the show, so that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Bill. Bill asks: Hi Carl, several years ago I decided I wanted to work in sales, but over the last year I have felt increasingly unhappy with that decision. I took your Time and Life Mastery course and I realised my long-term vision is not what I am doing today.
I want to change my career and my direction, but I have a family and a mortgage and I just don’t feel I have a choice. Do you have any recommendations that might help?
Thank you, Bill, for the question. Now, let me start by talking about one of my favourite actors: Jason Statham. Like most action-adventure actors these days, Jason Statham plays pretty much the same character in all his movies: a tough, non-compromising, generally good guy.
But if you watch a little closer you will notice his characters also all appear to live the same simple life. If you have seen his Mechanic movies, for example, you’ll notice his home, while luxurious, appears to have very few things his character cares about. His record collection and his watch seem to be it.
Even in real life, Jason Statham lives a simple life—well simple by Hollywood standards. He follows a simple diet and a consistent exercise routine. You will also probably notice he does very few interviews or promotions outside of his movies.
If you look at the lives of the most successful people, the people who maintain their success over a long period of time, they all appear to have something in common. No matter how successful they become, they generally stick to the same routines and habits that enabled them to be successful every day. There's no compromise. Most of the people who achieve immense success and then disappear without a trace, also follow a similar pattern. They stop doing what made them successful in the first place.
Every day, when you wake up you get to choose whether to stay in bed or go and do some exercise. Nobody’s telling you to do anything. You are no longer a child. You get to choose. It’s the same with your diet. You get to choose whether to eat that cake or not. Nobody’s forcing you to eat it.
When you accept you have a lot more control over your life than you think it can be incredibly liberating.
Many years ago, after studying and training to be a lawyer, I discovered I hated working in an office. Prior to working in an office, I had worked in hotel management, car sales and other non-office based jobs. I thought working in an office would be fantastic. I was wrong. It felt I was a day release prisoner but in reverse. I had to be in a fixed location Monday to Friday, five days a week and was allowed home in the evenings. It was a horrible experience for me.
The problem was I felt I had no choice. After studying and training for six years I believed had to live with my choices. Then one weekend I sat down to think about where my future life was going and it did not look good. I was heading towards a career in an industry that did not inspire me, it was only a matter of time before I settled down got married, got a mortgage and had kids. And once that happened I knew it would be incredibly difficult to give up my legal career.
It was a weekend in November 2001, that I decided I did not have to do any of those things if I chose not to. I always had a choice about what I did each day and I also had a choice about what I wanted to do with my career.
All I had to do was exercise that choice and I could do that at any time.
And that is how I found myself in South Korea in June 2002. I exercised my choice and it was the best decision I have ever made.
For whatever reason, we often feel trapped by decisions we made earlier in life. The thing is you are rarely ever trapped. You always have options and you can always accept you made a poor choice and decide to try something new.
In many ways, the hardest battle we have is accepting we made a bad decision. But let’s get real here, nobody makes the right decisions every time. We all make poor decisions from time to time. Some of those decisions have small consequences, others have very big consequences, like marrying the wrong person or investing all our life savings into a sure thing that turned out not to be a sure thing.
But whether the consequences are big or small, we almost always have a choice about whether we continue down the same path or take an exit and begin something new.
So what do you do if you feel your current path will not take you towards your vision for the future?
Well, first research what will put you on the right path towards achieving your vision for the future. This can take quite a bit of time as it depends on what your vision is. You may be lucky and already have a clear idea of what you want to be doing with your life. Other times it may take a few weeks or months to figure it out.
For example, you could be a manager in a company now but want to become a church minister and share your faith with other people. In this instance, you only need to become more involved in your church, volunteer to run bible study groups, talk to your church minister about what he or she would recommend you do to fulfil your desire to become a leader of a church. You could investigate taking a theology course, or if there are any seminaries that allow you to attend part-time. There’s a lot of things you can do before you need make any kind of decision.
The key is to understand you do not have to make any kind of decision right away. Often the process of investigating and researching will give you a lot of inspiration and that will create momentum to keep moving forward. Remember, "most people overestimate what they can achieve in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade."
The fact you make a decision to do something about what you really want to do will change the way you look at things. You will start to see opportunities open up and you can then choose to take those opportunities or not when the time comes.
I often have people take a piece of paper and write out what they envision they will be doing in ten years time if they carry on doing what they are doing today. Where will they be in ten years time if they don’t change anything about the way they live today?
What if you don’t change your current career path or lifestyle choices? What if you are in an uninspiring career, eat and drink too much and do no exercise? What physical and mental condition will you be in in ten years time? Will you be happy? Will you be healthy?
Once you have done that exercise, turn over the piece of paper and envision where you will be if you make some changes to your career path and lifestyle choices? Will you be in a better place?
Often when you realise that to get where you want to be in the condition you want to be in in ten years time will not take a lot of changes. It may involve enrolling in an online university course and making some minor changes to your diet. Nothing too dramatic.
After that exercise, all you need do is make a decision about when you will begin. And the best time to begin is now. As the old Chines proverb says: “the best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now”.
The next piece of advice I would give is; do not overthink things. All plans change over time. I’ve seen far too many people decide they want to start their own business, for example, and they spend months—and sometimes years—thinking about their branding and target audience. The truth is the chances are you will not get your branding or target audience right the first time anyway—at least not until you start doing something that attracts an audience. Then you will see who your real audience is and be in a better position to create a brand that work for them (remember it is always about your audience it is never about you)
I had a vision and a plan when I began my YouTube channel four years ago that within three months had completely changed. I also had a branding message, that was turned upside down once I was able to see the analytics from the content I was producing. The people watching my videos and reading my blog posts were not the people I thought would be watching. From that data, I modified my message and branding to better suit the people who were engaging with my content.
If you do a Google search for Apple’s first logo, you will see the idea of a simple, minimalistic company was not what Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak first envisioned. Apple’s branding and image and products evolved over time once the company saw how they could differentiate themselves based on who was buying their products.
So Bill, take a step back. Do some thinking and figure out how you will use the next ten years to put yourself on course for the career and lifestyle you want to achieve for yourself and your family. You do not have to do anything as dramatic as quitting your job right away. Often all you need is to retrain yourself, change a few habits and make choices about your future life.
I hope that has helped and thank you for your wonderful question, Bill.
Thank you also to all of you for listening. Don’t forget if you have a question then you can email me at carl@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week it’s all about your goals and staying focused so you actually get round to completing them
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 130
Hello and welcome to episode 130 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I hope you are faring well during these difficult and unprecedented times. Disruptions to our lives like this do not come around very often, fortunately, yet with anything bad, I always like to see the silver lining and in this instance the opportunity to step back a little, review what we want to accomplish and how we want to accomplish it is an opportunity not to be missing.
I’ve written and spoken in the past about the need to stress test any kind of system you build for yourself, and now is a great chance to test your system. How does it cope when you are thrown out of your normal, day to day routines? How does it manage when you are surrounded by interruptions and demands from family members? Does it still work?
These questions can really help you to find that balance and find the best way for your system to be set up.
Now this week, I have a goals related question. We haven’t answered one of these for a while. This week it’s about staying focused on a goal and how to avoid being distracted and or lose interest in it once you have started taking the necessary action to make it happen.
Now before that, I would like to remind you that if you have not done so already I have a FREE online course that will teach you the concepts of COD - That’s collect, Organise and Do.
Collecting your tasks, commitments, ideas and events into a place you trust, spending a little time each day organising what you collected and the rest of the time doing the work you have identified needs to be done. It’s simple, it’s powerful and it works.
Details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Toby. Toby asks: Hi Carl, I had a number of goals and projects that I was so excited to start this year and yet after a few weeks I lost interest and stopped working on them. I think I have a problem with motivation as this has always happened to me. Is there anything I can do to stay focused on them?
Hi Toby, thank you for your question and I can reassure you you are not alone. Struggling to stay focused on your goals and projects is hard. To achieve goals you are going to have to leave your comfort zone and that requires some big changes to your way of life.
Completing projects can also be hard if you don't have a boss or colleagues keeping you accountable. It’s much easier to slip back into our normal way of doing things and find excuses about why we cannot achieve a goal or complete a project when we do not have someone keeping us accountable.
And that’s something you need to be very alert to. The excuses your brain will come up with that prevents you from making the necessary changes you need to make to achieve your goal or complete a project.
And boy our brains are fantastic at coming up with excuses about why you are so different from everyone else. Why you cannot write a blog post, why you can’t apply for that promotion or why you cannot run a 10km road race.
What I’ve found is whenever a person says “I can’t” the vast majority of the time it’s got nothing to do with a lack of ability or qualifications or money. It’s got everything to do with a reluctance to make the necessary changes one needs to make to achieve that goal or to complete that project.
The “ah but they are different” excuse. The thing is we are all different. But that does not mean you cannot achieve your goals or complete your projects.
I recently heard a podcast talking about how Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson became the highest-paid Hollywood actor. It certainly wasn't luck. It’s because The Rock does the work nobody else is willing to do.
Despite all the success he has had in recent years, the amount of money he has earned, he still wakes up at 4 am and goes for a run or spends 45 minutes or so on the running machine. The Rock understands this. He knows the secret to his success is in the gym, not on the sofa or lying in bed. It must be so easy for him to sit back and say I’ve made it. I don’t have to go to the gym today” Yet he still goes. Why? Because he knows why he is successful. He knows what it takes to be successful and he’s made the decision to make those sacrifices.
You know, if you want to the physique of Dwayne Johnson you have to do the work Dwayne Johnson does.
And if you are not prepared to do that that’s okay. Accept that as your reason for not having the physique of Dwayne Johnson. But don't delude yourself by saying The Rock is a special case, or he was lucky. No, he wasn't. He puts the work in day after day after day. There’s nothing lucky about that.
That is commitment. Not luck.
And this is the same for your projects and goals. It takes commitment and consistency. I suppose a good question to ask before you decide to start any project or goal is:
What am I prepared to sacrifice in order to complete this?
That’s because to commit to completing a project or goal will require you to make time for doing it. That means you are going to have to sacrifice something. What will you sacrifice?
It could be you enjoy sitting down at the end of a long day to watch TV. Or you love going out for a few drinks with your friends on a weekend, or your favourite place is your nice warm bed.
If you really want to achieve your goal, complete your project what are you going to sacrifice?
You see, if you’re not prepared to sacrifice anything to achieve your goal or complete your project your motivation is not strong enough to carry you through.
A classic one is as the summer approaches many people feel the urge to lose some weight. So they embark on a crash diet. They go from eating three meals a day plus snacks to eating only one or two and no snacks. After a few hours on their new diet, they feel hungry. Then very hungry, then unbelievably hungry and after a few hours or a day or two they give up depending on the strength of their willpower.
The sacrifice—the discomfort of feeling hungry—is more powerful than the urge to look good on their summer holiday.
I often hear people talk of the desire to write a book or to start an online business as a side project. And these are great ways to develop skills and push your potential. Yet, once again there is a sacrifice to be made. There’s the risk of failure and the perceived embarrassment that will come from that—seriously if you fail that’s far better than never actually trying. There’s the time sacrifice—you are going to have to commit time to do these activities and that means you are going to have to stop doing something you already do.
All of these sacrifices will test your resolve and test your motivation.
So how do you develop motivation that is strong enough to overcome the discomfort of moving away from your comfort zone?
Now that’s a very difficult one to answer because it depends on where you are in life. By that I mean if you are in your early twenties, you feel you have plenty of time to write the book, start your own business or start an exercise programme.
I was a smoker when I was in my twenties—I didn’t care about lung cancer or other smoking-related diseases—they didn’t happen to people in their twenties. But as I got older that little voice in my head was telling me to give up—my long-term health would suffer and I would die young. And sure enough, the point came where my motivation to stay alive and live a healthy long-life became stronger than the nicotine hit I got from a cigarette. I quit.
If you are in your early thirties you are thinking about settling down, developing your career and building a family life for yourself, By the time you get to your mid to late forties, you motivation to preserve your health will be becoming stronger.
So a lot of our motivation comes from where we are in life. If you’ve just experienced the birth of your first child, your motivation to protect and preserve the financial well-being of your new family will be incredibly motivating. (Probably less so once that child becomes an adolescent teenager) As you approach retirement your motivation to build a sustainable retirement fund for yourself will be strong.
So, if you are looking for motivation you need to be asking questions about why a goal or a project is important.
And the final step to all of this you need to figure out what you need to do consistently every day to make whatever it is you want to accomplish happen.
The truth is, motivation will not last. The discomfort of your sacrifice will always trump your motivation later in the day. What you need to be doing is developing habits and routines that take you towards completing your project or your goal.
Writing that book? Write something every day. Set a minimum target say 500 words per day. Want to lose weight? Change your eating habits. Find the foods that you currently eat that directly contribute to your weight gain and replace them with healthier alternatives. Want to get that promotion at work? Find out what you have to do in order to get it. What training courses can you take, what skills need developing and make doing the work a habit or a routine? Something you just do.
Look for the action steps that will directly result in you completing your project or achieving your goal.
The Rock wakes up at 4 am because to him going to the gym and working out directly contributes to his success. Warren Buffett reads for 5 hours a day because he knows that the knowledge he picks up reading those financial reports directly contribute to his bottom line.
What can you do that will directly contribute to you achieving success with your projects and goals?
There you go, Toby. I hope that has helped and given you some concrete steps you can take to achieve your projects and goals. Thank you for your question.
And thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question, then you can email me—carl@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week it’s all about calming down an out of control productivity system.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 129
Hello and welcome to episode 129 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I do hope you are all doing well and staying safe. It is in times of difficulty when the best of us comes out. Now is the time to stand up and be a leader and set an example for everyone around us.
Now this week, I’ve received a few emails and I’ve had a number of people ask this question on this subject—or a similar question— and that is one where the productivity system itself has become overwhelming and is now the problem and not the work being thrown at us.
Now, before I do go into this week’s question, I should point out that if you also find your productivity system has become bloated and overwhelming now would be a very good time to take or retake, my FREE COD productivity course. COD (Collect, Organise and Do) was created with simplicity at its heart. It was born out of my own experiences creating a monster of a productivity system that In itself became the problem that demanded more and more of my time every day.
The COD course will take you through the basic set up of a simple system, explain what you need (and by omission what you do not need) and show you, in outline, how to manage your work so you spend more time doing and less time organising and processing.
So if you haven’t done so already, get yourself signed up. It’s completely free and don’t worry, it is not a sales pitch designed to get you to sign up for ever more expensive courses. It is a course designed to help, not sell. And most important of all, it will show you the essential components of building a productivity system that works for you.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Helen, Helen asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been following your work for some time and wonder if you can help sort out the mess I am in. I am using Evernote and Notion for my notes, I also have to use Microsoft OneNote for my work and I also use Todoist for my personal tasks and Microsoft’s new To-do for my work tasks. It all just feels so overwhelming. Is there anything I can do that will help me to feel more in control?
Firstly, thank you, Helen, for sending in this question.
Now, where do we start? The best place to start is recognising there is a problem and in this case Helen, you have done that. You have recognised you have a problem.
A good place to start is to calculate how much time you are spending organising and processing each day. Under normal circumstances, you really should only be spending twenty to thirty minutes, maximum, processing and organising your work. The rest of the time you should be doing the work.
A lot of overwhelm is self-inflicted. We spend more time adding than taking away. What we should be doing is looking at subtracting instead of adding.
Asking questions such as ‘do I really need this app?’ And ‘Is this adding to or reducing the amount of work I do each day?’ Are helpful in determining whether or not your system is the cause of the problem.
Also, look at the tasks themselves—do those tasks really need doing or can you combine them with other tasks—picking up your prescription at the same time as doing your weekly shopping. Replying to your actionable email while waiting to pick up your kids from school, for example.
Problems are also caused by us wanting to see a lot more than we need to see. And there is a difference between what we would like to see and what we need to see.
What you need to see is a simple list of tasks you have prioritised to do today. Nothing else. What we like to see often can be a list of tasks labeled to be done at the office and at the computer. What we have planned for the week, progress of a specific project and a whole bunch of other stuff. The problem there, of course, is seeing all that stuff doesn’t move anything forward and just causes anxiety, overwhelm, distraction and a feeling of being busy. Not exactly a good mental state to be in.
The time to be looking at future work is when you do your weekly planning session and to a less extent when you do your daily planning. 95% of the time on a day to day basis, you should only be seeing what you have prioritised to do today. That’s all that matters right now.
Tomorrow’s tasks are irrelevant at 9 am today. Tomorrow’s tasks only become relevant tomorrow. Stop looking. Focus on today’s tasks today and tomorrow’s tasks tomorrow.
You see, you are dressing up procrastination and calling it “planning”. Looking at next week’s tasks on a Tuesday afternoon when you still have Tuesday tasks to do is not planning. It’s procrastinating. There is a time for planning when a project or an idea needs developing and the associated tasks can be pulled out and put into your to-do list. But if you are constantly looking at what's coming up tomorrow, later in the week or next month and you still have tasks today’s tasks to do, you are procrastinating. Stop doing that. Do the tasks you have assigned yourself to do today and only go looking for more when you have completed those tasks.
Now many people have become so conditioned to checking and rechecking that there is a feeling of comfort in this action. A kind of delusion has set in—being convinced that all this checking and reviewing is somehow making them more productive. It’s not. You need to snap out of that thinking. Planning, reviewing and checking have their place, but that should never be at the expense of doing the work.
It’s similar to the same situation I find people who want to start a blog or YouTube channel. An awful lot of time is spent thinking, planning and thinking again and doing more research and more planning. You see all that planning, research and thinking is not doing. Nothing is being written or recorded. So nothing is happening.
Again, planning, researching, and thinking have their place and they are important. But none of that should ever get in the way of actually doing. For me, if I find myself planning and thinking beyond a few hours I see that as a trigger to analyse why I am not doing. I’ve learned from experience that having an idea, spending a little time thinking and planning it out and then doing it often leads to something special. My blog, this podcast and my YouTube channel all had a few hours of research and planning, but they only ever got off the ground and started when I sat down and started writing or recording. It was those first few attempts that gave me far more momentum and information than whatever I read, watched or planned.
So be very careful not to use ‘I just need to do a bit more research’ as an excuse not to start doing the work that matters. You’re going to learn a lot more from doing than you ever will from researching.
Now for the one that creeps upon us and we are not aware it is happening. Too many apps.
This one has become a much bigger problem for many people over the last two or three years because we are so lucky to be living in an age where I feel human ingenuity and creativity are at a peak.
There are so many amazing apps to choose from out there. From Notion to Bear Notes, from Things 3 to Microsoft’s ToDo. All of these apps have sprung up in the last two or three years and promise so much. It is so tempting to add one of these tools to our system.
And of course, we convince ourselves that we absolutely must have this new app because it is going to plug a gap we think we have in our system. Notion to me is the biggest culprit here because it promises to be all things to all people. It’s a task manager, a personal wiki, a note-taking app, a research tool and a place to play around with building creative lists.
The problem here is because Notion is all things it is not one thing. So we add it to our toolbox and do not eliminate any of our existing tools. So now, not only do you have a to-do list and a notes app to keep up with and maintain, you now have Notion to keep up with and maintain too. You’ve just added more processing and organising time and done nothing that optimises the time you spend doing.
When you have tools that duplicate each other you put a lot of drag on your overall system. When you collect something where does it go? Which to-do list? Which notes app? Which calendar app? That’s a lot of decisions to make. And if you are in a rush and you collect something, how do you remember where you collected it?
This is why I preach you need one to-do list, one notes app and one calendar app. You do not need multiple apps that do the same thing.
If your company requires you to use Outlook and Outlook calendar, then make Outlook calendar your calendar app. Likewise, if your company collaborates using OneNote, use OneNote as you notes app. Don’t use OneNote for Work and Evernote for personal. You are just overloading your cognitive load and you just do not need all that complexity.
If you are serious about becoming better organised and more productive, then drop your excess apps. Pick one. One to-do list, one notes app and one calendar app. That’s all you need. You may have a lot of work to do, but you are not a multinational conglomerate responsible for over 100,000 employees and millions of customers. You are an individual with a number of tasks to perform each day and a limited number of hours in which to do those tasks. You do not need all these distractions and complexity.
Focus on the work you have decided needs doing today, keep the apps you use to a minimum and reduce the amount of distractions and interruptions you get as best you can. Doing that will reduce your overwhelm and busy-ness and improve the quality of your work faster than another app will do. It leaves you feeling much more relaxed fulfilled and ultimately a lot happier.
I hope that has helped, Helen. Keep things simple and you will be fine.
Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget to have a look at my FREE COD course—details of which are in the show notes— and please stay safe. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, it’s all about what you can do to fine-tune your productivity systems so when we do come out of this pandemic you hit the track running.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
Carl’s YouTube Channel
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 128
Hello and welcome to episode 128 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a question about what you can do with that little bit of extra time each week because you no longer have to spend hours commuting or stuck in traffic jams.
Speaking of having a little extra time, whether you have taken the free COD course or not, now would be a very good time to do the course again (or do it for the first time)
It’s completely free and it will give you everything you need to begin building your own productivity system.
Remember, you are a unique person with your own way of thinking and doing things. This is why developing your own system around three core areas—collecting, organising and doing—is the best place to start.
Details on how to join the course are in the show notes and I hope you get as much value from it as the thousands of other people who have taken the course already have.
Okay on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Mike. Mike asks, hi Carl, like most people I am stuck at home and find I have a lot of extra time on my hands. I don't want to waste this chance. Are there any things I can do that will help to make me more productive?
Thank you, Mike, for your question. It’s something I have been doing. Looking at the way I do my work, seeing if I can find more effective and efficient ways of doing it and of course clearing up old folders, wardrobes and drawers around my home.
So what can you do to make your system more efficient and effective?
One area you may want to start with is to clean up your notes app. This is an app that can quickly fill up with a lot of old notes and stuff we collected and no longer need and just get forgotten about.
Now if you are anything like me, you may have a few thousand notes, so the question is where do you begin? For me, I start with the oldest notes. These are the ones most likely to be deleted.
Most notes apps will allow you to flip the way they are organised. You want to change your order from last in to first in—or oldest first. This just makes it a little easier as you will be organising from the top down—the natural way—rather than the bottom up—the unnatural way.
When I last did this, I had around 6,000 notes in my notes app. Clearing up 6,000 notes is quite daunting, so I decided to do 3 months at a time. I had three years of notes, that’s 36 months and so I divided that by 3 and that gave me the number of days I needed to clear up my notes app. - 12 days.
Doing it that way reduced any pressure and it turned into a fun experience. For the record, I got those 6,000 notes down to around 4,000 notes in just 12 days. Although I am sure it wasn't real, my notes app did feel a lot faster after that cleanup.
Another area you can cleanup is your to-do list. I find a lot of people have projects in there that are dormant. Projects that if you were being completely honest with yourself were not projects but wishes. If you know deep down that you will never get round to doing the project (or task) then clear it out.
For the more sensitive of you, you could create a master list of these projects and tasks in your notes app. At least then you won’t feel too upset having deleted a lot of old stuff that has been hanging around for a while.
Although, I find deleting them completely means if they are important, they will come back up in the future and then I just re-add them as a new project. The truth is most of these deleted projects and tasks never come back—they were just a lot of wishful tasks and projects.
It’s a very hard thing to do, but it can be very refreshing and similarly to when you clean up your notes app, you get re-energised with your to-do list and having less in there speeds up your whole decision-making process.
A lot of problems with our to-do lists comes from not being able to let go of projects and tasks that have been hanging around for a while and we have somehow convinced ourselves they are important. If you have not touched them for two or three months (or more) they’re not important and you should let them go.
For example, if you haven’t started writing the book you intended to start writing in January, you are not going to do it anytime soon either. Let it go.
By all means, keep your notes in your notes app, but if you are not actively writing your book, let it go. It’s taking up cognitive space in your mind every time you see the project and you really do not want to be wasting precious mental energy on something you clearly are not motivated to do (if you were motivated, you would be writing it!) Let it go.
In the past, I’ve had a number of projects like this just sitting around in my projects list and every time I do a review I am reminded I am not doing anything about it. It does not make me feel good about myself. I know if it was important enough I would always find time to do it. I also know if something is not really important enough, I just find excuses for not doing it. And I can often feel as if I am a genius when comes to excuses. Just let them go.
Now for the elephant in the room, so to speak. The files on your computer. I know, this is likely to be the scary place. How are your files and documents filed? Are they organised? Do you know where everything is? If you’re like most people, probably not. While you have a little extra time, now would be a great time to get these cleaned up and organised.
Now when it comes to organising your files there is not going to be a lot of help out there for you because we are all different. The way I organise my files is likely to be very different from the way someone else organises their files. I use the tagging function on my Mac to organise my files by the different areas I work in. My productivity business, my communications business and my personal life. I also use iCloud as my main cloud storage system (with a little help from Google Drive for collaborating) When I’ve tried helping other people to set this system up, we usually fail spectacularly. That’s because we all think differently and we would naturally search for something in a different way.
I began my working life just as computers were beginning take over the office (the early nineties) and so we were still heavily reliant on the trusty old filing cabinet. So, my first exposure to filing documents was with an alpha-numeric system and a metal filing cabinet. So for me, organising my files by area and alphanumerically just makes sense.
I’ve come across software engineers who have what appears to be incredibly complex coding systems for organising, but for them, they can find anything they want faster than I can with my system.
But no matter how you organise your files and documents there will always be files and documents that need cleaning up, deleting and archiving. Now’s a great time to do that. You may never get this opportunity again for a very long time.
Another area you can take a look at is how you structure your day. For this use your calendar. Go back to before the pandemic came along and see where you were spending your time during the week. Look at the meetings you attended and decide if that was a good use of your time. I have found that many of the meetings I used to attend were not all that useful and were surprisingly easy to be excused from.
Something I’ve been playing around with over the last week or two is developing my “perfect day”. What I’ve done is created a new calendar and called it “my perfect day” and added the things I would like to spend my days doing. It’s been a very interesting exercise as I discovered I want to begin my days writing. It could be a blog post, a podcast script or a book I am working on. Later in the week, I want to spend time doing my video and podcast recording.
And, I would like to be able to exercise twice a day. Running in the morning and weights in the afternoon. That was something that came up while I was playing around with what my ‘perfect’ week would look like.
I would begin the day at 7 AM and write for two hours. Then go out for a run for forty to fifty minutes. Come back, shower, have breakfast and then do some planning and communication work until lunch. After lunch, a little more writing and around 4 pm go to the gym for an hour.
What I discovered was teaching my English classes didn’t feature very much at all. This has given me some food for thought about how I want my days to go in the future and I can now begin the process of building that ‘perfect’ week and turning it into reality.
Not only is this a fun exercise, but it’s also eye-opening. You often find that what you are doing now—or before the pandemic—is not what you want to be doing. It may just be the stimulus to get you to make some significant changes that could lead you to find that dream work and turning every day into an amazing day.
Finally, one more area you can take a look at is your home working environment. This may be the first time you have worked from home and you have discovered that you do not have a good environment from which to work. Asking the question “What would I have to do to turn my working environment at home into the perfect workspace?”
I did this exercise a couple of years ago and it led me to ditch my desktop computer, buying a more powerful laptop and an external monitor and it transformed the way I worked. It’s wonderful now to be able to move around and work from my sofa from time to time or just unplugging my laptop and heading out to the local coffee shop to work on some writing or video editing.
Sometimes the little things can make a huge difference in the way you get your work done.
So there you go, Mike. Quite a lot of things you can take a look at and clean up. Doing this, what I call, backend work can give you a huge boost in your productivity because your apps will feel faster, you will have renewed enthusiasm for your system and your files will all be current and meaningful to you.
I hope that’s been helpful. Thank you, Mike, for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. If you feel this episode or any of my other episodes could help someone you know, then please share this podcast with them. And, don’t forget to retake or take my FREE COD course. It might just help you to finally have a system in place that will help you to Bec less stress, anxious and overwhelmed.
Stay safe and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In the Working With Podcast this week, I answer a question about staying motivated when our daily life gets interrupted.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Life Hack article | 15 Home Office Organization Tips to Save Time and Get More Done
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Carl’s YouTube Channel
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 127
Hello and welcome to episode 127 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I hope you are all staying safe and haven’t gone completely mad from having to stay at home and not be able to get outside. We are living in difficult times at the moment, but as in most things in life it won’t last and we will soon be able to start moving again. Stay strong and stay focused on the long-term.
This week, it’s all about maintaining motivation and routines when everything gets thrown out of sync. With many of you having to learn how to work from home and how to deal with a sudden drop in activity and movement it can be easy to lose your motivation to focus on what is important, your health and fitness and even keep up with the demands of your work when there are so many new distractions all around us—distractions we have not had to deal with before.
Now a quick tip before we get into the question: if you have taken my COD course, now would be a good time to review the course. Many of you will have had your working routines change over the last few weeks and that means many of the ways you collect and organise your work and commitments will have changed. Reviewing the course will help you quickly develop a new way of collecting and organising that reflects the way you are working today.
If you are new to this podcast and have not taken the COD course—that’s Collect, Organise and Do—the course is free and it will give you the basics of setting up your own system that will see you through these difficult times. Full details on how to get into the course are in the show notes or you can find it on my website—carlpullein.com
Okay, on with this the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jenna. Jenna asks, Hi Carl, I am really struggling to keep up with my productivity system. I have to work from home at the moment because of the Corona virus and I had just finally got a system in place. Not it feels like everything is falling apart. Is there anything I can do to keep up with a system?
Hi Jenna, thank you for your question. I think a lot of people are struggling with motivation at the moment. When we are suddenly taken out of our normal routines it feels disorientating and that often leads us to feeling disrupted and to losing sight of what we have identified as being important to us. The key here is to be absolutely clear about what exactly is important to us.
What I mean by this is let’s say maintaining a healthy lifestyle is something you identified as being important to you. Part of that lifestyle is you exercise five to six times per week and you follow a healthy diet.
Now, during your normal routines, you would eat a healthy breakfast at home, and then buy a salad or something at a specific place near your workplace for lunch and then go to the gym or go for a run when you return from work. Now, because you are working from home and your gym is closed you will feel trapped and unable to maintain your healthy routines. It is very easy to just give up and tell yourself you can take a break.
Okay, that’s probably fine for a few days. But there will come a point where you start to feel uncomfortable. Your energy levels will drop significantly and you will find yourself losing motivation to do anything. The temptation to become a sofa surfer will be overwhelming. The problem is that will just make you feel worse and you will begin to feel guilty.
Instead what you can do is identify what is important to you. I spoke about the importance of maintaining a structure to your day in last week’s episode—just because you no longer need to go to your workplace, you still need to have some structure to your day—you need a start and finish time for your work, and in the example above you will still need to do some form of exercise five to six times per week.
Now you may not be able to do your regular exercise—perhaps you do not have any exercise equipment at home, or if you run three to five miles a day you may not be allowed out of your home because of a lockdown in place, but you can get creative and do some body-weight exercises or use your stairs for some cardio.
Now I know it can be hard to motivate yourself to do this, so a trick I have used in the past is to fool my brain. If I feel unmotivated to exercise I give myself permission to just do a ten-minute session. I set the time—usually 2 pm and say from 2 pm to 2:10 pm, I will do some push-ups and squats. Nine times out of ten, I will end up doing a thirty-minute session. Had I told myself I had to do a thirty-minute session I know my brain would convince me I don’t need to exercise, that these are exceptional times and I can always get back into my exercise routines once this pandemic is over.
Now you can do this with your work too. If you have a report to do and you keep putting it off, just schedule a fifteen to twenty-minute session on it. Tell yourself you only need to spend ten minutes or so on it and get started. What you will find happens is you will do far more than ten minutes. Once you get started you will not want to stop so you just keep going. Before long you discover you have spent an hour or so on it and may even want to continue.
And, by the way, if you do this in the mornings you will find it much easier. When our brains are fresh and our willpower is at it’s strongest, that’s the time to do these more challenging tasks.
Another way to keep motivated is to have a plan for the day. This does not mean you create a plan to do ten to twenty tasks per day, that can actually be demotivating. What I mean by this is you create a list of no more than three things to accomplish that day. Write these down on a post-it note or a piece of paper and leave it on your desk when you close down the day.
Then when you begin the next day you see your three things and that is where you start. Start with the first task, once that is done, cross it off and move on the next and so on. Now don’t get greedy. What you want to do is create a list that you will accomplish, not a list that ends up with ten to twenty tasks uncompleted. This is the MIT method—your ‘most important tasks’.
The reason this is motivating is that at the end of the day you have three crossed off tasks and that builds momentum and momentum is your best friend in these difficult times because it generates motivation and it creates forward motion. When you feel and see that forward motion your motivation grows.
Now in your specific case, Jenna, maintaining a productivity system is a case where your method of doing work needs to become a part of who you are. Let’s take the COD system for example. How you collect your tasks, events and notes is what you do. It is just who you are. I remember a few years ago having lunch with David Allen in Seoul and as we were talking, he had his notetaker wallet on the table. Now for those of you not familiar with David Allen’s notetaker wallet, it is a wallet with a small notepad on one side. David uses that as his ubiquitous collect tool (UCT)
The theory goes that wherever David Allen goes, so does his wallet. This means he always has a method for collecting stuff. For me, my UCT is my phone. My phone is always with me so I have made sure that is set up for quick collection. People I regularly work with know if they ask me to do something I will pull out my phone and add it to my to-do list. If I don’t they think something’s weird (often ask if I heard them!)
Likewise for the way you organise your stuff. For me, spending ten minutes clearing things up, filing and organising everything collected at the end of the day is just something I do. I don’t need to think about it. I would feel I had missed something if I didn’t do it. Organising my stuff no longer needs motivation because I just do it. It has become a part of who I am.
And finally, always begin the day with a routine and a plan. Your morning routines are so important. The way you begin the day sets you up for the day. If your alarm goes off and you hit snooze two or three times, then you finally crawl out of bed, make coffee and not know how or what to start with, you are never going to feel particularly motivated. Instead, if you begin the day the same way, perhaps do some meditation or a little exercise, for example, you will find yourself much more motivated.
Likewise, when you have a plan for the day and you start knowing exactly what you want to accomplish, that drives momentum and motivation and once you have completed your tasks you feel ready to do it all over again the next day.
Motivation and routines go hand in hand. Making small improvements and a little progress every day creates a cycle of motivation. It’s when you have no plan and no routines that’s when you a cycle of demotivation.
As many of us are experiencing a change to our daily lives and we are thrown out of our usual routines it can be demotivating. But by making a few changes and adjustments it can be quite easy to get back on track and stay motivated in these unprecedented times. We may not be able to perform at our best, but if we can keep moving forward, even a few tiny steps at a time, our motivation will stay strong and that will make it easier to transition back to our normal lives once this pandemic comes to an end.
Thank you, Jenna, for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Stay safe and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week I answer a question I’ve had on my questions list for quite some time and has now become a question many people are asking. How to be productive while working from home.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Life Hack article | 15 Home Office Organization Tips to Save Time and Get More Done
The March 2020 Clearance Sale
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
Carl’s YouTube Channel
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 126
Hello and welcome to episode 126 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Well, we are living in strange times and experiencing a lot of disruption to our regular working lives. For many of us, we are now having to find ways of doing our work that is alien to us… Working from home!
For me, it has been very interesting seeing companies that previously said the work they do meant it was impossible for them to allow their staff to work from home suddenly find ways for their staff to work from home.
So what can you do to create a working environment that assists to you to get on with your work and minimise the distractions that inevitably come from having to work without supervision and with kids, spouses, partners and roommates hanging around?
Now, before I get into answering the question, just a quick heads up to let you know my incredible special offer of 4 courses for $40.00 will be ending on Tuesday at midnight PST (That’s Pacific Standard Time or the time in LA) This is your chance to pick up courses like my Supercharge Your Email Productivity, The Complete Guide To Creating A Successful Life and How To Create and Achieve Your Goals for just $40.00 for all of them or for as little as $10.00 each.
This is a one time offer as these courses will no longer be on sale from 1st April. This is a fantastic opportunity for you pick up some of my best selling courses and download them and keep them so you have a resource you can go back to whenever you need a refresh or need to get back to base after falling off the wagon (let’s be honest we all fall off the wagon fro time to time.
Details for this wonderful offer is in the show notes.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Andrew. Andrew asks: Hi Carl, I’ve just started a new job that allows me to work from home three days a week and I was wondering if you have any tips and tricks for being productive when working from home. I am finding it very difficult to concentrate and it is so distracting. Any tips would be a huge help.
Thank you, Andrew. Great question and a question I am sure a lot of people have at the moment in these uncharted times.
The first thing you are going to need to do is set your working times. Now you are working from home, you no longer need to commute to work. That is likely to save you quite a lot of time. In theory, all you need to do is roll out of bed, put the kettle on, make coffee, turn on your computer and you’re at work. Ten minutes max.
The key is to set yourself a routine. You had a routine when you had to go to your office, now, even though you don’t need to go to your office, you still need to treat your working day as if you had to be somewhere at a specific time. The thing is you do. You need to be at your chosen work station. So pick a start time and make that your working time.
Likewise, you should also set aside time for your lunch break and finish time. You need that structure or you will soon find yourself doing email late at night and home shopping at 3 pm in the afternoon. You might not be at your office, but you are still working. You need to treat your working time as just that. Working time. Do your home shopping, news reading and YouTube watching when you finish work! Don’t slip into the temptation to mix what you would normally do at home with what you would normally work on at work. You need to set up barriers between your home life and your work life.
A trick I use is I have a keyboard shortcut for quick entry to my To-do list manager’s inbox. If I am suddenly tempted to look up some useful bodyweight exercises I can do at home (now my gym is closed) I can just quickly add it to my inbox and do it when I finish work. I really do not need to research that now when I am supposed to be doing my work.
Next up is to create yourself a work station. The worst place is to stay in bed and work from there and your sofa is the next worst place. You need to create a physical space to do your work. A place that is free from distractions, a place that is clean, cool and well lit. If you have a dining table that’s often the best place and failing that your kitchen table. Just make sure you put a lock on your refrigerator! (That’s just from personal experience!) Try to set yourself up by a window. Natural daylight helps with your circadian rhythms and prevents you from feeling sleepy and being tempted to take a nap your sofa.
Now once you have set your working times and your work station you need to make sure you’re taking breaks. This was a mistake I made in my early days when I was working from home. I felt because I was at home I did not need to take as many breaks. That turned out not to be true. I needed the breaks. So I worked out my best working times. I found out I could work well for around ninety minutes before needing a break in the mornings and for around an hour in the afternoons. This helped me to break up my days.
So, when I started working from home, I began my day at 7:30 AM and worked until 9:00 AM and then made some breakfast. I would step away from my work station and made sure I ate my breakfast in the kitchen—away from where I was working. I also made sure I moved. Fortunately, I have a little dog at home so I got outside quite frequently walking the dog. I also used my breaks to do my shopping as my local supermarket is only a five-minute walk from my home.
I would return to my desk at 9:30 AM and do another ninety-minute session which took me to 11 AM. For me, 11:20 AM to 12:00 PM was communication time. That was the time I would clear my action today folder in email and make any calls I needed to make. It was a nice break from writing or creating a presentation file.
Once again, make sure you take a proper lunch break - step away from your desk and computer and get some air. I found the most difficult thing about working from home was the feeling I was stuck in a single place 24/7. That’s why if you can step outside into a garden or a driveway and just get some air it will give you a mental boost. I know we have to be careful in the current situation, but you can still keep your distance from other people and get some air. Just make sure you are following your country’s government’s guidelines.
Now the thing I would advise you to do is to make sure you are moving. One of the biggest changes that will take place when you have to work from home is you suddenly stop moving. Your desk is a few metres away from your bed. This is seriously not good. If you are unable to leave your house now would be a good time to do some housework. Cleaning a room, scrubbing a bathroom wall or doing the vacuuming are all good sources of exercise. I know I said don’t mix your home life with your work life, but in this case, you need to make an exception. If you are not moving, you gaining weight, your focus, mental and physical energy will drop. Make sure you are moving. The stairs in your home can also be a great place for some exercise.
Now for finishing your work for the day you need to set a stop time. The biggest danger with working from home is there are no barriers between your workplace and you home. This makes it difficult to stop and it can often lead to your work creeping into your private time. I was terrible at this—I still am—but you do need to make sure you have a stop time and stick to that time. Close down your computer and step away from your work station. Again, get outside, if you can, and move.
Now, before you do close down, though, plan the next day. I find this is more important than when you work in an office. Certainly have a plan for the first task you will attack when you start your day. The biggest fight you are going to have is with procrastination. The best way to defeat procrastination is to have a plan. We procrastinate because we are not sure what needs to be done next—there are other reasons for procrastination but not having a plan is the most common—so give yourself fifteen minutes before you close down the day for planning what you will do the next day.
This is where your calendar will be useful. You may not have your regular meetings right now, so you may feel you don’t need your calendar, you will find your calendar is going to be your best productivity tool. Before you close down the day, schedule out your work on your calendar. Don’t be too specific unless you are working on something specific. Use phrases such as “writing time”, “design time” or “communication time” keep it general. This gives you some degree of flexibility. And make sure you block out your break times too.
A few extra tips for you.
Create a music playlist for doing your work. Both Apple Music and Spotify have dedicated playlists for working and they can help to keep you focused on your work. And make sure you keep your workspace clear of your personal things when you are working and keep work away when you are not. Remember there is no physical barrier between your work and home life now, you need to create these barriers.
If possible, use a different computer for your work and your personal life. I know that might not always be possible, but if you are provided with a computer for work use that only for your work. Sounds obvious, but it is so easy to do your personal browsing on your work computer because it is just there. Don’t do this. You need to create those barriers.
Well, there you go, Andrew, I hope these tips help you to get on with your work while you are on lockdown. Remember these times are unprecedented and not likely to last. Hopefully, we will return to our normal lives very soon.
In the meantime please stay safe, listen to your government’s advice—now is not the time to be political activists—and avoid sharing scare stories and fake news. That makes you part of the problem and not part of the solution.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
On this week’s podcast, why do we delude ourselves about what we can do each day?
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
David Sparks' Article on the time delusion
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
Carl’s YouTube Channel
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 125
Hello and welcome to episode 125 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
So how many tasks on average are you rescheduling each day? If you find yourself rescheduling tasks you are likely deluding yourself about how much you can do each day and it’s a problem I find in many people’s productivity systems and often causes people to falsely believe to-do lists and time management is not for them. The good news is once you accept reality, it is a problem you can fix very easily and that is what I will be talking about today.
Now, before we get into this week’s answer, I just want to give you a gentle reminder that many of my courses are on a very special offer this month and you have a chance to pick up four of my all-time best courses for just $40.00 (or for as little as $10.00 each) Time is running out as this very special offer will be ending soon so head over to my learning centre and get your bundle today. You will not be disappointed. All the details are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Frederic. Frederic asks: Hi Carl, I have trouble completing all my tasks most days. I find I am having to reschedule sometimes half of the tasks I set for myself. Is this normal or am I doing something wrong?
WOW! Thank you, Frederic. I’ve been reading quite a few articles recently on this problem myself and it seems you are not alone. One article, in particular, caught my attention which I will link to in the show notes. David Sparks of the MacSparky podcast wrote about the delusion we have about how much we think we can do and the reality of what we actually can do each day. High expectations and hope rarely lead to a good outcome. What we need is to reduce those expectations and remove hope from the equation when we plan our day. The question is, how do we do that?
Firstly, understand you have a limited amount of time each day and with that time limit you also have limited resources of focus and concentration. What this means is as the day goes by your ability to focus and concentrate diminishes too. Your brain has a limited capacity to stay focused. And so while it might be easy to keep adding tasks to your daily to-do list, it becomes much harder to stay focused on completing those tasks as the day goes by. That’s why most people hit a mid-afternoon slump.
However, there are more complications here too. Another factor is when are you at your most focused? Here we are all very different. Some people are at their most focused first thing in the morning—the early birds. Others find they can focus better in the evening—the night owls. And there are a rare few who find they focus most in the afternoons. Those people are so rare, though, we don’t have a name for them.
So, one of the first things to do is to find out which type of person you are. Are you an early bird or a night owl? This is important because once you know your type you can start scheduling the work that needs your most focus at your best time.
Now this can be more difficult than you think. When I was in my twenties, I always felt I was a night owl. I hated mornings and really only came alive as the sun set. As I have matured I find I now focus best in the mornings - between 7 AM and 9 AM. Yet, I also find I can be very creative in the evenings between 11 PM and 1 AM. I experience a mental slump in the afternoons, so I schedule my exercise for 2 PM. Now I know many of you cannot do that as 2 PM is in the middle of your working day. That said, though, monitoring your days and learning when you feel at your most focused and when not is an essential first step to becoming more productive.
One of the least productive things you can do is to push through on a task that requires high levels of focus and concentration when you are in a mental slump. It would be far better to stop doing the task and spend some time working on your email replies and phone calls. Generally, your communications require less focus than pouring over a spreadsheet doing due diligence on a company’s financial status.
According to Daniel Pink in his book, When, most people are at their most focused first thing in the morning. So for most of you the best time to schedule work that requires the most concentration is when you arrive at work. This is why you should not start your day with email. Email requires low levels of concentration so you would be better off working on your email replies towards the end of the morning—say 11:30 AM. This is one of the best times to hit reply too because as most people are heading off to lunch around that time you are less likely to get replies coming in as you reply. (That’s a secret bonus tip for you—please keep it to yourself!)
Okay, so now you have established your best times for focus and concentration, how do you manage the number of tasks you have for the day? Good question.
Firstly, stop creating your daily to-do list based on hope and wishful thinking. Yes, we are all busy, yes we all have more stuff to do than available time in the day. But, we cannot change that. Instead, we need to get smart about how to manage our mental energy. If you focus better in the morning block time off to do your more difficult tasks in the morning. If you are in a leadership role, don’t schedule meetings first thing in the morning—remember most people are at their best first thing in the morning—schedule meetings for late morning or better still early afternoon.
Next, reduce down the number of tasks you try to do each day. Now here’s a trick I use. Rather look at a what I want to accomplish on a daily basis, I find looking at the week as a whole works better. Ask yourself what do you want to get accomplished this week? Now this focuses you more on outcomes than individual tasks and helps to reduce the number of tasks you have to do each week.
Let’s say your goal for the week is to complete a proposal and get a commitment from a potential customer to purchase your service or product. Now, most companies follow SOPs (standards of procedure) and often these just add unnecessary tasks. Instead ask the question “what do I have to do this week to get this potential customer’s business by close of business on Friday?” Asking this question may lead you to make a couple of calls and sending an email for two. This is far better than following some antiquated box-ticking system that was written five years ago that the potential customer or client does not care about.
For me, I could ask the question “what do I have to do to get this online course update finished by Sunday evening?” When I ask that question I may decide I need to cancel my teaching assignments on Thursday so I can spend all day in my studio recording the classes. Sometimes that’s the only way you are going to get something done. As the saying goes: “if it’s important enough you’ll find way. If it’s not, you’ll find an excuse”. If I had a task such as “complete course update” I know that task is going to get rescheduled and I would likely miss completing the update. A task this big needs a lot of focussed time. It’s far better to block a day off to get it done than to keep discovering I don’t have time to do it today.
Now, I’ve heard the excuses about not being able to block a whole day off to complete a project or a task. And I’ve worked in enough industries to know this is partially true. That said, I also know that if a project needs to be completed by the end of the week or month the successful are willing to pull out all the stops and do whatever it takes to get that project completed. Like I said if it’s important enough you will find a way. If it’s not you will find an excuse. This one is your call. Talk to your boss, talk to your customers explain the situation. Do whatever it takes to carve out the time to complete the project.
You need to get intentional about what you want to accomplish each day. Sure, you’re going to get a lot of stuff thrown at you, that’s called life. As a productive person you need to learn to manage that stuff, prioritise the important and discard the not so important. It’s hard, it takes practice, but it’s worth it because of the productivity benefits you will get from it.
Finally, are you practising the 2+8 Prioritisation method? This works. It works because it focuses you on deciding what is important. You have to decide what ten tasks you are going to complete today (excluding your routines). Now, this is not a rough number. It’s an intentionally precise number. You are only allowed a maximum of ten meaningful project or goal-orientated tasks per day.
I’ve seen people try to do more than ten tasks only to end up rescheduling many of those tasks. Remember, the purpose here is to not have to reschedule. To have enough meaningful tasks to comfortably complete them all and not have to reschedule. To have flexibility built into your day so you can deal with the inevitable unknowns that will come your way every day.
Think of it this way. If you have to reschedule a task - you failed. No excuse. You tried to do too much and you screwed up. Stop, review and ask why and then adjust accordingly. A lot of becoming better at managing your time and becoming more productive is really about making tiny adjustments until you discover your own sweet spot. The place where the number of tasks and type of work you do is manageable and has enough flexibility built in so you can deal with minor emergencies, interruptions and distractions as they come up. Most people never reach that sweet spot because they don’t stop and figure out where their sweet spot is. Instead, I find most people are better at coming up with excuses about why they are different and why something that works for billions of other people couldn’t work for them.
If you’re having to reschedule tasks every day, then whatever you are trying to do is not working. If you find you need to reschedule once or twice a week, that’s not really a problem. Sometimes the unknowns in the day will derail you. But, for the most part, you should be organising your day so you are not rescheduling much and that takes a lot of honesty and analysis. But that honesty and analysis will free you up to make better choices about how you manage your work each day.
Hopefully, that has helped you, Frederic. Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Spring is just around the corner and that means we are entering the Spring cleaning season. What’s the best way to do that?
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
Carl’s YouTube Channel
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 124
Hello and welcome to episode 124 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week we are exploring the concept of the Spring clean and decluttering our stuff. Decluttering is a subject particularly close to my heart this year and it’s something I do every year.
And speaking of spring cleaning and decluttering That’s exactly what I am doing with my Learning Centre this month. I am cleaning out some my older legacy courses and that means you can pick some of those up for only $10!
These courses are packed with great tips and tricks as well as know-how and in many cases workbooks and worksheets. They’ve been around a while and have helped thousands of people build great productivity systems, develop goals, get out of control email tamed AND developed the foundations of a successful life.
If you want to learn a lot for a small investment, then take a look at what’s on offer. I am sure there’s something for everyone here. You will have to be quick, these courses will be disappearing after the 31 March. Details of what’s on offer are in the show notes.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Annabel. Annabel asks, hi Carl, I did your Your Digital Life 2 course late last year and I have a system now. The problem I have though is all my files, documents and papers are a complete mess and I don’t know where to start to get them all organised. Do you have any tips to clean this area up?
Thank you, Annabel, for the question.
Now, as we are approaching spring, it is a great time to be thinking about cleaning up and organising our stuff. Did you know traditionally, the spring clean was done to clean out the soot left by oil lamps and fires used to light and warm homes in the winter? And going back even further many religions and cultures have used the spring and approaching easter to clean alters and begin the new religious year. So the spring clean has a lot of history and customs.
Now for us in the digital world, a spring clean gives us the opportunity to clean up our stuff. We have probably collected a lot of files, documents, notes and other such stuff over the year—or years—that are just gathering digital dust somewhere on our hard drives or cloud storage systems and spring is a great time to clean these up, archive the old and delete a lot more.
Here’s a thing. Email. I know we collect a lot of emails over the years and we leave them in our archive folders or in special folders we added to manage a project or an email heavy exchange with a colleague. The trouble is we rarely clean these out and delete them so they build up over time. Now with email there will always be a copy of the mail. If you sent an email the person you sent it to will have your email. If you received an email the person who sent you the mail with have the original mail. So, never worry about deleting old emails. Cleaning up your email not only makes you feel better, but it also speeds up your whole system. Start with your email guys. Delete, delete and delete some more.
If you want to save an email because it has some sentimental value to you, then export it as a PDF and save it in a folder called “keepsakes” or “memories” or something like that. That way it’s outside of your email, but you still have a copy of it somewhere.
A quick tip for these keepsake or memory folders. Review them each year when you do your spring clean. I find I delete a lot of the stuff I saved there each year so only real sentimental items stay there. It’s surprising after another year passes how unimportant some of these emails, photos and documents can be.
Next up your computer’s hard drive. Now hopefully you no longer keep files, photos, documents and stuff on your computer’s hard drive. I hope you are using cloud storage for these now. Aside from the risk of losing these documents and folders if your computer crashed or died, you also need to have your computer with you at all times if you were to have access to them. No, don’t do that. Cloud storage is cheap and it’s safe and secure. If your computer, phone or tablet dies, is lost or becomes corrupted, you still have your files safe and secure online.
That said, we still need to hold the apps we use on our computers so clean up these. Are there any apps you are no longer using? Are there any apps you have not used at all in the last twelve months? Delete these. If you do need them again in the future you can always re-download them.
Just a quick tip on your media files. I have a lot of old movies and TV shows that are not available on Netflix or other streaming services. A lot of Cary Grant movies as well as my James Bond Collection, The Professionals (remember Bodie, Doyle and Cowley?), Inspector Morse and Ally McBeal are all on a 2 terabyte external hard drive I keep velcroed to the side of my desk. This hard drive is for my digital media so my Apple Music, Films and Podcasts are all there as well as archives of my photos going back at least ten years. None of these are on my computer’s hard drive. And because some of these TV shows would be almost impossible to retrieve if I lost them, I have them backed up on another external hard drive. A 2 terabyte hard drive is going to cost you less than $100 these days and will last you many years. So get your media backed up and off your computer’s hard drive.
Now for your folders and documents. For me, I find organising these by year is the most effective way. This way I can easily remove older files without having to go through them one by one. At the beginning of each year, I create a new parent folder called, in this years case, “2020”. Inside there I can keep my project folders, client folders for this year and anything else I am working on this year. I began doing this around ten years ago now and each spring I just archive the previous year’s folder. So, this spring, my 2019 folder will be moved off to an external hard drive.
Now what I keep in here are projects that are completed, workshops I did last year and my email archive (which I download as an archive file through my Mac OS Mail app.) Old client files will also be in here and anything this else I am finished with.
What will not be in here are my online course folders as these get updated each year so the folders remain relevant and current, my folders related to my YouTube channel, this podcast and anything else that is still active. They stay in my current folders in iCloud.
Now, I should point out how you organise your files and documents is entirely up to you. You need to develop a way that works for you. For me, organising by year has worked incredibly well. If I need to find something from a few years ago, I can attach the relevant hard drive (they are all labelled by year and do a Spotlight search and I will be able to find it.
I think we sometimes forget that our computers are incredible at finding stuff. You no longer need to develop an elaborate file system. You only need a place to store the files. For me, I do it by year, you may prefer to do it by subject or client. Chose a way that works best for you.
I find the hardest part of decluttering and cleaning up is letting go. We have this false belief that we will need a file or a document sometime in the future, yet almost every time we never do. If you clean up and move stuff off to an external hard drive you have not lost anything. It’s still there. It’s now on an external hard drive and no longer taking up space on your computer or in your cloud storage. Just let it go. Once you’ve bought the external hard drive, it’s not costing you anything to keep it.
The final part of your spring clean is to look at how you are organising your stuff. A great question to ask yourself is: “can I find everything I need when I need it?” If not, take a look at how you are organising your files. I use a simple role-based structure. That means my work is divided by my businesses and my personal work. So, I have three areas. My productivity business, my English language business and personal. The basic structure inside these areas does not change on a year to year basis so all I have to do is remove old stuff I no longer need and move them to my year folders.
I do keep the same basic structure in my year folders too. So the three areas are child folders inside my year folder. That way I find it easier to find stuff when I need to find it.
And that’s really what it’s all about. It’s about being able to find stuff when you need to find it. That’s why how you organise everything needs to work for you and don’t just copy someone else’s structure. I did that in the past. I saw a video years ago where David Allen showed us how he processes his stuff and organises Evernote and files and I spent weeks trying to set up the same system. What a complete waste of time. It did not work for me at all and it soon became unwieldy and unmanageable. David Allen spends a lot more time processing and organising than I have time for. That’s why it did not work for me.
So I urge you to find your own path. A basic structure such as organising by year or by role—your work and your personal life is a good place to start, but how you organise your sub-folders that needs to work for you and the way you think.
My working life began in the 1990s so I became familiar with filing cabinets and the alpha-numeric way of filing. That has followed me through to the way I organise my files now. My tagging in Evernote, my tagging on my computer, for example, are all organised in a simple alpha-numeric way. This might not work for you. I’ve seen people organise folders with the letter “P” or “W” at the beginning to indicate a personal or work file and I’ve seen professors organise their work by the subject code and year which makes absolutely no sense to me, but works seamlessly for them.
So please, I urge you to work out the best way for you. The way you think so finding your files is instinctive and easy.
The final point I should make is you need to keep things as simple as possible. When you file today you need to be filing for your dumb self tomorrow. It might be fantastic to come up with an elaborate organisation system today, but in three or five years time you will probably be unlikely to remember how you were organising things. So keep things as simple as you can. Think about how your dumb self tomorrow with try and find a file. Use that system.
Thank you again, Annabel for your wonderful question. And thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like me to answer, all you have to do is email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.
This week, why do my colleagues who have no productivity system seem to always get their work done on time and I struggle?
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Carl Pullein Learning Centre
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
Carl’s YouTube Channel
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 123
Hello and welcome to episode 123 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week we have an unusual question and a question that intrigued me somewhat because I also noticed it. That is people who have no apparent knowledge of productivity systems, to-do list managers, Evernote or OneNote and seem to be able to get on with their work, meet their deadlines and not appear stressed out. How do they do that?
Now before we get to answer this intriguing question I’d like to tell you about an unusual sale I am having.
I began creating online courses in 2017. I gathered together over twenty years of knowledge, put it all together into a series of courses and began helping people to discover a better way of managing their work, achieving their goals and building a life they wanted to live. I used the knowledge I had gained, the tips and tricks that had worked for me over the years and my own know-how and began my career as an online teacher.
Well, the time has come to retire some of these courses. I have updated some of them in newer, more comprehensive courses and now my Learning Centre has quite a lot of duplication.
So, this month I am having a clear-out sale. You can buy many of these older courses for just $10.00 or you can buy them all as a bundle for just $40.00 - that’s 4 courses including my Complete Guide To Building A Successful Life for just $40.00!!
Don’t worry, these courses will not disappear. If you enrol now or have enrolled in any of them in the past, you will still have access to them via your dashboard. The only change is they will no longer be showing in my course lists. I have also made them all downloadable so you can take them with you wherever you go.
More details of what’s on offer are in the show notes. There’s a lot of content there for an incredibly low price. So if you’ve been holding back, now would be a fantastic time to pick up a course and start building your own productivity system, goal planning method and so much more for very little cost.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Matthew. Matthew asks: Hi Carl, I am a regular listener of your podcast and I watch your YouTube channel. I am also an avid reader of productivity blogs to get the latest tips and hacks on productivity but I have a problem. My colleagues at work do not have any productivity system neither do they read or talk about productivity. They are more productive than me and they get a lot done and are not stressed at all.
Is having a productivity system to follow a waste of time or is there something wrong with me.
What a fantastic question, Matthew and thank you for sending it in.
Now my first reaction when I read this question was, yes! I have noticed that too. But then when I began thinking about it and looked at the way many of my language students manage their work I realised that much of what we see is just the surface. We do not see what is going on internally with these people. When I ask my students how they manage their work a lot of them tell me their email determines what they work on each day. Or their supervisor will give them a list of tasks that need to be done.
What I noticed was that most were managing their work based on what was the most urgent and who was asking them to do the work. They had no plan, no direction and pretty much all of them were not achieving their goals. In fact, almost all of them had no goals. It was a life of work, eat, sleep repeat.
Often when you operate your life from the perspective of what your boss or your most urgent email is telling you to do, you may appear on top of your work, but the problem here is you are just following the priorities of other people. Your life, your goals and your aspirations never get a chance. It’s a life following orders and when you finally approach the end of your career you realise you have lived a life serving other people’s interests and neglected your own interests. And that’s when regret sets in.
Sure, when we are young we feel we are immortal. We feel we have plenty of time to pursue what we want to achieve and it’s so much easier to let other people tell us what we should be doing. After all, if it goes wrong, if we discover we were working on the wrong thing, then we have someone else to blame. Right?
That’s true. It is an easier life to let others make all the decisions for you. But if you stop for just one moment and ask yourself is that really what you want for your life? You may find you have your own ideas, your own aspirations, dreams and things you want to pursue. So the question will be when are you going to start making decisions for yourself? When are you going to take responsibility for your own life?
I’ve been there. I’ve done that. When I first began working full time, I too took orders from my supervisor. But then I was learning the job. I was following the SOP (Standard of Procedure) manual. And although it was slow at first, I was soon able to do my work without a list in front of me. Then when I began working in a law office, the mail came in, it was put in my in-basket and all I had to do was empty my in-basket each day and I was doing my job.
The problem here is that this kind of work in not fulfilling. Sure you are clearing your in-basket each day, but you are doing nothing for you. You are not developing. You are stagnating. And stagnation is a horrible place to be when you reach 45 years old.
In Tony Robbins’ early work, he often talked about something called “CANI” spelt C A N I. “CANI” stands for Constant And Never-Ending Improvement” and the idea is every day you are striving to be a better version of yourself. Now, this is hard work, this involves questioning everything you do and asking yourself if there is a better way to do it? How can I improve myself today?
For your colleagues, who never read or are not interested in self-improvement or productivity they are not asking this question. They are avoiding this question. They are avoiding it because deep down they will be feeling a little unsettled. Questions like “is this it”? Is this what life is all about? Will be coming at them from time to time.
When we are young, it is infrequent—we still have hopes about a better life. We fall into the trap of if I follow this path that everyone tells me to follow I will be happy. The reality is this path leads to disappointment. Nobody is else is going to make you happy. Only you can do that. And the happiest people I know are the people who have a goal, have a plan and have a system in place that is taking them a little closer to achieving their goals each day.
So, perhaps on a day to day basis when there are other people telling what to do and where to be, a productivity system may seem a bit surplus to requirements, but having a productivity system in place is less about your daily work and more about keeping you focused on what you have identified as being important to you.
If all you were concerned about was getting the work that has been assigned to you done each day, then a simple piece of paper and list of those tasks to be done would be all you need. But a fulfilled life is much more than that. Your daily work is a single component of a whole life. You have your family and friends, your hobbies, your health and side projects. All these need your attention and some will be more important to you than others. Having a system in place that allows you time each day to reflect on these things, to prioritise what is important to you right now and have a plan in place for you to follow so you achieve the things you want to achieve is the way towards living a fulfilled life.
Having a productivity system is not really about getting things done. It does help you there because you can see what needs doing and you can decide when to do it. Having a productivity system is much more about making sure you are working on your priorities and not being dragged off to work on other people’s priorities at the expense of your own. That’s the key. Having a system in place means you can collect your ideas, develop those ideas and build a life for yourself that leads to real happiness and fulfilment. It helps to prevent you from living a life you will one day regret.
A final bit of advice here is if your colleagues do not have a system and are getting more work done than you there is a possibility your system is too complex. One of the things I preach is to simplify your system and maximise the time you spend doing the work. If you are collecting and giving yourself around ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day to process, review and plan the next day, you should be finding no difficulty in getting your work done with little to no stress. If you are struggling to get your work done and are feeling stressed then the chances are your system is too complex. Look at ways to simplify. Reduce your processing and organising time and find ways to maximise your doing time.
The goal is to start the day knowing exactly what it is you want to get done and to get started straight away.
I hope that has helped, Michael and thank you very much for your question. Thank you also to you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, on the Working With… Podcast, we are digging deep into the world of procrastination.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Gary Vaynerchuk - A 5 Minute Plea to Do
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
Carl’s YouTube Channel
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Carl Pullein Learning Centre
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 122
Hello and welcome to episode 122 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Right. So it happens to us all. We find it almost impossible to motivate ourselves to begin a project or to sit down and prepare that presentation, write that email or call that difficult client. Instead, we will suddenly realise that the most important task right now is to clean our desk of the five files we left there this morning and our socks drawer has to be re-organised now!
Yes, this week we return to the wonderful subject of procrastination and more specifically how to turn procrastination to your advantage.
Now, before we begin, are you ready to move beyond the to-do list? I ask because I see a lot of people getting stuck and not getting what they want done because they are spending far too much time inside their to-do list and not enough time doing the work. For me, that’s a weakness in the whole Getting Things Done methodology—too much time processing, organising and reviewing—and it’s a weakness in a lot of people’s system and if you think about it, it is just another form of procrastination.
In my latest course, Productivity Masterclass | Build Your Own Workflow, I take everything I’ve learned about doing the work so I have more time to do the things I want to do and built it into a course that will show you how to get focused on your important tasks, how to make sure you goals are being acted on every day and how to finally get away from living inside your to-do list so you can focus on the things you want to focus on. Basically, how you can stop procrastinating.
I’d love for you to join me in this course, so please take a look. The link to the course details is in the show notes.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Janet. Janet asks: Hi Carl, I recently took your COD course and loved it. The problem I have though is I never seem to be able to get started on my work. I follow the Golden ten, yet when I wake up in the morning I will do everything except the things I had planned to do. Do you have any tips that could help me?
Hi Janet, thank you for sending in your question.
Now, we all procrastinate, it’s part of being human and it is perfectly normal. What we rarely hear about is there are two types of procrastination. The famous negative type—the one where you don’t do what you had planned to do and the positive type—the one where your brain engages your subconscious mind and develops great ideas and solves problems you thought were impossible to solve.
Now when people talk about procrastination they are inevitably talking about the negative kind. The one that finds you watching puppy videos on YouTube instead of writing that urgent email to your most important customer.
Why do we do that? Well, it’s more often than not linked to a fear of failure. That’s the number one reason we procrastinate. We fear we will screw up, we fear we will be embarrassed by what we do. This is why when we are not clear about something, rather than ask the question about what something means, we procrastinate and not do anything about it. That appears a safer option than risking looking stupid by asking what might be an obvious question.
Procrastination is built into our human psyche as a safety mechanism and if you procrastinate a lot it does not mean you have a problem. It just means you are normal, but are more aware you are procrastinating than most people. That’s a good thing. Seriously!
It’s far better to acknowledge you procrastinate—because we all do—instead of telling yourself you are naturally lazy and that is just the way you are. That thought might not be completely true. Yes, humans are naturally lazy. We naturally take the path of least resistance. To not be lazy takes a lot of willpower and discipline but that is something completely different from procrastinating.
So how do we prevent ourselves from procrastinating?
Well, first up is awareness. You need to be aware of when you are procrastinating. Catch yourself doing it. Knowing what you do when you procrastinate (in the negative sense) is the first step to overcoming it. Do you flip through your Instagram or Facebook feed? Do you watch unrelated videos on YouTube? Do you suddenly begin cleaning your desk or removing old files from your computer’s hard drive? What do you usually do when you find yourself procrastinating.
When you recognise the signs you are procrastinating it is much easier to stop yourself. It also allows you to ask yourself why? Why are you procrastinating? What are you afraid of? I love that question because it shocks me into thinking about what the fear is.
That’s because it’s almost always related to fear.
It took me six months to record my first YouTube video! Seriously, six months! Why? Because I was ‘afraid’ to be on camera. I’ve always preferred being behind the camera rather than in front of it. This fear manifested itself by convincing me to “think about topics” to “plan out the way I would record the videos” and to research the best equipment to make a YouTube video. My favourite phrase at that time was “I just need to…”
Once I realised all this was BS—and I thank Gary Vaynerchuk for this because I remember seeing a video he did on the phrase “I’m gonna” that woke me up to the excuses I was making (I’ll put a link in the show notes to that video) I finally did my first video. That first video was the start of an incredible journey and a journey that has completely changed my life in so many positive ways.
Recognising you are procrastinating and understanding what the fear behind it is will do so much to help you overcome it.
Nine times out of ten the fear will be a fear of failure. You are afraid you will screw up. The thing is, you are going to screw up, you are going to fail. It’s how we learn as humans.
I’ve been watching my nephew learn to walk. He pulls himself up on the sofa, looks around and tries to take an unaided step and as soon as he lets go of the sofa he falls down. Again and again, he falls. But we don’t turn round and say, “oh well never mind. I guess he’s not going to be a walker”. We encourage him to keep trying until he can walk unaided. All those mistakes are part of the learning process. It’s in the not giving up and trying one more time that eventually leads to kids being able to walk unaided and that leads to the next step and the next.
In a work environment, picking up the phone and calling the angry customer to sort out their problem will always be easier than worrying about what the customer might say or do. The worrying is always a lot worse than the actual call. Sure, the customer might shout and scream at you down the phone, but by making the call you have taken the one step you were afraid of and can now move on to the next step of turning that customer from an angry unhappy customer into your biggest fan.
So, what can you do to overcome procrastination once you have identified you are procrastinating?
What has worked for me and many of my clients is to schedule the work on my calendar. Let’s say you have an angry customer and you know you have been putting off making the call, what you need to do is to set a time for when you will call the customer. Let’s say you schedule the call for 11:30am. Put that on your calendar. Write something like “call Miss Angry about her problem”. To really make that time stick, send the customer a message either by text or email telling them you will call at 11:30am. Now you cannot escape—well you could, but you would be making a bad situation onto a worse situation.
If you have been putting off writing a report, Schedule thirty minutes to write. I like to use the words “begin writing report on regional sales in the first quarter” rather than “write report”. Using the words “begin writing” lowers the expectation enough for my brain not to overthink the work. “Begin writing” means if I only write 500 words, I can still claim I have completed the task. After that, I use words like “continue writing…” If you write 500 hundred words every day for five days you have a 2,500-word report.
Another trick you can use is the momentum trick. This involves building momentum so you eventually reach a spot where momentum carries you through to completion. For example, if you wanted to find another job there are a number of things that need to happen for you to apply for a new job. Things like, update your resume, research job openings, draft out a cover letter etc.
In your to-do list or notes app, you can create a list of tasks you need to perform and once that list is complete you start at the top and tell yourself you will complete one task per day until all tasks have been completed. So, day one you might update your resume, day two you write out your cover letter. Day three, you find ten jobs you want to apply to. Day four you apply for those ten jobs etc. Over a period of five days, you will have moved a significant way towards a new job.
The rule is you one thing every day. No excuses.
Finally, the one thing that works for me every time is to plan the work I will do the next day the day before. Every day, before I close out the day I sit down with my to-do list and calendar open and I plan out what I will work on the next day. For those of you familiar with my work you know about the 2+8 Prioritisation method. This is where I select two tasks as my objectives for the day and up to eight other tasks that I would really like to complete. This means I close the day knowing what I want to accomplish the next day and I begin the day with a clear plan on the work I will do that day.
I don’t always complete the eight tasks, but I rarely fail to hit my two objectives. It’s when I don’t have a plan for the day I find I procrastinate. Having a plan allows me to start the day with a purpose and a focus and that keeps procrastination away.
One more thing I should mention before I end is if you are not getting enough sleep, you will find you procrastinate a lot more. Now, this is not usually associated with fear, but more a lack of willpower. A lack of sleep dramatically reduces your willpower and discipline because your brain is tired it just wants to stop. If you do find you are procrastinating over something and you did not get enough sleep the night before, it’s much more likely caused by tiredness rather than fear.
I hope that has helped you a little Janet. Remember, if you do catch yourself procrastinating ask yourself what it is you fear. Then, break down the task into steps you can take and just do the first step. Fear is not a physical thing, it’s a mental thing and understanding the fear, what’s causing it and rationalising it so you can take the first step is going to build the momentum you need to move forward on the task.
Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 121
This week we have a question all about apps and choosing the best combination of apps for you.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
Carl’s YouTube Channel
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Carl Pullein Learning Centre
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 121
Hello and welcome to episode 121 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week it’s all about which apps to choose for your productivity system and how to choose them. With apps like Wunderlist and Newton Mail closing down, this week has been a timely reminder that the apps we choose for our system are important. Choose the wrong apps and you spend a lot of time having to transfer your information from one app to another when it closes down or becomes too expensive to manage. Choose the right app and your system and the app can now together.
But before we get into this week’s question don’t forget if you are ready to move beyond the to-do list my Productivity Masterclass Workflow course will do that for you. This is a brand new course designed to teach you how to create workflows in your day so you create enough time to focus on the things you want to focus on.
Full details of the course are in this week’s show notes.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Myke. Myke asks: Hi Carl, I am a very heavy Apple user, and I love their products. I think they could be the key to my productivity if utilised properly. I have an iMac at home, and iMac at work, a MacBook pro for when on the go, an iPad, and an iPhone - as well as multiple Homepods throughout my home. What productivity "stack" would you recommend for someone like myself?
Thank you Myke for your question.
I’ve always felt the benefit of sticking with built-in apps is you are much less likely to have an app you rely on shut down on you. Just in the last couple of weeks, I’ve received notifications about two popular apps closing down. Wunderlist and Newton Mail (again) and this is certainly something that concerns me.
Part of building a productivity system is consistency. The amount of time it takes to not only get your stuff into a system, and that time can be a lot, a more important element is the trust you have for that system. If you don't trust your system then it is not working. This means if you are planning on using third-party apps you need to make sure the apps you are using the companies behind them are structurally and financially sound.
A couple of years ago I used Newton Mail as my email app of choice. It was wonderfully simple and minimalist and it had everything I needed in an email app. Then I got a notification to say they were closing down.
Several months later, I was told they were starting up again and this time it would be different because they had a big financial backer. And then last week we were told they were closing down again.
Fortunately, this time I was not going to make the same mistake so did not return to Newton. I set up Apple Mail on all my devices and while there are a few features that are lacking such as scheduled sending which I did use in Newton, it was no big deal and scheduled sending is rather less important than having an app that will not go away. Apple Mail has been a Mail app I have used for nearly twenty years and it is solid and dependable.
I also know a lot of people who invested time and effort into Wunderlist and we now know that will be closing down in May. That has been on the horizon for a while now, but the end date is finally approaching and if you are a Wunderlist user you only have three months to migrate to another app.
This makes things difficult for other app developers. Trust is a big issue for anyone wanting to build a strong productivity system and if there is any uncertainty then people are not going to invest their time and money in an app that may or may not be around in five years time.
Evernote is an app that I have used for over ten years. It has always been solid, dependable and has been a huge part of my digital life. Unfortunately, these days their lack of development and the competitive state of the notes app market with apps like Notion, Bear Notes and Apple Notes have created a huge mountain for it to climb if it wants to get back to being one of the top note-taking apps. The good news is Evernote is apparently cash positive and it does have a loyal following. My worry is if the updated Evernote does not meet customer expectations (which are incredibly high after more than a year of back end development) what happens next?
I have found Evernote difficult to use on my iPhone since iOS13 came out so I have been using Apple Notes more and more and have now found workarounds for many of the things I used to do in Evernote that Apple Notes cannot do. Until recently, Evernote was one of the first apps I opened in a morning on my computer, now I open is only a couple of time per week. Personally I hope and pray Evernote’s impending update will not disappoint, but if it does I already have a replacement at the ready.
So what can we do? Well if you want to be completely protected the best advice I can give is go with the built-in apps. That means if you are in the Apple ecosystem where possible use the Apple apps.
Apple Notes is a serious contender in the notes app market now. It’s free and has an impressive set of features. The Apple Reminders update last September gave this built-in to-do list some much-needed love and now has quite an impressive feature set
And Apple Calendar has been a solid calendar app for over twenty years. There are a few features it could do with, like the ability to allow people to book times on a public calendar, but it is a very dependable calendar app.
Microsoft has a solid set of productivity apps too. Outlook is the industry standard for most companies when it comes to email and calendar and OneNote is one of the best note-taking apps out there.
For your To-dos, Microsoft To-Do is likely to become a solid to-do list manager in the near future, particularly if it does incorporate many of the features Wunderlist had.
And of course, Google has it’s own Tasks and Keep and has probably the best calendar app out there
The problem with using these built-in mainstream apps is you do not get a lot of features and if something does not work properly it can be a long time before they are updated. But they are unlikely to disappear, they are simple to set up and simple to use. And in my experience, it does not take a lot of time to learn how to use them.
That said, the biggest thing to remember is the app you use is rather less important than the system you set up. As long as the apps you are using are dependable and you allow enough time to learn how to use them then almost any app out there is going to do the job for you. App switching is time-wasting and can be a huge cause of procrastination. I’ve always said pick one app and stick with it for a year. That gives you enough time to learn how to use it properly and develop workarounds for the things you want to be able to do with it.
My recent organisational change in my to-do list manager could easily be created in any type of app. So far I have shown how to set it up in Apple Reminders and Todoist and in the coming weeks, I plan to show how this could be set up in Trello and TeuxDeux. These apps are very different and yet a simple organisational system can be set up in any of them. That’s why your ‘system’ is more important than the apps you are using. Another reason why your system is more important than the apps you use is if the worst-case scenario does happen and the app you are using shuts down or becomes prohibitively expensive, you can quickly and easily transfer your data across to new apps.
So there is a lot to be said for using built-in apps. They are reliable, consistent and have just enough features to be able to do what you need them to do.
Let’s take the Google suite of productivity apps as an example. Given that all you need is a calendar, a to-do list manager, a notes app and a cloud storage drive. With Google, you have them all. Because of the way Google has added plugins and extensions to their Chrome browser, you can build an amazing productivity dashboard using Chrome. Gmail can operate your email, and if an email comes in you can quickly add it as a task to Google tasks or highlight a section in the email and add it as a note to Google Keep.
Another great feature of Google Keep is you can create mini (or full) checklists and all sorts of other types of notes and have them easily accessible as a side panel in your browser.
Microsoft office also now allows you to add add-ons to Outlook so you have quick access to your calendar, to-dos and notes from your Outlook window. And of course, all your files can be stored in OneDrive.
If I were to completely start again with building my own productivity system, given all my devices are Apple, I would set everything up using only the Apple apps. Apple’s sharing functionality across all their devices makes adding tasks, notes and events incredibly easy and iCloud storage is cheap - $10 for 2 terabytes of storage.
So, if you want to build your very own productivity system, today I would advise you to start with using the built-in apps your devices come with. If you are in the Apple eco-system like you, Myke, I would use Reminders, Apple Notes, Apple Calendar and iCloud. If I were predominantly a Windows user I would use Microsofts apps and if I were hybrid ie, my computers were Windows and my phone was either an iPhone or Android phone I would go with the Google set.
Only after at least six months would I consider third party apps and would only change if I was having some serious difficulties managing my work with the apps I was using.
I hope that answers your question, Myke. Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, in a special episode, I explain why it is important to question your assumptions about how you go about doing your work and achieving your goals.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
Carl’s YouTube Channel
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Carl Pullein Learning Centre
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 120
Hello and welcome to episode 120 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Last week, on my YouTube channel, I posted my latest Todoist setup and it sparked quite a lot of questions. In recent months my whole to-do list organisation structure has gone through some radicle changes and that was because when I began my annual systems review last October, I decided not only would I look at how I was organising and managing my work, I would also question my assumptions about how I think a to-do list manager should be organised.
Before I get into explaining my thinking and why I changed my system so radically, I just want remind you that my Productivity Mastermind course on building your own workflows is out now and the early bird discount period will be ending tomorrow (Tuesday).
This course takes you beyond the to-do list manager and into building a custom daily workflow for yourself then ensures you get your most important work done each day and gives you a framework to focus on making daily 1% improvements to the way you do your work and live your life so you are always making progress on your goals and developing the right habits to build the life you want for yourself.
It’s a great course and will transform the way you work today to a more effective way of building on habits and making improvements where you identify you want to make improvements.
Full joining details are in the show notes.
Now, like most people who have read and implemented David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach, system, method or best practices (whichever way you want to call it) I bought into the belief there were just two ways to organise my to-dos. By context—people, place or thing—and by project. And for the last eleven years, that's how I have organised my to-dos.
At various times I had up to fifty project folders and well over twenty to thirty different contexts. After all, this was the way to organise things right? I needed a place where I could review all my projects, open loops and tasks.
Now, I guess like most people who have thrown their hats into the GTD ring, you quickly discover that you are spending a lot of time reviewing stuff. There's a quick daily review and there's the massive weekly review--The one or two hours each week where you review everything—On top of that you need to regularly process your inbox (at least every 48 hours) It often felt like I was doing more reviewing than actual doing, which never seemed right to me for a method or system that claimed to help you to “get things done”.
One of the funniest things I have come across are GTD purists telling people if they are not doing a full weekly review each week they are not practising GTD. This completely misses the point. It’s called “Getting Things Done, not “Getting Reviews Done”. The whole point is doing the work, not reviewing the work. That’s just the old proverbial shuffling papers to look busy trick. It doesn't get the work done. It just reorganises work.
Now, of course, knowing what work you have on and where everything is is important, but you should not be spending so much time reviewing stuff either. If you apply a little common sense you would know where a project status is and what needs doing next—or if you are properly engaged with your work you should do.
As I was questioning my assumptions, I began wondering why I needed to organise my lists by projects and contexts. For me contexts have never worked well and since I have been able to do almost all my work on my iPhone as well as a laptop and so in recent years I have pretty much completely stopped using them.
I should point out that I am self-employed and don't work with a team of people, so I’ve never needed a context related to people and as I can do my work from almost anywhere I don't need any place contexts either.
As I analysed how I use a to-do list, I noticed I was creating lists of tasks each day based on my 2+8 Prioritisation method—two objectives and 8 would like to do tasks each day. My routines took care of themselves because they just filtered into my daily list when they were due. So on a day to day basis, it was my Today view that I was looking at. I could not remember the last time I went into a project view. All I wanted to know was what to work on that day and as I did my 2+8 each evening I knew when I began the day what I was going to do anyway.
This led me to ask if I don't use a project view, how would I like to organise my tasks? Every time I looked at this, I kept coming back to the same thing. “When?” When do I need to see a task? And when do I need to do a task?
Every time I kept coming back to this I kept seeing the same problem. When you organise by project you feel obliged to review not do. There was something about reviewing that made it feel I was doing something important, but I was actually doing nothing important at all. I was just shuffling papers so to speak.
There’s a bit of a give away in the title of a to-do list. It’s a “to-do” list, not a to-review list. If I need to review something I can create a task that says “review ABC report progress”.
What happens when I do want to review a project? Well, there always something around related to that project. For me, it’s likely to be a folder in my files. I have a folder for example for all my online courses. Folder contains all my project work.
For example, my recent Productivity Mastermind course began as an idea in my notes app. Over a period of a few weeks, I added more ideas to that note. Eventually, I decided this could make a great course so I began developing an outline in Numbers. It was at this point the course first appeared in my To-do list manager. The task was “continue working on my Productivity Mastermind course outline”.
For the next three or four weeks that task continued to come up. I would allocate it a date, say Wednesday. I would work on the task, and once that period of work was complete, I would change the date on the task and schedule it for another day in the future. The Numbers file stayed in my Numbers iCloud folder. So, even at this stage, there was no dedicated folder for the course. There was a task in my to-do list, a note in my notes app and there was a file in my Numbers folder.
Looking back at this, there was absolutely no reason for me to have a project folder in my to-do list. I only needed one task and I had that. I was not going to forget that task because it was dated, it was current and I was doing a lot of work on the outline. For me to forget about the project, even with all my other work going on at the time, I would need to be suffering from severe amnesia!
Back then, I had an area of focus project called “online courses” in my to-do list and that was where this task was living, but I also realised if I had a folder called “This Week” or “Current” that task would work in there too. And that is when I began considering “timeboxes” or “time folders” for organising my work.
Essentially, what I wanted was to spend less time reviewing and organising and more time doing. Reviewing and organising did not get my work done. All it did was remind me of my commitments and often that just caused anxiety and stress. What I wanted was a system that told me what I wanted to, or needed to, do and when and for the rest of the time get out of my way so I could get on and do the work. When I was doing the work, I was giving myself more time to do the things I wanted to do instead of spending hours in my to-do list manager trying to decide what to do next which meant I was putting myself under unnecessary time pressure.
So from that initial question: how can I speed up my reviewing and processing? I started asking questions like: Do I really need project folders? Do I need areas of focus? And if I did away with these, how would I organise my to-dos? Leaving them in my inbox would just create an overwhelming list of tasks.
Again, I came back to time. I wanted to see my to-dos based on when they needed doing, not what project they were related to. I have project folders, I have a parent folder in my cloud storage called “current” so I have a place where my current projects live. If I want to see the current situation with a project, that’s where I would go. That’s where I have always gone. That tells me the real situation. My to-do list might not be up-to-date. My project folders are always up to date because they are live, they are real.
So after completing this review I had a set of radicle ideas about how I wanted my to-do list to work, the next question was could I really organise things without project folders? Like most people I was wedded to the idea to-do list managers had to be organised by project folders. I could not imagine not having project folders. It was inconceivable, right? I mean how else can a to-do list manager be organised?
It was very hard to get over this thinking. This belief that projects folders were necessary. But the more I looked at it the more I saw this was simply not true. In fact, the more I looked at it the more I realised project folders were slowing me down. They were creating unnecessary anxiety and they were places tasks could disappear and never be seen again until it was too late—or I added some arbitrary date so I did not forget about it making my today list meaningless.
So, I decided to take the plunge. I removed all my project folders in my to-do list manager and replace them with folders related to time. I created six folders. This week, next week, this month, next month and long-term. I also retained my routines as these just had to be done on a specific day so nothing needed to change there.
Now, I have covered this set up on my YouTube channel in both my Apple Reminders video and Todoist. If you want to see these folders in action, head over there. The links are in the show notes.
What happened was something remarkable. By no longer having contexts and projects to think about I didn’t need to waste time thinking about where tasks went or what I needed to complete the task. Instead, all I had to think about was when was I going to do the task; this week, next week, later this month or next month or beyond? This was so liberating! Processing time halved. It was so easy to just have to think about when I wanted to do a task. If I got it wrong it was not a problem because I would see it when I did my next weekly planning session.
And those weekly planning sessions instead of taking 40 to 60 minutes to complete now only took 20 minutes! When I first did it I thought I must have missed something because I have become accustomed to taking about an hour each Sunday afternoon. But no, when I double-checked, I hadn’t missed anything and I had wonderfully planned weeks that occasionally I don’t manage to complete the tasks for the week, but these can easily be rolled over to the following week.
So there you go. That’s why I have changed the way I organise my to-dos. I have finally got away from the false belief that everything must be organised by project or context. That anything involving more than one step must be a project and I need to organise my tasks with next actions and complete a full weekly review every week.
Now I have a system that works for me. And I must stress that. This system works for me. It may not work for you. What I would say is don’t get trapped by the thinking of other people. Don’t always believe that what you read in a book or see in a video or article must be the correct way to do things. It is not. There are always other ways and some of those might be better for you. Robin Sharma advocates waking up at 5AM every morning. I tried that for a year, but as I have coaching calls often at 11PM not finishing until after midnight waking up at 5AM does not work for me. Waking up at 7:00AM does.
Likewise, GTD contexts do not work for me, they never have, yet I spent years thinking I was doing something wrong because I could not get them to work for me. The reality was I was not doing anything wrong, it was the way I had set up my workflows that meant I did not need contexts.
So find your own way, find a way that works for the way you think, the way you work and the way you want to see your tasks presented. Being more productive is not about the system, it is about being able to get your work done in the most efficient and effective way you can so you can spend more of your time doing the things you want to do with the people you want to doing them with.
Thank you for listening to this episode. I hope you got a lot of value from it. Feel free to ask me anything you like either by email carl@carlpullein.com or by DMing on Facebook or Twitter. And if you want to see this set up in action, head over to my YouTube channel.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
How do you organise all your projects and to-dos? Do you organise by project, context or some other way? Well that’s the question I’ll be answering this week.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Productivity Masterclass | Create Your Own Custom Workflow
Carl’s YouTube Channel
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Carl Pullein Learning Centre
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 119
Hello and welcome to episode 119 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I have a well-timed question about how to organise your to-do list manager and your work. Well-timed because I recently I changed the way I organise my to-dos and projects to better reflect the way I work today and I have been getting a lot of questions about this new set up. So, it seems appropriate to answer this question this week.
Now, before we get to this weeks question. My first Productivity Masterclass course has now launched and I am excited to tell you this course will transform your days. The course teaches you how to build your very own daily workflow. We don’t achieve our goals and objectives by luck or chance, we achieve them by taking small deliberate steps every day. We achieve through our routines and habits and all you need is a workflow you create for yourself that you can follow that takes you a step closer every day.
This is what the Productivity Masterclass is all about. It teaches you how to build your own workflow that reflects the type of work you do and the way you manage your personal life. It gives you the tools you need to build your own workflow that will take you in the direction you want to go. Whether that’s to earn a promotion at work, to build your own business, prepare yourself for retirement or prepare yourself for the challenges of a career change. Wherever you are in life, this course is designed to help you create the future you want to live in.
Now there is an early bird discount period you can take advantage of by signing up today. So don’t miss out on this chance to start building your future through your daily actions and save yourself a little money today.
All the details of this course are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Anna. Anna asks, Hi Carl, I’m really struggling to find the best way to organise my projects and to-dos. I’ve read Getting Things Done and I think I understand it, but I am confused about how to organise my projects. Can you help?
Hi Anna, firstly, thank you for your question. I find this is a very common question for a lot of people who have read Getting Things Done (GTD) because David Allen intentionally left how to structure your stuff vague. I say “intentionally” because David understands we are all different and we all have different ways of thinking and organising our stuff.
That said, I feel there is a problem with the way people follow the GTD book and that is what I call the “because David Allen says…” problem. This is where a person takes everything written in the GTD book literally and tries to build the ‘perfect’ GTD system. You see the thing is, the ‘perfect’ GTD system does not exist. It can’t exist because machines are not operating GTD. Humans are and we have emotions, variable energy levels and are prone to be distracted from the work that we want to or should be getting done.
If you have read the most recent version of GTD, the 2015 version, you would still need to go out and buy yourself a load of file folders, a labelling machine and a set of drawers to keep your project files in to follow the book. In reality, I’ve not needed any of those things for around eight or nine years. I went completely paperless three years ago and even had a small ceremony to celebrate when I threw my printer away.
This is one of the reasons I developed COD three or four years ago. COD stands for Collect Organise and Do and takes the core, fundamentals of GTD—the capturing and the organising and simplifies it so you can create your own way of managing your commitments and work.
If you step back and think about what a good productivity system needs to do for you it needs to give you a simple and fast way to collect your stuff—your ideas, your to-dos and your commitments. It needs an ‘easy to find stuff’ organisation system and it needs to get out of the way so you can spend the majority of your time getting your work done. The more time you spend in your system organising, tweaking and searching for stuff, the less time you have to do the work that needs doing.
So COD is all about maximising the time you have available to do your work and minimising the time needed to organise your stuff. Essentially, COD is all about maximising your ‘doing’ time.
So what is the best way to organise your work?
Like most people who have read a lot of time management books over the years, I got caught up in believing the only way to organise my work was by project. This meant the best way to organise things was to create the same project folders in my notes app, my to-do list manager and my files on my computer. Then, when a new idea, commitment or task came in all I had to do was decide what something was and what project it belonged to.
Sounds simple yes? The problem is a lot of the stuff we collect each day does not neatly fit into specific projects. So we have to create new projects or have a single actions folder for all those unspecified (or I can’t decide where it goes) tasks, ideas and commitments. Pretty soon you find you have a huge list of projects (and sub-projects) that now need a lot of reviewing just to stay on top of. When you are reviewing you are not doing and so now you may have captured everything, but you have a lot less time to do your work because all that captured stuff needs managing.
So what is the best way to organise everything?
When I did my annual systems review last year, I realised organising all my stuff by project was not working effectively. I also realised that GTD contexts no longer worked for me. I rarely ever looked at a context list and I was not working from any particular project view. I worked from my daily list of tasks and my calendar. My calendar told me where I needed to be and when and my to-do list told me what tasks I wanted to get done that day. When looked at that way, I saw a much simpler way of organising my work. By time.
What I mean by organising by time is all the work you have needs to be done by a particular time. Some tasks are more time-sensitive than others. For example, if a client asks you to send them a document by the end of the day, then that task is more time-sensitive than cleaning your living room. Both are tasks that need doing, but one needs doing urgently—ie today, while the other may be nice to do today, but it could just as easily be done tomorrow or at the weekend or even next week.
If you organise your work by time—when a task needs to be done—then after collecting the task the only decision you need to make is when are you going to do that task? There may be other decisions like how much time will you need to complete this task? But essentially even with that knowledge what you really need to decide is when are you going to have time to do the task?
This led me to realise project folders were not always helpful. In fact, project folders often created several problems. The first one was that it was easy to throw a task into a project folder and forget about it therefore run the risk you would miss the deadline or only discover the task again when the deadline was imminent. To overcome this risk, you had to add a date. Okay, that’s fine. But what about a task that was not particularly time-sensitive or urgent. In that case, you added an arbitrary date for sometime in the future only to find on the date you gave it you had a lot of other tasks and so it had to be rescheduled.
This can happen to a lot of these tasks so your daily to-do list is no longer a to-do list for that day, it becomes a hope to do list. Hope to do lists are useless. There’s no motivation to do the tasks and you spend too much time rescheduling and feeling overwhelmed by the number of tasks.
With all these rescheduled tasks being given new dates it creates a vicious circle. There is no end to non-essential tasks coming at you every day and your daily to-do list keeps growing and becoming more overwhelming and stressful by the day.
So what is the solution?
Organise your tasks by time.
What I mean by this is you really only need six folders in your to-do list manager. These are:
This week
Next week
This month
Next month
Long-term
Routines
When you organise by time in this way the only decisions you need to make are when will you do your tasks? For example, if I am given a task that needs to be completed by Friday all I have to do add a date for when I will do the task (probably Thursday) and drop it in my “this week” folder. If I have a task that does not need doing until next week or later this month, then I can drop it into my “next week” or “this month” folder. I don’t need to add a date at this stage because I can decide when I will do it when I do my weekly planning session at the end of the week.
Processing your inbox becomes easy. You no longer have to think about what project a task belongs to and when you will do it, you only have to decide when you will do a task. You do not have to create more and more projects (in GTD a project is anything that requires more than one task to complete which can result in a huge list of projects).
Now, as long as you do at least a weekly planning session each week, which with this method does not require a lot of time—you really only need to pull forward your next week’s tasks to this week’s tasks and review your this month folder—you will be ensuring you don’t miss anything important and you will be hitting your deadlines.
Now for this way of organising your tasks to work you do need to have a paradigm shift in your thinking. For anyone who has read books and articles on organising your to-dos you will have a belief that you should organise your work by project. For this time-based way to organise your work, you will need to start thinking about when you will do your tasks rather than what a task is connected to. It can be hard to shift your thinking, but when you do, you will have a system that is easy to manage, simple to keep on top of and will allow you more time to get on and do the work instead of organising your work.
Recently, on my YouTube channel, I have posted a couple of videos showing how to implement this system using Todoist and Apple Reminders. In future videos, I will show how to implement it using other to-do list apps so if you want to see this way of organising your to-dos in action, then head over to my YouTube channel. The link for which is in the show notes.
Thank you, Anna for your question. The real answer to your question is to choose a way to organise your tasks that works for you. What might work for David Allen, me or anyone else, may not necessarily work for you. What’s important is the way you organise must work for the way you work.
I hope this answer has helped you.
Thank you also to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering, all you have to do is email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’ it’s all about saying “no” to new opportunities and interrupting colleagues.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Carl Pullein Learning Centre
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Time And Life Mastery Course
Script
Episode 118
Hello and welcome to episode 118 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
One of the hardest things for me is to say “no” to new opportunities. There’s a little voice inside me that says this could be the one that will take me to the next level or if I say no to this, this person will be very disappointed and upset. Then I end up resenting that person for putting me in this situation in the first place.
While we may have developed a fantastic productivity system, being unable to say “no” can put a drag on anyone’s ability to get the important things done.
Now, before we get to this week’s question and answer, I'd like to let you know I have been hard at work developing a brand new course. This course, How to Build your own Daily Workflow is a result of all the things I have learned from my coaching practice about where people struggle with getting their work done and how to build a structure into your life so you stay on top of everything going on in your life.
The course will show you how to develop your own daily workflow so you stay focused on what you have decided is important while at the same time managing your regular routine work.
So if you are looking for a way to stay on top of everything coming your way as well as have the time to develop your goals and side projects have a look at the course. This is one course that will help to reduce your stress and overwhelm by giving you a solid structure to your day. You will be able to find the details for the course in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Joshua. Joshua asks, hi Carl, I am having real problems turning down my colleagues’ requests. They are always interrupting me and asking me to help them but I have my own work to do. I don't want to upset them or cause any problems in the office. Do you have any strategies for dealing with these kinds of interruptions?
Great question, Joshua. Thank you for sending it in. I know you are not alone with this difficulty. As human beings, we are hard-wired not to disappoint. So we find it difficult
To say no to requests. This is why I have always envied people who have those gatekeepers—assistants employed to say “no” for you—I’ve seen those tv shows where the hero shouts “cancel my appointments this afternoon!” Or “Clear my diary for the rest of the week!—oh how easy that sounds. Not having to deal with people’s disappointment. Not having to tell someone you cannot make your commitment etc.
But for most of us, we don't have the luxury of having an assistant to say “no” for us. For the rest of us, we have to say “no” ourselves. So how can we do that without feeling guilty?
One thing you can do is set up some boundaries. What is important to you? If, for example having dinner with your family every evening is important to you, then create a boundary around that time. Make it non-negotiable. If, say, you tell people that between 6:30pm and 8pm you always have dinner with your family and you make that non-negotiable, pretty soon the people you come into contact with regularly will learn your habits and will not interrupt you.
Part of making saying no easier is being consistent. An example for me is Friday afternoons. Friday afternoons is when I record my YouTube videos and so between 1pm and 4pm on a Friday is non-negotiable. I occasionally have a language student ask to rearrange their class for a Friday afternoon. Almost as soon as the “f” of Friday comes out of their mouth I have already apologised and said no. Friday afternoons are non-negotiable and any opportunity I get, I tell people that.
One of the reasons we feel saying no is so difficult is because we think by saying no to someone they will be stuck without our help. The truth is likely to be a lot less dramatic. If we cannot help, there is always going to be someone else who can help them. And that someone else may have a lot more time than we do, so you are doing the person asking a huge favour. If you say yes to something and are not totally committed to the task at hand, would you say that is being fair?
One of the easiest ways I’ve found to say “no” is to tell someone I don’t have time. I only use this when that is true, of course. This week, for example, I am putting the finishing touches to my new course, I am preparing a video for a webinar I’m invited to speak at and I am in the process of making some minor changes to the way I record my YouTube videos. When I look at my calendar for the week, I can see very quickly I do not have a great deal of spare time. So, if someone asks me if I can teach an extra class, do an extra call or write an article for them, I know this week is not going to be possible. Instead, I will offer an alternative—say in two or three weeks time. If the person asking agrees, then I can schedule that.
And that is where you can really help yourself. Often, because we find it so difficult to say no, we say yes just to get out of a difficult situation. Then when we stop, look at our calendars, we discover there is no time to fit that extra task in. This is one of the reasons I tell people their calendar is their most powerful weapon. It does not lie. It shows you very clearly where you are committed and how much spare time you have available. Use it. It will help to stop you from over-committing yourself.
Okay, so those are some of the foundations you can use to make sure you are not over-committed. How can you deal with those interruptions that come your way in your workplace?
Okay, the first one is a simple one. Use headphones. Whenever you do not want to be disturbed, put on a pair of headphones. Even if you are not listening to anything. When people see you with a pair of headphones on they are less likely to interrupt you. This is because to get your attention, they are going to have to move out from their own workspace and come over to you and tap you on the shoulder instead of calling out across the room. When you have a pair of headphones on you are conveying a subtle message not to disturb you. I’ve found this one works all the time. It takes a very brave soul to interrupt someone wearing headphones.
Now, if you really need to carve out some deep work time, you are going to have to be more intentional. Whenever I need uninterrupted time to work on something, I will always go find a quiet place to do it. These days, most offices have meeting rooms and if you can, try to use one for your uninterrupted deep work sessions. Like using headphones while sat at your desk, when a person sees you in a room working with the door closed, they are unlikely to interrupt you unless it is really important. When you do this, I would always tell your colleagues you need a couple of hours to work on something uninterrupted. People, when asked to leave you alone, are very accommodating. A lot of time people interrupt us because we appear open to interruption. If we tell people we need some quiet time to get on with our most important work, they are much more likely to respect that and leave you alone.
Now how do you handle a person who is being insistent? Here you are just going to have to be honest. This is the hardest and it’s even more difficult if the person insisting is your boss or an important client. In these situations, you are going to have to make a decision based on priorities and values.
Priorities because sometimes the work you are currently working on has an imminent deadline and you just have to finish that first. And values because we all have values that have a greater priority over anything else. Greg McKeown, author of the book Essentialism tells the story of when his wife was expecting his first child. A colleague told him that if his wife gave birth on Friday it would be very inconvenient because he was needed at an important meeting. As fate would have it, his wife did give birth on the Friday and he did attend the meeting. It was then he realised that there are some things in life where you just have to say no because something else—based on your values—has a much higher priority. For me, family is the highest priority.
Other areas where my values take priority is my exercise time. I know how important exercise is to my overall health and wellbeing. When I am not exercising, my work suffers. So, I say no to appointments between 2pm and 3pm, unless I can schedule my exercise time at another time that day or I am doing a two or three-day workshop. In those situations, because I am on my feet teaching all day, I count that as exercise. I know, I am lucky, I have control over my day and how I spend it, but that does not mean I can say no to everything, I do have clients, some very important clients and I cannot always say not to them. But I can negotiate times with them.
Finally, there is the “I’m a bit busy at the moment, can you come back later?” Response. This works on a lot of different levels. Firstly, anyone attempting to interrupt you will generally respect your time, and secondly, in most cases, the person will find the answer to their problem without having to come back and bother you again. It also teaches people that you can and will say no occasionally when you need to.
Ultimately, the art of saying no is something that needs practice. It will always be hard to do it, but developing a few strategies, having a few boundaries that your colleagues, customers and bosses understand and being consistent and honest with people will make it easier. Remember, whenever you do say yes to something you are also saying no to something else. It’s far better to say yes to the things you want to do than to say no to those and yes to things you do not want to do.
Good luck, Joshua. I know it will be hard, but try some of these tips and find the ones that work best for you. Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you for listening.
Don’t forget, if you have a question toy would like answering, then just email me at carl@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
How often do you do a complete review of your system? That’s the question I’m answering this week.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Carl Pullein Learning Centre
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Time And Life Mastery Course
Script
Episode 117
Hello and welcome to episode 117 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I have a fantastic question about reviewing your productivity system and what you should review and why. Our environment and work are in constant change, perhaps not big changes, but little changes and over time these changes need to be reflected in our productivity systems.
As part of reviewing any system, I should point out that if you have already taken the COD course (that’s Collect, Organise and Do) then redoing the course is a great way to review your overall system. It should help you to refocus on the basics and re-evaluate your objectives for any system.
If you haven’t already taken the course, you can do so for FREE. It’s around forty minutes long and will give the basics of setting up your very own COD productivity course.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Stuart. Stuart asks: Hi Carl, I’ve heard you mention that you regularly review your whole system. Could you tell me why you do that, how often and what do you review when you do it?
Thank you, Stuart, for the question. You’re right, I do review my system. I do it once or twice a year. I feel it’s important to periodically review my system because things change. What worked for me two years ago likely does not work as efficiently today. And that's because not only do our work and work scope change so does who we are and how we work.
The question though, is how often should you review your system? Well, here we need to be careful. Too frequently and you never allow any system to settle and become automatic. It can also be used as an excuse to try new apps when your current apps may not be the problem.
So, for me, I review my system every six months or so. Six months feels like the ‘perfect’ time and it also means my reviews do not last too long.
How do you go about doing a review? For me, it starts in my notes app. What I do is I review my previous review’s note. This is great because it will immediately highlight any areas I was looking at in my previous review and in a way it’s a pre-made template. If you don’t delete any part of this note it also becomes a fantastic record of how your system has evolved and grown as you have become better organised and more productive.
It also means you can add comments about your thinking in the previous review and that helps with the current review.
So what do we look at?
The first step is to review how you are collecting your stuff. Can you
collect fast and collect seamlessly? In my experience, if there are too many steps to collect you will resist. You may not resist all the time, but resisting just once is enough to miss something important and when you miss something, that creates distrust in your system. You need to trust your system. Without that trust, everything falls apart.
So how do you collect? Is there any way you could make it faster? Can you collect when you are at your computer just as fast as on your mobile phone? I say that because most people are pretty fast at collecting on their phone—we’re doing so all the time—and not so good on their computer where we collect less frequently.
Are there any keyboard shortcuts you can set up? If you were to have a brilliant idea, how would you collect that if you were sat at your computer? Are you clicking an icon or using a keyboard shortcut? Remember, keyboard shortcuts are fantastic because they save you a lot of time.
All these questions are great because they force you to really look at how you are using your system. They pinpoint weaknesses and give you ideas you can use to make things better, smoother and faster.
How are you organising your files and projects? Is it intuitive? Can you find what you want when you want it? The way we file stuff can often be a barrier to us getting on with our work and if we have no logical system and we cannot find the documents we need we resist and end up procrastinating.
I find it can be helpful to have all current work in an easily accessible single folder or alternatively you can create links to the documents you are working on and add them to a master list in your notes app or individually in your to-do list. There are a lot of ways you can organise your stuff. The important thing is you organise it in a way you can find your stuff quickly when you need it.
Another great question to ask is: has there been any complexity creep? Now, this happens to us all. Over time, we add stuff and rarely take it away. An example of this is labels tags or contexts in your to-do list. We add these all the time but rarely go in and purge unused ones.
In my last review, I realised I did not need labels, contexts or tags in my to-do list.
Over the last six months or so I have been ruthlessly reducing the number of tasks I do each day. Looking for tasks that will have the biggest impact on my projects and goals and focusing on them. I’ve purged a lot of tasks that do not drive things forward and as a result, I have fewer tasks on my list each day.
This meant, I found I was no longer using labels (as we call contexts in Todoist) and so I deleted them completely from my system. And there I discovered something I suspected for a while. I don't need labels, contexts or tags. These were just slowing down my processing and not adding anything useful to my overall system.
All I need is a focus for the day and a list of tasks I can realistically complete. My labels were not helping me at all. I rarely have calls to make or tool-specific work. My calendar contains all my coaching calls for me and inside each of those appointments are the details I need. Labels just felt like a legacy from a bygone era. An era when there were physical barriers between the tools we used—days when we did need a computer to read and reply to email—and the work that needed to be done. None of those barriers exists today.
I can write blog posts while sat on a bus using my mobile phone. I can make calls from my computer and can ask a colleague a question via text message. Nothing I do is tool, place or people specific anymore. So, I no longer use “contexts”.
Essentially, my reviews are all about simplifying and minimising. Which is rather apt as my theme for this year is minimalism. Like most people, I have far too much stuff and it’s time to reduce. This means I need to look at my system, reduce it and make sure it is operating at it’s most effective.
With my productivity system, it is “app creep’” that causes the most problems. App creep is where we add productivity apps because we think they will make us more productive but because of the maintenance involved it does the opposite and we spend too much time updating the extra apps. Once you have the basics, a to-do list manager, a notes app and a calendar you really do not need any more than that. If you do, you need to ask yourself is the time cost involved in keeping up with all these apps giving you a good return on that investment? In my own personal experience, I have not found that to ever be the case.
Now, occasionally I will test out some apps—particularly ones that are being talked about. Currently, I am testing a meditation app to help get me into the habit of daily meditation and a habit tracker to track my habits—the habit tracker is really to see how effective they are over a three month period. So far it’s been a lot of fun, but I do not anticipate habit trackers becoming an integral part of my system overall. I can do that with my own to-do list manager and once a habit is installed, you no longer need the tracker. Those kinds of apps can very easily be a part of the ‘app creep’.
Finally, to finish off my review I go through all the apps I have on my phone, iPad and computer and remove any I have not used over the last three months. My recent review found a Ryan Air and Aer Lingus app as well as some notes apps I had been testing since I started to have issues with my Evernote iOS app. It’s surprising how many of these you find hidden away in folders taking up space. Remove them. If you need them again in the future, you can always download them again.
And there you go, Stuart. I full comprehensive rundown of why I do a review and what particularly I look for. I hope it gave you some ideas. Thank you for the question.
Don’t forget, if you have a question if you have difficulties with time management and productivity, then please send in your question. All you need do is email me—carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
How should a great productivity system be working? That’s the question I’m answering this week in the Working With Podcast.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Carl Pullein Learning Centre
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Time And Life Mastery Course
Script
Episode 116
Hello and welcome to episode 116 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
My guess is if you are listening to this podcast you have some interest in productivity and time management. And for people like us (I certainly have an interest), there is a huge resource of material around that showcases how to set things up so you can become more productive and be more efficient with your time.
But the question is, with all this advice around, what does an effective, efficient, well-managed productivity system look like? How does it really operate when it comes face to face with everyday life?
Well, today, I will try to answer those questions.
But first, I just want to give you a heads up that if you enrol in either my Your Digital Life, Time and Life Mastery or Create Your Own Apple Productivity courses you can get my Complete Guide To Creating A Successful Life course completely FREE. That’s almost two hours of learning that will help you build momentum towards a life you love living and towards making progress every single day towards whatever you define as success.
The Complete Guide To Creating A Successful Life normally costs over $100s, but for this month only you can get that course for free. So if you are serious about building a great system—a system that works for you—then now would be a fantastic time to pick up one of these courses and begin your journey today.
All the details are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Natalie. Natalie asks, Hi Carl, I’ve been following your YouTube channel and a lot of other productivity YouTubers as well and you all have different ways of organising and doing things. What I really want to know is what does a ‘perfect’ productivity or time management system look like?
Hi Natalie, thank you for sending in your fantastic question. It’s a question that got me thinking because in a sense you hit upon a very important point. There are a lot of different ways of creating a system, many will work well, a lot will not. The question to ask is how can I build a system that will work for me?
So, to begin with, let’s ask why do we need a productivity and time management system in the first place?
If we go back to the era before industrialisation, when we lived an agrarian life, we did not need anything more than a seasonal calendar. We certainly did not need a to-do list manager or a daily diary. Our work was determined by the seasons and the weather. We planted in the spring and we gathered in the autumn. In the summer we looked after our crops and in the winter we cleaned up and repaired our stuff. Very simple really.
Then came industrialisation, but even then the majority of us did not really need elaborate calendars or to-do lists. Factory work was simple. We turned up, went to our work station, did our work and then came home.
We then became information workers. Now we no longer had a fixed job. Now we were managing information. This changed everything because suddenly nothing was fixed. We became much more reliant on other people for information. Computers needed information inputting and we needed to make sure we had the right information in the right place at the right time.
Meetings were invented (well, I can’t imagine a farmer 200 years ago having a meeting to decide what to do next can you? It was obvious), water cooler chat and cc’d email. It all became so much more complex and this led to the birth of management consultants whose job it appears was to make things even more complex by creating processes and procedures and managing it all in an Excel file—which rather than reducing a worker’s workload all it did was increase it.
To combat this information overload, we created time management systems, desk diaries and so much more. The question is, did any of this really help us to become more productive and be able to focus on what was really important? I’m not so sure.
So, to get back to your questions Natalie, what does, a ‘perfect’ productivity system look like in 2020. How can we manage all the inputs that come our way, get our work done and still have time and energy at the end of the day to spend it with the people we really care about?
Well, first up, you should make sure you have the five foundations balanced. That’s have enough sleep, eat the right kinds of foods, drink enough water, take regular exercise and make sure you have a plan for the day. Getting these five areas in balance will go along way towards keeping you energised throughout the day.
But what kind of system is a perfect system anyway?
The short answer is any system that works for you and achieves a balance between getting your work done and allowing you the time to do the things you want to do without causing stress or friction.
Okay, now that we have a kind of working definition, how do we translate that into a system?
The basics of any system is you collect what needs to be done, you make a decision about what needs doing with those things, organise them so you are reminded of them when you need to be reminded of them and you have enough time each day to do the work that needs doing. Simple yes? Well, sort of.
It’s here where I see a lot of people overthinking and over complicating things.
Really all you need is a way to organise your tasks. Now, for me, I like to organise my tasks into three areas. Active projects—that’s real projects I am currently working on. Routines—those everyday tasks that just need to be done. And my areas of focus—that’s the things I have identified as being important to me.
My goals, life’s mission and my purpose will fall under my areas of focus. For example, I want to maintain a high level of physical fitness. I identify fitness as being a part of who I am. That’s an area of focus. However, if you look at my physical fitness area of focus you will find there’s hardly anything in there. Why? That’s because maintaining my physical fitness is just something I do. I do not need a task reminding me to workout. It’s scheduled on my calendar. It’s a non-negotiable part of my life. Having a task come up on my to-do list is pointless. I’m going to work out. That’s non-negotiable.
Now, of course, there’s going to be little things that come up each day. A call you need to make, a follow up that needs doing and an email or two that requires a reply. It’s here where I see people struggling the most. Yet, if you maintain a simple system, you will just set aside some time each day to reply to messages, emails and phone calls.
In my case, I set aside thirty to sixty minutes each day for communications. This involves replying to emails that need replies, answering questions on my YouTube channel and responding to questions on Twitter or Facebook. It also involves following up on clients and students. Because I have a set, dedicated period of time each day for this, I do not need to feel stressed or overwhelmed. I just go into my email, YouTube and Facebook dashboard and reply. The goal is to get to the bottom, but it’s not a problem if I don’t. As long as the most important, time-sensitive ones are responded to, I feel satisfied.
And, don’t buy into the idea that you must reply to an email within the hour. This is ridiculous. Email is never urgent. Ever! If something was urgent, you would be contacted by phone or text message. And if you work with someone who does think email is urgent, you should gently educate them to better ways of communicating.
Once you have a place to keep your tasks, projects and areas you want to focus on, all you need to do is to spend ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day on what I used to call the Golden ten, but realise a better name is the “Focused Ten”. That’s the ten tasks you want to get completed tomorrow. I pick two objectives—the two tasks I will complete whatever happens—and eight other tasks that I will do whatever I can to complete, but it would not be the end of the world if I were unable to do.
Now because my tasks are organised into active projects and areas of focus it is very easy to do a quick look through all my active projects and select my ten tasks. Most of the time these are already pre-selected because I always do a weekly review. Once a week, I review all my active projects and decide what I will work on the next week.
And that’s really all there is to it. The stuff I collect each day gets processed at the end of the day into their respective projects or areas—or more often than not just get completed directly from my inbox.
Once you do have a system in place the trick is to spend as little time as possible in there. You see, the more time you spend inside your ‘system’ the less time you spend doing the work. That is when you find you have less time for the things you want to spend time doing. So, keep things simple, don’t create complex hierarchies of projects, sub-projects and todos. Organise things in their natural places, give yourself some time at the end of each day to plan the next day—the ten things you want to focus on—and just get on and do your work. If you are interrupted by a request, add it to your inbox and get back to doing your work.
And that’s really all there is to it.
Hopefully, that’s given you some ideas, Natalie. If you want more information about this, you can take my FREE productivity course, the Collect, Organise and Do system. That will help you to set up a system for yourself.
Thank you for the question, and thank you to all of you for listening. Don't forget, if you have a question you would like answering, then you can do so by emailing me— carl@carlpullein.com or DMing me on Twitter or Facebook.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Is it possible to create an environment where you have a huge amount of energy, enthusiasm and direction each day? Well, that’s the question I answer this week.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Carl Pullein Learning Centre
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
The Obesity Code By Dr Jason Fung
Script
Episode 115
Hello and welcome to episode 115 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week it’s all about energy, positivity and sleep… Well, something like that. This week I’m answering a question all about maintaining high levels of energy throughout the day and how to make sure that happens every day.
Now, before I get into the question, I’d just like to say that one of the best times of the year to review and refresh your systems is the beginning of the year. So, now’s a great time to retake the COD productivity course if you have already taken it and if you haven’t then go ahead and get yourself enrolled. It’s a completely FREE course and will provide you with the know-how and skills to create your own system—a system built for you that is easy to maintain and simple to use.
Just by having a system in place is a great first step towards relieving stress and overwhelm, but it goes so much further than that because having a system also assists you in developing your goals and projects and when you build momentum in these areas you create the all-important “success momentum” and that just leads to better and better things.
Details on how to enrol for free are in the show notes and I’d love to see you in the course creating your very own system and helping me to spread the word that we don’t have to live a life of stressed out and overwhelmed.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jurgen. Jurgen asks, hi Carl, you always seem to have so much energy and I was wondering what you do to keep your energy levels up.
Hi Jurgen, thank you for your question. This is something I have spent a lot of time researching over the last few years. The reason was that several years ago I committed myself to create a lot of content and to do that I knew would require a lot of energy.
Before I share a few strategies with you, allow me to take you back a few years.
Around 2009 I was quite a bit overweight, my diet was terrible. I was not exercising and I was having to wake up early to teach a 6:30 am class in a language institute in Korea and although I had the afternoons off, I was teaching again in the evenings until 9:30 pm.
This meant I wasn't getting enough sleep, my diet was very bad—too much sugar and fattening foods—and, not surprisingly my energy levels were rock bottom.
I knew something had to change if I was going to achieve the things I wanted to achieve. So I began researching and monitoring how I felt throughout the day. I noticed I began the day already tired, needing coffee just to function at a basic level. I was making excuses such as “I’m not a morning person” which resulted in a negative mental loop of “I hate mornings” which just reinforced this negative loop every morning. Obviously not a great way to start the day.
My research led me to discover how the food I was eating—a lot of sugar and processed carbohydrates— my daily lack of sleep and being overweight created a huge drain on my energy resources as well as impacting my mood. When you feel heavy and lethargic, it’s hard to feel positive and energetic.
What I realised was ultimately it comes down to four foundations. Get enough sleep, eat the right foods, drink enough water and get enough regular exercise. That’s it. As long as you build these four foundations into your daily life, you will find you have an abundance of energy each day.
Miss just one of these and your energy levels will drop significantly which impacts the performance at almost everything you do. You will feel frustrated and will start looking for excuses for why you feel the way you do. The reality is your decisions about what you ate, when you went to bed and how much water you drank were big contributors toward how you feel. There are no excuses because you can change the way you feel with just a few small adjustments to your daily life.
So, if you want to begin every day with energy and feeling fresh and alive—and let's be honest who doesn't?—you need to make some small changes. And that is where the fifth foundation comes in... Planning.
We don't get enough sleep because when we don't plan our own days we have no control over our days and that causes us to feel stress. When you are stressed you cannot sleep well. When you don’t get enough sleep, our will power and motivation drop and then we start craving refined carbohydrates such as cake, pastries and candy and because our will power is not at a high enough level we give in to the cravings and It becomes a vicious cycle and the only way to get out of the cycle is to start taking your planning serious.
So, how can you pull yourself out of this vicious cycle of low energy, stress and overwhelm?
Well, the first part is to make sure you get enough sleep. This one’s an easy adjustment to make because all it involves is a simple decision to go to bed at an early enough time to ensure you get whatever amount of sleep you need. I need 6 ½ hours, you may need more.
If you are not sure how much sleep you need to do a test next weekend. Go to bed on Friday night without setting an alarm and see what time you wake up. It’s a simple test and as long as you are doing what you would normally do and are not suffering from any kind of illness or have consumed a little too much alcohol, this should give you a ball-park figure of how much sleep you need.
The next step is the easiest to take and that is to invest in a good quality water bottle. One that you can carry around with you. A lack of water affects energy levels dramatically and you do not have to feel thirsty to become dehydrated. If you do start to feel thirsty, it means you are already dehydrated. I have a fantastic stainless steel Klean Kanteen Insulated water bottle on my desk as well as a smaller one I carry with me in my bag wherever I go.
The great thing about carrying your own water bottle with you is that most offices and places you visit will have a water fountain where you can top up your water bottle without having to buy more water or plastic bottles. So having your own water bottle saves you money too!
Perhaps the most difficult area to improve is our diets. Before reviewing and modifying your diet, I would recommend you read Dr Jason Fung’s book The Obesity Code. (I’ll put a link to that in the show notes for you) It’s a fantastic book that you will find you cannot put down. It’s written in a style that anyone, regardless of whether they have a scientific background or not, will understand and the book will give you some great food choice advice.
Basically, if you want to feel incredibly energised, fresh and have amazing moods then cut our refined carbohydrates. That means, no white bread, rice, pastries or sugar and instead eat sweet and regular potatoes (non-fried of course), avocados, fresh fruit and vegetables and use olive oil and vinegar dressing. It’s surprising how easy it is to replace refined carbs once you start to look.
Now, for me, I do enjoy a pizza and chocolate, so it’s perfectly okay to have a cheat day each week. For me, I cheat on Saturdays. I have pizza or rice and grilled bacon (a Korean dish called San Gyup Sal) and chocolate, But once finished I will do a 24 hour fast not eating again until 7 pm on a Sunday. And I should say, that’s a lot easier than you think.
Next up is regular exercise. Now, this does not mean you have to become a gym rat or a marathon runner. All it means is you move enough to raise your heart rate and breathing for around twenty to thirty minutes four to five days a week.
In addition, if you ban yourself from using escalators and lifts (err elevators for my American friends) for floors below the sixth floor you are going to give yourself a huge boost. That will stop you from getting the afternoon slump.
The final part of all this is the make sure you plan your sleeping, eating, drinking and exercise every week and make sure your sleep and exercise times become non-negotiable. Removing sugars, cookies and cakes, rice and other highly refined carbs from your cupboards and refrigerates will also help you be not giving you any temptations late at night. Using your calendar for bedtime and exercise time will help you considerably here because… What goes on your calendar gets done!
Anyone can have an abundance of energy and positivity if they really want it. If you want it, all you have to do is make a few small changes to your diet and lifestyle and very quickly you will notice a huge improvement in how you feel every day.
My advice is if you have never done any of this before and your diet is not good you don’t exercise and you sleep badly, is start with one part first. Create a goal to change al these things over the next three months so by the time you hit the second quarter of 2020, you begin each day full of energy, vitality and positivity. I can promise you any discomfort you may feel initially will be easily outweighed by the way you begin to feel after just one week of this.
I hope that gives you some ideas, Jurgen and thank you for your question.
Thank you also to you for listening.
it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
So, 2020 has finally started and today most of you will be back at work and back into your daily routines, The question is, how can you make your planned 2020 changes stick now that your regular daily life is back?
Links:
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The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
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The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 114
Hello and welcome to episode 114 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I want to help you start the year off on the right foot. So, there is no question this week except for the question I ask which is, how can I make my new year plans and goals stick?
It’s very easy to make plans for the new year while we are on a break, the difficulty comes when we return to our normal routines and our normal daily life. No matter how determined we might be to make this year the year we stick to our goals and plans for the new year, once we go back to our daily life, the same work, the same workplace, the same colleagues and bosses the same commute, it is so easy to slip back into the habits of old and before long find ourselves back where we were before the holidays or break and out carefully laid plans.
So how do you prevent this from happening?
Well, the first step is to anticipate possible areas of weakness. An example of this would be a smoker trying to give up. If you have always smoked a cigarette when you had a coffee, then temporarily stop drinking coffee. Instead, drink tea or another hot beverage. It’s the simple changes that will make all the difference in developing new habits.
Another example would be if you wanted to replace mindlessly scrolling through your social media feeds with reading a book or listening to a personal development podcast. The best way to do this is to remove the social media apps on your phone or tablet and replace them with your reading or podcast apps—in the exact same place. This way if you mindlessly tap on the area your social media apps used to be, you would open up your reading or podcast apps instead. That would normally be enough to bring you back on to your desired goal.
If you do have social media addiction really bad, then I would suggest you set some time each day for social media. Give yourself thirty to sixty minutes each day dedicated to social media and stick to it. Remove all opportunities to look at social media outside of these times.
To begin embedding new habits you may need to turn to your to-do list managers to help you here. One trick I have used that has worked in the past is to create daily recurring tasks that will pop up from time to time to remind me to do simple things. It could be a reminder to drink some water or to get up and move. You can create anything here. This also works for if you want to start the day with a morning ritual. This year, I want to start being more consistent with my morning routines. I have been experimenting over the last couple of years and finally developed a morning routine that works for me. From this week, I will dedicate my energy and attention to make sure I complete this every morning.
For this, I will use a combination of my to-do list manager and calendar. This way every time I look at my to-do list or calendar I will be reminded of my intention to turn my morning routine into a habit. My intention is to do this every morning and not just weekdays and when I am at home. I want to deeply embed it so I do this routine every morning. So from the moment I wake up, I will begin my routine. This helps on those days when I am not waking up early or I am waking up earlier than usual. Wake up, drink a glass of water, get out of bed and begin my stretching exercises. Just follow the same pattern every morning until it is embedded.
And that leads me to the next crucial part of this. Focus only on one area at a time. Let me give you a personal example of this.
For me, my first priority this year is to remove sugar and refined carbohydrates from my diet completely. This might seem a simple objective at first, but this involves researching the foods I currently eat to make sure there are no hidden sugars or refined carbohydrates it also means I will have to resist temptations—these are all around us. For the first three months of 2020, this will be my sole health goal. I do not need to worry about my exercise as this is already baked into my daily routines, but I have been known to find it difficult to say no to adding sugar to my tea or coffee and to enjoying a pizza and a couple of bags of chocolate on weekends. Sugar has been a part of my life for a very long time, so I want to have the mental space to focus on eliminating it. Once not adding sugar to my tea and coffee, not eating chocolate and pizza on weekend has been baked into my daily life I can then look at my other health goals.
The key is to do one thing at a time. Bake it in and then move on to the next goal.
You have to be patient, but it’s worth it. By focusing on one goal at a time you maximise your chances of success. Most people fail to achieve their goals because they focus on too many things and spread their focus too thin. Be patient.
By putting all your energy and focus into achieving one goal at a time, you build what I like to call “success momentum”. That means the more successes you have the more energy and determination to succeed you experience. This is a self-propelling way to build up your successes.
It’s like when you lose your first 5 pounds or 5 kilograms. It gives you a real belief in yourself. That belief fuels you to push harder to succeed. But if you have multiple goals going on at the same time, you will succeed at some and fail at others and this prevents you from creating a “success momentum”. Without that success momentum, you start to lose faith and belief in yourself.
Another reason to only focus on one goal at a time is when things don't go according to plan you need to put your focus onto fixing what is going wrong so you can get back on track quickly. If you are trying to focus on multiple goals at the same time and just one or two begin to go wrong, you will soon find yourself losing your enthusiasm for change and will quickly fall back into your old habits and routines.
So, focus on one thing at a time. It simplifies things and helps maintain your focus.
Now there are a few exceptions here—there always are—Let's say you have a health goal and a financial goal. The health goal is to get fit and lose weight (these two can be done together) and the financial goal is to put $250 away into a savings account every month. The savings goal is easy. Just add a task or a calendar event on a given day each month and put the money into your savings account. It’s one task per month goal. For something like this, you can add the two objectives.
Another similar goal would be if you decided to spend one whole evening per week working on a hobby or a side business. Again, this is a one task per week goal that can be scheduled each week. There’s very little that can go wrong here and if it does—ie you skip your regular day—then you can easily rectify it by switching days.
What you do not want to be doing is having more than one goal that involves daily focus and attention, that’s when things go wrong. For example, if you want to get fit and lose weight and spend more time with your friends. These goals potentially cause conflict. To get fit and lose weight you need to stay focused on not only what you eat but also how frequently you exercise. To spend more time with your friends and family, you will need to go out more often. Going out potentially involves dining out and drinking and a lot of time that is likely to take you away from your exercise time.
Achieving your goals is easy if you take the long-term view. Remember, you do not have to do everything all at once. Life is not a sprint and to make lasting positive change is going to take time, probably longer than you expect. As long as you accept this and allow yourself time to bake in the necessary changes both lifestyle and routines to make sure you achieve your goals.
I hope this episode has added some value and motivation to your plans for 2020. If want to learn more I shall be writing on my blog and posting videos on my YouTube channel to help you turn 2020 into the best year of your life.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s podcast is an end of year special. So sit back and let me see if I can teach you some productivity and time management wisdom.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
6 Common Sense Time Management And Productivity Tips Anyone Can Use.
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 113
Hello and welcome to episode 113 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This is the final episode of this year. The Working With Podcast is taking its annual break and will be back on 6th January.
As a treat for the final episode of 2019 this week it’s all about productivity tips and tricks. All these tips I am going to share with you work. They are tried and tested and if you adapt them for your own way of life and ways of doing things you will see significant gains to your overall time management and productivity. The important thing is you adapt them.
They are simple and logical but are not easy to implement. But I can promise if you do implement them you will improve.... a lot.
Now before we get to this week’s question, don't forget if you are in the UK, you have the opportunity to join Kevin Blackburn and me in Scunthorpe for a day of planning, motivation and massive massive action.
Saturday 28th December. Perfectly positioned between Christmas and the start of the new year. Will you join us? I cannot think of a better way to start the 2020s than making a commitment in front of likeminded people.
Tickets are limited so get yours now. Ticket details are available in the show notes and from my website - Carl Pullein.com
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question is from many people. They have all asked if you could share some of your favourite tips and tricks to become better organised and more productive. Thank you to Richard, Sophie, Stephan, Alex, Duncan, and many more for asking this question.
Yes, thank you, guys. Now I am going to share with you six tips I shared in a recent blog post called - 6 Common Sense Time Management And Productivity Tips Anyone Can Use. Hopefully, some of these will resonate with you. If you want to read the article, I will put a link in the show notes for you.
The digital revolution has caused the demand on our time to grow incredibly over the last twenty years or so. —where once if we were not in our home or place of work our friends and colleagues could not reach us, now no matter where we are in the world (or universe!) we can be reached with the simple press of a button.
Now, with that 24/7 access and all the wonderful things we can now do for entertainment and education, we find ourselves having difficulty finding time to do the most basic of things. Having breakfast or dinner with our family, spend an hour or so reading a book or go for a Sunday afternoon walk with our partner or friends.
Because we are expected to be more accessible than we have ever been, leaving our mobile phone at home while we go out for a run or take a walk with our loved ones would be uncomfortable. Now, this is the way we lived just twenty to thirty years ago and we had no problems or issues. I would not go as far as to say we were more relaxed back then, I would say we enjoyed more of the time we had with the people we cared about because it was just them and us. There was no mobile phone or other electronic device beeping and buzzing for our attention.
So, to help us get some out time back so we can focus on the things we want to focus on, here are six tips and tricks anyone can use that will help you to regain more of your time so you can spend it doing the things you want to with the people you want to be with.
Use your calendar
It does surprise me how many people are not using their calendars to manage their time each day. Your calendar shows you how much time you have each day and you see where you have gaps to do the things you love doing. Exercise, spending time with the people you care about, reading a book or taking a walk in the park. All these things can be scheduled on your calendar so when you receive a demand for your time you can make a decision based on whether the new demand for your time will be more important or fulfilling than the original one.
Seriously, use your calendar to schedule your work and play. It will help you to get a better grasp on where you are spending your time and will help you to better allocate your time resource.
Get better at saying no
This is hard. It’s the one that most people struggle with because we are wired to please people. Saying “no” to someone feels like we are letting them down and they will think badly of us. The truth is, if you say “yes” to a time demand and then you do not give your full commitment to it, you will let that person down a lot more than if you had said “no” in the first place.
You don’t have to be impolite when saying “no”, you can do it gently. Developing a few strategies though that make it easier for you to say no to demands will ease your time pressures and put you in more control of what you do each day.
My trick is to not commit immediately to a time demand. I always ask for time to review my calendar. Of course, I could check my calendar from my phone, but the truth is I want to see the full week in context before I commit to anything new. Once checked, I can then accept or decline the invitation with honesty.
Spend a few minutes at the end of the day planning the next day
This one is huge. All you need is ten minutes at the end of the day to write out a few things you want to get done the next day. My Golden Ten method is designed to put you in control of your work. It’s just ten tasks per day that you want to want to focus on. These ten tasks do not include your regular routines, but they are the ten tasks you really want to complete and doing so would move your projects and goals forward.
Now It does not matter where you do this. You can have an elaborate to-do list manager, you could use your calendar or just a simple piece of paper. All that matters is you make a plan for the things you want to do tomorrow.
What this does is help you to stay focused on what is important to you. It also gives your mind a chance to prepare. When you begin the day with a purpose and a plan, you are more likely to get those things done than if you just turn up at work and allow your email to tell you what needs doing next.
Here’s a bonus tip: Before you start the day, take a look at the list you made the day before and review it. Visualise yourself completing the list. This helps you to stay focused on what you have decided is important for the day. You can make this a part of your morning routine. It’s a fantastic way to get ‘primed’ for the day.
Stop overcommitting yourself
Okay, truth time…. You do not have to do everything all at once. One of the reasons so many people feel stressed out and overwhelmed is because they are trying to complete all their projects in one go. Stop this madness.
Firstly, you are never going to be able to do everything all at once anyway so stop trying and secondly, when you take that kind of pressure off yourself you get a lot more work done because you can focus on a few key parts that will move your projects further faster. It’s the old saying… “less is more”. It’s true. Try doing less each day and watch your productivity grow.
Identify the things that will have the biggest impact on your work
Far too often we spend our time doing trivial tasks that do not have a significant impact on our work but make us feel busy. Let me give you an example of this. Checking email is incredibly inefficient. Doing email is more productive. What’s the difference? Checking email is going through your inbox looking for important emails and ignoring the less important emails. Doing email is starting at the top of your inbox and dealing with each email as you go through it.
Checking email leaves you with email still in your inbox that you will have to look at again later anyway. Doing email leaves you with an empty inbox and a list of emails that need action that you will do when you have time later.
With practice, you soon learn to distinguish what tasks have the biggest impact on moving projects forward. While planning is important, spending too much time planning and thinking does not move projects forward. Action does. Making the phone call you have been putting off, sitting down and writing the report or preparing the slides for the presentation you have to do next week. Those tasks get things done. Thinking about them does not. Never confuse thinking about and planning as doing. It is not. Thinking and planning does not move things forward only doing does that.
Of course, there is a time for planning and thinking, but that should never be used as an excuse for not taking action.
And finally, take a break!
We are not machines. We cannot work at a consistent level all day. We will go through peaks and troughs. For most people, they can stay focused and creative longer in the morning. After lunch, it becomes harder to focus and pushing yourself through to try and finish a report is wasting time and again rather inefficient.
Instead, learn when you are at your most focused—for most people that will be in the morning, for some, that could be in the evening—then use your calendar to schedule the work that requires the most focus and concentration at the times you are at your best.
Make sure every ninety-minutes or so, take a ten-minute break. Get up, move around. Try to get some fresh air and a different view. Staring at a screen all day will sap your creative juices quicker than anything else. Taking a break and getting outside will rejuvenate you. If like me you work from home, you can schedule dog walking or exercise time in the middle of the day. I find that’s a great way to break up the day and helps me t get a tremendous amount done each day.
So there you go, six common-sense tips and tricks to help you become more productive with your time so you can spend more of your time doing the things you want to do and that have the biggest impact on your work and your wellbeing.
Thank you to all of you for listening this year and a big thank you to all of you who have sent in questions. This podcast is built on your questions so please keep them coming in. If you have a question, just email it to carl@carlpullein.com.
Have a wonderful end of year break and happy new year. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
So, you have a lot of ideas about what you would like to accomplish in 2020. The question now is how do you turn those ideas into achievable goals? Well, that’s what we’ll be exploring in this week’s podcast.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 112
Hello and welcome to episode 112 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Okay, I need to be honest with you here. I have been saving this week’s question for a while because now is the best time to answer this question. A few weeks ago I gave you a link to my annual planning sheet and that sheet asks six questions about what you want to change and what you want to achieve next year.
Well, hopefully, you have developed a long list of things because now we are in December and it’s time to go through that list and decide what you will do next year.
But, before we get to that question, for anyone living in the UK and would like the opportunity to spend a day with likeminded people planning and developing their goals and plans for 2020, I will be in Scunthorpe in Lincolnshire on the 28th December along with Kevin Blackburn at the Life and Time mastery Workshop. You are all more than welcome to come and join us for some post-Christmas planning so you are not just ready to begin 2020 the way you want to, but you begin it with massive amounts of energy and motivation… Which of course is the best way to begin any year.
Tickets are still available and if you want one, just head over to the registration page. Details for the event and ticket information are in the show notes.
Okay, time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Maria. Maria asks, Hi Carl, a while ago you recommended we should write out all the things we would like to change about ourselves, the way we work and other things. I did that. What do I do next?
I’m glad you asked, Maria. This week I’ll show you how to turn those ideas into actionable goals.
Now first up I need to stress the importance of “less is more”. A huge mistake people often make when planning their new year goals is they want to change and do too much too soon. Slow down. You have plenty of time and you do not need to do everything all in one year. I’ve found the perfect number is four meaningful goals each year. That works out at one goal per quarter.
I know it’s very tempting to go for more. The problem is when you set yourself too many goals you dilute your effectiveness. It’s already difficult to focus on what we have to do each day, having multiple goals to work on at any one time as well is just going to add to that and you are setting yourself up for stressed out and overwhelm.
So, going back to the list of ideas you have been working on. Now’s the time to review that list. What would you like to do and, more importantly, what can you do?
Let’s take things you would like to change about yourself. Perhaps you no longer want to be a couch potato. You don't like coming home every evening, eating dinner and then just flopping down on the sofa and mindlessly watching TV. So what can you do to change that? This is a habit change and to change a habit like this requires a lot of effort and willpower.
So, from 1st January you pre-plan something different. It could be a thirty-minute walk after dinner. It could be you go to a different room from where the TV is and read a book for thirty minutes. Whatever you do, you do what it takes to change that routine. The bigger the change you make, the more likely it is you will disrupt your habit of just collapsing on the sofa at the end of the day.
A quick word of advice here—based on my experience. Don't schedule this change to take an hour. An hour is too much of a time commitment. I’ve found when you commit to doing a new activity for around twenty to thirty minutes each day it is much more likely you will do it. When you schedule an hour, you will resist. Your brain will not like committing one hour every day to doing something new. It will find all the excuses you need to not do it. Of course, if you want to do more than twenty minutes then keep going, but just commit yourself to twenty-minutes. Your brain will accept that time commitment much more easily.
This twenty-minute rule applies to things like exercise too. If you schedule twenty-minutes exercise every evening five to six times a week you are much more likely to succeed than if you tell yourself you will go to the gym three or four times a week for an hour. Start small here. As you begin to get fitter you will feel more energetic and exercise will no longer be a painful experience you believe you have to do but rather become an enjoyable experience you want to do. When you start wanting to exercise that’s the time to up your game and join a gym or start running longer.
Now for the longer-term goals. Things you want to change about the way you work for example. Let’s say you would like to apply for a promotion. The next step is to give yourself a period of time for discovery. You need to discover what additional skills you will need to do this new position, will you need extra qualifications? Have a talk with your boss or HR department about what you will need to do to demonstrate you can do the job you are wanting to move to. You will then need to create a plan for acquiring these skills and qualifications. For this, you will need a create a project.
If you use a to-do list manager you can create that project there. But a simple notes app would do the trick. Most good notes apps have the ability to create tasks and checklists. Now write down all the tasks you will need to perform to achieve the goal. Breaking these down into small, clear actionable steps will keep things moving along nicely.
Now another quick tip here is to make sure you load the beginning with quick wins. This helps to keep the momentum moving forward. The hardest part of any project is getting started. So if you load the beginning with quick wins you will keep your enthusiasm up and this keeps the energy high.
Now, one important component of any goal is the “why” why are you doing this goal? A lot of people struggle with this because they feel embarrassed to say they want to lose weight so they can look “sexy” in the club or on the beach, for example. The reality is if you are not motivated by your why then you are not going to successfully complete the goal. Your “why” has to be just that. It needs to be your “why” and it does not matter what it is as long as it motivates you.
It does not matter if you want to get promoted to earn more money to spend on yourself or to impress a girl or boy. You do not have to tell anyone why you are doing your goals. You do not have to have ‘noble’ “why”s. Your motivation for doing anything needs to be genuine and it needs to be yours.
So whatever your “why” for a particular goal is, write it down in your project notes. There will be days when you do not want to do a task related to that goal and the time to review your “why” is when that happens, and trust me on this one it will happen.
So, back to planning out your goals and plans for 2020, once you have decided on a list of four or five goals for the year and you have listed out the tasks you will need to perform to complete those goals you now should decide when you will start the goals. Starting everything all at once is a recipe for disaster. You need to be able to focus on one thing at a time. This is where using quarters to assign specific goals.
Let’s say one of your goals is to get fit and lose some weight by the time of your summer holiday. That maybe six months away now, but the sooner you start that the sooner you can move on to other goals. And a get a fit and weight loss goal is an easy one to start with because that’s what I describe as a lifestyle goal. To succeed at losing weight you need to change the way you move and eat. Basically, move more and eat less. That’s something that, although difficult at first, is easy to maintain once you get over the initial discomfort of feeling hungry.
Larger goals though may need some long term work. For example, a career change. For a goal like this, you may need to break it down to run over two or three years. In this case, what can you do this year to prepare the ground?
I was talking to a language student of mine recently and she mentioned that two years ago she’d returned to Korea after studying in Canada for a year and when she came back she was determined to return to Canada within two years. Unfortunately, because she had not broken down the goal into steps, she was still two years away from returning.
It’s very easy to not do the necessary groundwork for the longer-term goals, but sometimes you need a year to do just that. Build the foundations. The studying, the training or whatever it is you need to do. Make those important steps a part of your goal planning for the new year.
Hopefully, that’s given you some ideas about how to plan out what you will accomplish in 2020. How you do it is, of course, entirely up to you. But my advice is don’t try and do too much. You have plenty of time and if you cannot do some things this year, remember you have next year, so don’t throw away your ideas sheet. That’s a great sheet to refer to next year.
Good luck, Maria, and good luck to all of you too.
Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Are you returning to work after a holiday break? Are you looking forward to the backlog waiting for you? Didn't think so. This week’s podcast is all about handling overflowing inboxes.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
My Black Friday / Cyber Monday Offers Page
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 111
Hello and welcome to episode 111 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week’s question is a timely one for all of you returning back to work following the holidays. I know what it’s like having to catch up and deal with the backlog and try to get back into work when you can’t remember where you were when you left for the holidays.
Now before we get into this week’s question, if you haven’t discovered yet, I am doing a huge Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale on my courses, coaching programmes and books. You can save yourself up to 40% and get yourself a programme or course that could be the stimulus to change things for you so you become better organised and more productive as well as being able to put in place a system that will drive you towards completing your goals and life’s vision.
I’ve tried very hard this year to make these prices as low as possible because I want to be able to help as many of you as I can discover the amazing benefits of having a fantastic system in place that works for you and helps you to reduce stress and overwhelm so you can spend more of your time doing the things you love doing. That’s what it’s all about really. Helping you to do more of the things you enjoy doing without having to worry about anything else because you have it under control.
So check out my offers and see if there’s something there for you. I am here to help you in whatever way I can.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question
This week’s question comes from Jane. Jane asks: Hi Carl do you have any tips and tricks for getting back to work after the holidays? Every year I come back to a mess and I really don’t want that to happen again this year. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you, Jane, for the question and I guess a lot of you are returning to work today after the Thanksgiving holiday. For many of you working only with US clients and customers, you should be okay. For others who have customers, suppliers and clients all over the world your return to work will mean a big backlog to deal with.
Let’s deal with email first. This is the one that causes most problems after being away for holidays or business trips. Even though most people have been on holiday, your inboxes will still have been filling up. It’s likely you will return to work and could easily spend all day dealing with your email. Not the most productive way to start back.
Now, before we go any further whatever you do do not “snooze” email. That's the silliest thing you could do. You’ve already seen the email, you know it’s coming back but now there’s little you can do with it until it does come back. You need control, so if you cannot make a decision about something right now, move it to an Action Required folder (or as I have an “action today” folder). This way, you retain control over what’s coming in and what’s going out. When you use features like snooze, all you’ve done is delayed the inevitable. You will have to make a decision about the email sooner or later. Sooner is always better than later.
Keep in mind pretty much everyone is going to return to work with overflowing inboxes and most of those people will spend all morning, if not all day, dealing with it. This means there’s little pressure on you to reply to email. In fact, not replying to email straight away will probably get you some points for not adding to other people’s backlog. It also means you can process not do. That means begin at the top of your inbox, and make decisions about what each email means to you. It means not replying to email—even if it will only take two minutes—ten two-minute emails equals twenty minutes of doing. You’re not doing, you’re processing and the two are very different.
As you go through your inbox, run a questions workflow like this...
What is it?
What do I have to do with it?
If the answer is reply, then send it to an action folder. If it’s nothing then either delete or archive it and move on to the next email. When processing things like email, the focus needs to be on speed. The faster you process, the sooner you can get on to work that matters. Work that will move projects and goals forward.
When you are dealing with a large backlog the goal is to get the backlog processed as quickly as possible so you can start doing work that matters. Having a backlog of email hanging around you will not help get things back under control. Only once you have made decisions about what something is and what you have to do about it will you be able to get on to work that matters without worrying about unknown stuff you still have to make decisions about.
Now ideally, the first day back from a holiday, or business trip, you should give yourself some time to clear your backlog. Heading straight into work following a holiday is a guaranteed way to create stress and overwhelm in your life because you will have a lot of stuff in the back of your mind demanding attention.
So whether your backlog is email, Slack or LinkedIn messages. Get them cleared first. That’s going to clear your mind and your inboxes. The ideal would be to do this way from your place of work, but I do understand this will not always be possible. If you do have to be at your place of work, then try and find a quiet place to deal with your backlog. You will thank yourself for that later.
In an ideal world, you would take the first day back from any holiday or business trip off as a clearing day, but I know that will not always be possible. If nothing else, though you do need to block a couple of hours, if not the whole morning, to get yourself caught up. That’s key to getting back to work quickly and effortlessly. If you do have a reasonable amount of control over your calendar, then block the whole morning. Go incognito. If not, at least block off an hour or so to get back in touch with your projects, work and commitments.
Once you have your backlog under control you need to go through all your active projects and areas of focus. This does not need to be a detailed look through, but you do need to get yourself back in touch with what is going on in your work life now the holidays are over. This is a kind of weekly planning session.
Look at what’s coming due in the next week and month. What tasks and other stuff have you not made a decision about? What meetings do you have coming up and do you need to prepare anything for them? Get that done now. It’s about getting yourself back up to speed as quickly as possible so you can get back on doing the work that matters quickly.
I know all this sounds like a lot of additional work, and in a way it is, but if you so take these steps to get yourself back up to speed, you will ease yourself back in to work effortlessly and avoid any unexpected issues. Most of the surprises in our daily work come about because we do not stop for a look at what’s coming up. It does not take long, but the time you do spend doing it will be worth it. It’s about sharpening the saw to use a Stephen Covey analogy.
Now I know by the time this podcast is published the Thanksgiving holidays will be over, but one for future reference is try to do a clean up before you go away too. I’ve always taken the day before I go on holiday or trip to clean up and to inform partners and students I will be away for a few days. This means when I plan the week before I go away, the last day before I leave for my trip is blocked off as much as possible so I can clean up. This means dealing with any outstanding emails, making sure there’s a reminder or next task in my projects and anything I need to know about when I return is clearly marked on my calendar or to-do list.
It’s these little things that don’t take up too much time that gives you the clarity of mind to be able to go away for your trip or holiday save in the knowledge that there are no hidden issues waiting for you when you return. You want to be able to smoothly get back into your work so you can stay stress-free and keep overwhelm at bay.
I hope that has given you some ideas, Jane. Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, it if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast, then just email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is about developing your ideas so they either become a project or an area of focus.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 110
Hello and welcome to episode 109 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week it’s all about how to manage all your ideas, particularly if you are someone who has a lot of ideas. The question is what do you do with those ideas and how do you nor forget about them.
However, before we get to the answer, I’d like to remind you all of the upcoming Life and Time Mastery workshop in the UK on the 28 December. This workshop is all about helping you plan 2020 and I can’t think of a better time than just before the new year celebrations to spend a day with likeminded people who want to turn 2020 into the best year of their lives.
I’ll be there to go through a number of strategies you can follow to not only decide what you would like to accomplish in 2020 but also show you ways you can turn those ideas into daily actionable steps. Plus, Kev Blackburn… THE Life Success Engineer will be kicking things off with his legendary lessons on turning your dreams into reality with his high energy, massive action session.
This is a workshop not to be missed and it’s in a part of the UK that is easily accessible, just off the M62 in Scunthorpe.
So, no matter where you are in the UK, come and join us in Scunthorpe for a day of discovery, planning and high energy inspiration with a group go incredible people. This is something you will never ever forget. PLUS…. There’s a good chance the mystery podcast voice will be making an appearance as well. Now there’s a reason to come and join if there ever was one.
All the details for the event are in the show notes.
Speaking of the mystery podcast voice, it’s now time for me t hand you over to her for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Nilesh. Nilesh asks… Hi Carl, I noticed that when I make plans for future I often forget about them and then after a few days I make new ones. It's really slowing down my growth and decreasing my productivity. Is there anything I can do about it?
Hi Nilesh, thank you for your question. I am sure this one will be very helpful to a lot of people.
If you are adding tasks about future plans and then almost immediately forgetting you added them one of two things is likely to be happening.
Firstly, you are not developing your ideas or plans outside your to-do list manager or secondly, you are not going over all your tasks, projects and areas of focus on a weekly basis. Or it could be a combination of both.
Of course, it could be your ideas and plans are not important enough to you which means you will forget them very quickly anyway.
Let’s deal with the first one—you are not developing your ideas properly.
Now, what I mean by this is from the moment we have an idea, that’s all you have. An idea. All ideas need some form of development and some time to incubate. If you are adding ideas straight into your to-do list manager’s inbox and then turning them into a project without fleshing them out, you are going find a lot of those ideas will disappear inside your to-do list never to be seen again.
Now, it’s okay to collect your ideas into your to-do list manager’s inbox, but before you turn it into a project or area of focus you should develop it first. That could be in a notes app or on a simple piece of paper. What is the outcome you want from this idea? Why do you want to do it? What's your motivation for wanting to do this project? And what steps or actions do you need to take to make this idea become reality?
These questions and more need developing before you turn it into a fully-fledged project in your to-do list. It could be that once you have developed it, you decide you no longer want to do it. Which is another reason for not turning everything into a project immediately. If after developing your idea you have no motivation for doing it, it will sink to the bottom of your projects and die a slow death.
Okay, so let’s assume you have fleshed out your idea and you decided it is something worth pursuing, what do you do next? Well, that means it’s time to move it to your to-do list manager.
Now, I pull out the tasks when I develop my ideas and put them at the bottom of my development note. This just makes it a lot easier to send everything over to my to-do list manager once I have planned out my idea. I can copy and paste the full list of tasks straight to Todoist and Todoist will create tasks for each line.
Another advantage of planning and fleshing out your ideas first is you get to see exactly what will be involved in doing the project. You can then make better decisions about what needs to happen next and more importantly when you will start the project. There have been many times when I had an idea and really really wanted to start it straight away. But after I had fleshed our my thoughts and ideas, I realised I really didn't have the time or resources available at that time to do it, so I was able to put the project into a holding area.
To avoid forgetting about the project once you have it in your holding area, all you need do is add a review task to the top of your action list. Something like “review this idea” and add a date to that one task.
I like to think of my holding area as something similar to how air traffic controllers ‘stack’ incoming flights in a ‘holding pattern’ before initiating the landing procedure. You cannot do all your projects at the same time, just like you cannot land all the planes at the same time. There has to be a sequence—a priority. Now those priorities depend on when a project is due, whether there is a genuine time sensitivity or the possibility of a missed opportunity if you do not start the project now. All of these factors need to be considered. And, of course, you can divert projects to another airport—or in our case delegate them to someone else.
Now to me, a review task does not necessarily mean I must start the project that day. All it means is I can decide if I want to start it. If I decide to start it, I will complete the decision task and date the first task that needs to be done.
If I am not ready to start the project, I will re-date the reminder task for a future date - usually one month later.
Developing ideas this way means there’s no way I can forget about an idea. There will always be a note in my notes app to back me up and I will have at the very least a review date in my task manager to ensure I am not forgetting anything important.
On the other hand, it could be you are not going over your projects and areas of focus on a weekly level—the weekly review. If you are not looking at and reviewing everything in your to-do list manager at least once a week, of course, things will get forgotten and missed. There’s simply far too much going on in our world for us to remember everything. That’s why the weekly review is so important—even more so today. And if you are the kind of person who is always having new ideas, you do need a place to keep those ideas for future reference and or development and then review them, to decide whether something is still relevant.
Just as air traffic controllers need to be aware of what they have on their radar screens, you too need to be aware of what you have in your holding area so accidents do not happen. Missed deadlines, incomplete projects and or missed opportunities. That’s where the weekly review comes in. It prevents those things from happening.
The thing is, if something is important enough, you will find the time to work on it. If it is not important enough to you, you will procrastinate and not do anything about it. It’s the old “if it’s important enough you will find a way, if it is not you will find an excuse” situation.
Another good reason for keeping your ideas in a notes app or notebook until you have fleshed them out is if the idea is something you are not really interested in doing, it will soon drop down the list of ideas in your notes. I regularly purge my ideas lists because a lot of ideas I have do not turn into projects. If I were to guess, the percentage of ideas I have that turn in to projects is less than twenty per cent. That means eighty per cent of my ideas will never get started.
Now, I do not delete those ideas, I archive them into a single note and review them every six to twelve months, or if I go through an ideas drought, I can pull up that note and see a list of all my past ideas. Often just going though those ideas can spark new, better ideas and I can develop those. Sometimes an old idea suddenly looks very attractive and I will start developing that then. No idea goes to waste and old ideas do not take up a lot of digital space.
So here you go, Nilesh. I hope that has helped. Try not to overthink things, keep it simple and understand that you cannot do everything all at once. You need to prioritise and make sure that the projects you are working on right now are the projects that you really do want to work on right now.
Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s question is all about using your calendar and how and why your calendar is your number one productivity tool
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Carl’s YouTube Channel Link
Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
----more----
Script
Episode 109
Hello and welcome to episode 109 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Before we get to the question, I’d like to let you know that if you are in the Apple ecosystem, I am currently running a special series of videos on my YouTube channel showing how to get the most out of Apple’s productivity apps as well as iCloud.
And if you want to learn how to build your very own productivity system using only Apple’s suite of apps, then I have updated my Create Your Own Apple Productivity System course which will show you how to build a system designed for you and the unique way in which you work.
Details of all these are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This weeks question comes from Tiago. Tiago asks: Hi Carl, I work on customer service and sometimes is difficult to lead with interruptions and emergencies from clients, colleagues and my boss. Do you have some tips for using my calendar appropriately to do my tasks and projects to get more work done?
Thank you, Tiago for your question. Now, this is something I believe strongly about - that is your most important productivity tool is not your to-do list, notes app or any other app. It’s the plain simple calendar. That’s because your calendar is the one app that tells you the truth about how much time you have each day. Your to-do list does not do that. Your to-do list is a list of tasks you need to complete.
More often than not, most people overestimate what they are capable of each day and find they have to reschedule tasks every day. The irony is when they do that a lot of people give up with to-do lists believing it’s the to-do lists fault not realising it is they who put tasks into a to-do list and a simple fix for constantly having to reschedule tasks is to not put so many tasks into the list in the first place. Basically get realistic.
Okay, so let's get back to the calendar. Why is it the most powerful productivity tool for you?
Well, firstly it shows you only the time you have available each day. Those precious 24 hours. You cannot change that and you cannot change the need for sleep, food and water. Those are the non-negotiables of life. You can try and squeeze time out of your sleep and eating time if you want, but you would only be damaging your health and well-being and it would unlikely lead to any improvement in the amount of quality of work you get done anyway.
Okay, so how do you use your calendar to maximise your productivity?
First up begin with the weekly review. This is where you can take a long-view of your calendar and see what time you have available in the week. Let’s say, for example, you have a training day on Wednesday and on Friday you are out of the office on a site visit. This means you have lost two ‘normal’ working days. So those two days are scheduled off and you would be wise not to add anything extra in those days.
This leaves you with three normal office workdays. Now, you may have a number of meetings to attend on some of those days, a conference call or two and various other non-negotiables. These all get put on your calendar first. They are, after all, non-negotiable.
Once you have all your non-negotiables on your calendar you can see how much time you have left. You can see the gaps. That’s what you have to do your regular tasks and project work.
Now if you are like most people you are going to discover you are looking at one to three hours each working day—not much more than that. You’ve probably felt you had eight hours. No, you don't, not when you take into account your daily meetings and other commitments.
This is why using your calendar as your foundational productivity tool makes sense. Your task list is just that—a list of tasks all with different time requirements. Looking at your to-do list is not going to tell you how much time you need for each task. Even if you label tasks with time estimates, they are only estimates. And while you can really only estimate how long something will take on your calendar at least when you do add something to your calendar you are blocking the time out to do that task. If that takes longer than the time you allocated you can allocate additional time later.
Review all your projects and areas of focus so you know what you need to work on next week. Make sure your meetings and commitments are on there first including your travel times (it’s amazing how many forget that part) then schedule out your project work.
Don’t be too specific here. Let’s say you have a ninety-minute block on Tuesday morning. All you need to do is write in “Work on project X”, then when Tuesday morning comes along you see that on your calendar and you can open your to-do list at that project and begin work.
Now, It does depend on what kind of work you do how you do this. If you’re a writer perhaps you could just write in “Writing time” and when you do your daily planning the night before you decide what you will write the next day. The key is to be general and not specific. You want to build flexibility into your calendar where possible. Just because you have control of your calendar does not mean emergencies and crises will not happen.
Once you have your work into your calendar next up take a look at your personal life. What are your plans for the evenings and weekends? Now here’s a very powerful trick if you are struggling to find time for exercise each week. Schedule your exercise time on your calendar. I see a lot of people scheduling exercise on their to-do lists and this does not work.
It doesn’t work because a lot of what we put on our to-do lists are ‘hope to do’ tasks and so at the end of the day, when you’ve been hit with the realities of the world, it’s likely you are not going to feel much like doing exercise. When it’s on a to-do list it’s too easy to ignore it and find excuses like “I don’t have time”. When it’s on your calendar you see it when you plan your day and you are mentally prepared to do it at the time to you have assigned and of course, you cannot use the excuse “I don’t have time”.
Okay, so now you have your calendar organised at a weekly level. This is like the big-picture view of your week. Now you need a daily review. This is where you spend ten to twenty minutes before you finish your day to process the work you have collected through the day - organise it where it needs to go - and look at your calendar to see what the day looks like for tomorrow. Often meetings that were scheduled have been cancelled, or you have new meetings to attend. A lot can change throughout the week that will knock your initial plans off. That’s okay. That’s just life.
This is why the daily review is important. Look at your calendar, decide what you have to do tomorrow and make sure you have a block of time to get your important project work done. Now whether you are in customer service or any other kind of work, you still need to find blocks of time to do your focused work. Thirty minutes, if that’s all you have, is better than nothing.
You will find even at a daily level you will have to move a few tasks around. That’s perfectly fine. You need not worry. As long as you are doing your daily review you will always be on top of what you have to do because you are making daily decisions about what you want to work on.
So, a daily review means you review your calendar for events you have planned for tomorrow. You review your to-do list for the tasks you have assigned for tomorrow and based on the amount of time you have available for tasks tomorrow you can reschedule your tasks or add tasks accordingly.
Remember, you only have twenty-four hours each day. That’s why your calendar is the most important tool it shows you how to fit everything you have to do into those twenty-four hours.
It also stops you from procrastinating. If you see you have thirty minutes between 9 AM and 9:30 AM to do some focused work and you waste that time thinking about what to do, you will know you have just wasted thirty minutes. This is why planning what you want to do the day before is so important. It prevents you from procrastinating and it stops you from wasting valuable time. You start the day knowing exactly how much time you have and what you want to get accomplished in that time. You don’t have time to procrastinate and you will see you don’t have any time to waste.
Finally, I would always suggest you schedule R&R time (rest and relaxation) It’s very easy to get caught up in work, to over schedule work on your calendar. I’ve done this a lot and it is not pleasant. Block time off for rest. You do not need to micro-manage your rest time. All you need is a block that just says “rest” or “R&R”. Then you decide in the moment what you want to do with that time. For me, Friday evenings between 6:00 pm and 10 pm are always blocked for R&R, so is Sunday evenings too… Generally.
And that really all there is to it. Make sure you schedule you big-picture stuff on a weekly level when you do your weekly review and then do a quick daily update when you do your daily review—and that’s only ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day—to make sure you are taking in to account any changes to your priorities that may come in on a daily basis.
I hope that has helped a little, Tiago. Thank you for your question. And thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast just send your question in via email - carl@carlpullein.com - or you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Have you started planning what you want to accomplish next year? If not, this week’s episode is a special episode to help get you started with your planning.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Business Productivity Mastery Webinar Registration link
Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 108
Hello and welcome to episode 108 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week’s episode is a little different in that there's no question and instead I want to talk to you about why you should be planning 2020 now.
Now before I get to that, I’d like to invite all of you to join me and Kev Blackburn in a webinar later this week. It’s on Saturday 16th November and we are going to show you how to balance a full-time job with a side project. That could be a business or a hobby you want to develop
All the details for the webinar are in the show notes and if you are following me on Facebook or Twitter I will be sharing the details there.
Okay, why should you be planning 2020 now?
Well, one of the many reasons why so many people fail to accomplish their yearly plans and goals is because often they get to the end of the year, that break between Christmas and the new year and start to think they should be doing something about plans for next year. This neither gives you the time to really think about what you want nor does it allow your subconscious mind to develop creative ways of making them happen.
Okay, before we go further, I have an annual planning sheet you can download for free from my website that can help you with this process. Just go to carlpullein.com and click on downloads from the menu at the top of the page. Everything on the downloads page is free.
So, how do you go about planning for the new year? First brainstorm ideas. Now, this does not mean you sit down for an hour or two and think about what you want to do, what it means is creating a note in your notes app or a piece of paper and adding to it over the next week or two. Anything that comes to your mind—write it down. When you allow your subconscious mind to do the work for you you will find you come up with things you haven't thought about for years. Trust your subconscious. It rarely lets you down.
So what areas of your life should you be thinking about? Well, first think about what you would like to change about yourself? Are you a “yes” person. Do you tend to say “yes” to new things a little too quickly? Are you a little lazy? Are you terrible at seeing plans through to the end?
When we dig deep it can be surprising what we find that could do with changing. This is why giving yourself plenty of time to let these things bubble up to the top is important.
Next up is lifestyle. What would you like to change about your lifestyle? Are you happy with the way you live? Would you like to move house? Change the way you travel to and from work? Change your daily routines? There’s a lot in the lifestyle section you could look at changing. Eating habits, social life, where you take your vacations. Put everything up for review. After all, the way you live your life is often the driver for your long-term success. If you spend all your free time vegetating on the sofa watching mind-numbing dramas, your health will suffer in the long-term and no matter what your plans are in the future you will never get chance to do them.
How would you like to change the way you work? This is quite a general question but the idea is to get you to question the way you work today. Are you happy? Do you enjoy the work you do? Are you starting and finishing your work at reasonable times? Do you want to change that? There’s a lot here you can think about.
The goal with the questions you ask about your work is to push you to do work that makes you proud. Work that leaves you feeling satisfied when you come home at the end of the day. The saddest thing for anyone is to be doing work that leaves you feeling empty and unfulfilled. Often it is not about changing your work or job—that can be very difficult—often it is about changing the way you look at your work.
I always found doing the daily admin boring and tedious. It was something I just did not enjoy doing. But, it is an essential part of the work I do. Student attendance records, feedback to the people who need feedback from coaching sessions. I always used to look at that part of my work as something not to look forward to.
It was when I realised that the admin and paperwork was an essential way for me to grow my company. To be able to measure my performance as well as the performance of my students and coaching clients that I understood that this was another way I could help my students and clients even more and the admin allowed me to analyse where I could make improvements and grow my business.
Now, this part of my work is something I look forward to doing. Writing the feedback is another way for me to help people and, for me, it is when I help people with their performance in life that I feel satisfied and happy with the work I do.
So, switching the way you look at your work could be all you need to change the way you feel about your work. Alternatively, it could be you want to change the type of work you do. If that’s the case, a question to ask is what do you have to do to do the career you want to pursue? Do you need to return to college? What extra training do you need?
Next up comes the challenge section. What can you do next year that will push you and challenge you? What have you been putting off that you know you should do but for some reason—fear or just not knowing exactly what you should do—you have not done anything about? This year I chose to get my hernia fixed. My fear of surgery had prevented me from doing anything about it, but it was preventing me from exercising in a way I wanted to exercise. It was a very hard decision to make, and in the end, I was forced into it. But I went through with it. Not only have I now fixed my hernia, I have also learned that there is very little I need to be fearful of.
Have you been putting off asking your partner to marry you? Have you always wanted to run a marathon but for one reason or another never committed yourself to do it? Challenging yourself is one way you can push yourself to grow. It also toughens you up mentally because once you realise you can do these things you have put off, you begin to realise you are capable of much more than you think you are.
Then you should think about the goals you want to achieve next year. Goals are the driving force of your energy every day. Often once you have completed the other parts, your goals will reveal themselves. When you look over your list you will see obvious goals. Running that marathon, or getting the extra qualifications so you can pursue the career you have dreamed of can all be turned in to goals for next year. This is why the goals section of this process comes towards the end.
One of my goals for next year is a fun goal which is to take a photo every day for a year and post it to Instagram. I have a new iPhone 11 Pro and that comes with an incredible camera. This means I can resume my hobby of photography. So, I have have been researching creative iphoneography techniques and I have relearned how Adobe Lightroom works. It’s a goal I am really looking forward to because not only will I have a record of my whole year, I will also be doing something to grow my creativity.
Finally, there is your bucket list. We all have a bucket list of some sort. Either it is written down in a journal or in an app like your Notes app or just in your head. Either way, choosing something from this list turns it from a wishful list to a reality list. My bucket list item for next year is to go to Australia. So when my wife finishes her master's degree in August, we will head off to Australia to do Tony Robbins’ Unleash The Power Within together and then spend a few days exploring Sydney. That’s going to be a trip of a lifetime!
So there you have it, the six areas you can spend some time over the next few weeks thinking about. Developing ideas and from around the middle of December turning them into actionable steps you can take from day one… That is 1st January.
That’s how you turn a year into a successful year. By giving yourself enough time to think about what you would like to accomplish before the first day and developing those ideas into something concrete and actionable. It’s not hard, in fact, it’s a lot of fun.
I hope you found this special episode useful. Remember it’s about collecting ideas, thinking about them and deciding what you will pursue next year. You don’t have to do everything you add to your list next year, there’s always 2021 and beyond. After all, most people overestimate what they can achieve in one year and underestimate what they can achieve in ten years. Play the long game and you are much more likely to accomplish the things you want to accomplish.
Thank you for listening to this episode. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Do you find you are still searching for that ‘perfect’ productivity app? Then this week’s episode is definitely one for you.
Links:
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Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Create Your Own Apple Productivity System Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 107
Hello and welcome to episode 107 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week we return to that polarising question of what app is right for you and how do you choose the right app or apps.
But before we get to this week’s question, in case you missed it, my Create Your Own Apple Productivity course has now been updated for 2019. That means there’s a whole new section on the new Reminders app as well as updates for Notes and Calendar.
If you are already enrolled in the course, this is a free update for you and if you are not, and you are quick, you can pick up this course for just $39.99 on the early-bird programme. But you will need to be quick as this discount will end very soon.
If you don’t want to invest in expensive productivity apps and want to just use the built-in apps that come with your iPhone, iPad and Mac, then this course is perfect for you as it will give you the know-how to build your own system using just the Apple productivity apps including Calendar, Notes, Reminders and iCloud. It’s all there in this course.
There’s a link to the full details of this course in the show notes to this podcast.
Ok, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tim. Tim asks: Hi Carl, I've been looking for a really good to-do list manager for years and just cannot find the right one. Do you have any advice on finally finding the right app?
Hi Tim, thank you for your question. My answer would be “no I don’t” and there’s a very good reason why.
that's because the tools you use—whether that is a to-do list manager or notes app or calendar—really doesn't matter. What matters is your system or framework.
You see no app will ever do the work for you. All a productivity app will do is show you what you need to see when you need to see it. Of course, you can add dates, times and tags, labels or contexts to narrow down the lists, but essentially all these tools will ever do is show you what you have to do. Doing the work is completely in your hands and that is not going to change anytime soon.
So what it all comes down to is how you organise your lists. All you are going to get with different apps are just different ways to list things. You may get some different colours, some may show you your projects and tasks in a Kanban board style, others may show you your lists in a traditional list format but they are all essentially doing the same thing, they are showing you the tasks you inputted into the app. That’s because they are just lists.
When you base your whole system on an app, if the app updates or, as in the recent case with Todoist, changes some of the features. If that happens, you can find your whole productivity system no longer works and then you are going to have problems.
This is why I preach building a system around COD—this is a stripped-down absolute basic System anyone can adopt—All you need to do is collect everything that has your attention into a trusted place. That could be a piece of paper you carry around with you in your pocket or it could be your phone’s built-in notes app. It really doesn't matter where you are collecting. All that matters is you are collecting and you trust you will look at what you collected every twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Having too many places to collect stuff can be overwhelming as you will have multiple places to look.
This is why in the GTD world we seek the UCT—the Ubiquitous Collection Tool—that’s a tool you can carry with you everywhere you go. David Allen has his notetaker wallet, Richard Branson and Warren Buffett have their little pocket notebooks. It really doesn’t matter what you use. The only thing that matters is you collect everything into it and you process and organise what you collected every twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
Organising what you collected does require something a little more structured. You want to be able to find what you collected when you need it quickly. It also needs to be accessible from all your devices these days. Travel itineraries, for example, are best when they are accessible on all your devices. Here again, though, you do not need anything too complex.
When you organise everything you collected, complexity will be your enemy. Complexity will slow you down. Finding what you want, when you want it and as quickly as possible, that's the key. So a little thought about how you file stuff is important.
Do you remember things by topic? By the people or team involved? Maybe you would prefer to see things organised by project or areas of focus. What’s vitally important here is that you organise your stuff by the way you naturally think. Not because someone else organises things that way.
When you organise things by the way someone else does—because it looks cool or efficient—you are going to find yourself with difficulties. What works for one person is not necessarily going to work for you. This is why how you organise your stuff needs a lot of careful thought.
A few years ago many in the Evernote world jumped on the Michael Hyatt’s way of tagging notes with symbols to indicate: what, when, who, reference and miscellaneous. You could see the beauty of this system very easily, but if you stepped back and thought about it you could also see the complexity involved and the issues you would have if you got a note that was not quite a “what” but also not quite a “who”.
This system soon received a lot of criticism and eventually disappeared as the latest way to structure your notes. The thing is, this system worked for Michael. It would not necessarily work for anyone else and it didn’t.
Files are another thing too. I organise my files by date and tags. Apple has system-wide tagging which allows me to view my documents by tag. So, I categorise my work by the different businesses I run and my personal stuff. I have three main tags that represent these three areas of my life. It makes it much easier for me to find what I am looking for as well as file my work. But, I know this way of organising my files would not work for everyone else.
You see there are so many factors involved. The type of work you do, how your brain organises things and what tools you have available. Your company’s security systems may not allow you to have work files on cloud-based servers accessible outside company property.
Now, I think a lot of this comes down to an individual’s expectations. We see a super cool video on YouTube (and I might be guilty of causing this) and see how another person organises their projects, notes and tasks and think WOW! If I set up my system like that I will get a ton of work done.
This is never going to be true. You see it doesn’t matter how super cool and organised your stuff is. If you are spending too much time inside your productivity apps reorganising, filing and fiddling with the settings you are not doing work. You’re not being productive at all. You are procrastinating and it’s the worst kind of procrastination because you are convincing yourself you are doing work when you are not doing work at all. You’re fiddling and that is pure procrastination.
So, Tim, if you want to find the ‘perfect’ app, create the ‘perfect’ system first. The system comes first then the apps. In fact, if you create a great system, that system would work with any app.
A great way to test your system is to test it out on paper first. If you can create a system and workflow that you can use using a simple notebook and pen, then you have a system that could work with almost any app.
Fundamentally, you need to make sure you collect everything into a place you trust. This place should be something you have with you at all times. Today, that is usually a mobile phone or wallet. You need to give yourself time each day to process and organise what you collected in a way you can find quickly when you need it and you should be spending at least 90% of your time doing the work.
When you get those basics right, then you have a system that will reduce your stress, massively increase your productivity and give you a lot more time to do the things you want to do with the people you want to do them with. It will do that because you will not have to spend much time in your apps playing around with settings, colours or anything else your apps allow you to do.
I hope that has helped, Tim. Remember, get your system right and the apps will take care of themselves.
Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget if you are in the Apple ecosystem, check out my Apple Productivity course. It might just be the ‘perfect’ system for you.
It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Do you need to reset? That’s the question being answered on this week’s podcast.
Links:
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Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The Ultimate Goal Planning Course
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 106
Hello and welcome to episode 106 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week it’s all about stepping back and regaining control over your time and what you are working on. It’s very easy to find ourselves being caught up in day to day work that has no real impact on our overall goals or plans. To have a built-up backlog that is causing us to feel stressed out and overwhelmed. And to feel we cannot take any time out to regain control and perspective. In this week’s podcast, I share a few strategies that can help you to take that time out and to regain some control and perspective.
Now before we do that, I just want to give you a heads up that my October special offers are about to come to an end.
As we are now just about eight weeks away from the end of the year, we do not have a lot of time left to plan out what we would like to accomplish in 2020. To help you with that process I have a very special offer on my Ultimate Goal Planning course. This is a course that will focus you on what is important to you. It will help you formulate your ideas and then create a clear, easy to follow strategy to make those ideas, goals and plans come to life.
Normally this course is $59.99, but for now, until the end of this month (31st October) you can pick up this course for just $49.99. That’s an incredible investment in yourself. $50 for creating a plan that could give you many thousands of dollars in return.
And for those of you who feel you need a little extra help, my three-month coaching programme is now just $295.00. That’s a saving of 15% on the usual price. My coaching programmes give you a plan and guidance, unlimited calls, written feedback after each call with clear action steps and someone to hold you accountable to your goals, plans and intentions. $295 is incredible value for a life plan that can elevate you to areas you have only ever dreamed of going.
So get yourself signed up now before these incredible offers come down.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Ethan. Ethan asks: Hi Carl, I hope you can help me. I am feeling completely stressed out and overworked. I just do not feel I can get on top of my work. I have tried everything, read all the books, listened to all the podcasts and while I do get inspired sometimes, I just cannot get in control of my time or my work. Is there anything I can do that will help me to get in control and start over without taking time off work?
Thank you for your question, Ethan.
So let’s define exactly what we mean by a reset. A reset is where you stop doing what you are currently doing, step back, look at the larger landscape of what is going on in your life. Reassess your priorities and start over. It means no adding anything else to your to-do list. It means saying no to any new commitments and renegotiating existing ones.
It’s quite dramatic and is a way to interrupt a soul-destroying pattern of stress, overwhelm and a feeling you cannot keep up with the demands being thrown at you.
Because of the severity of what you are doing in a reset, a lot of people fear doing it. There’s a sense that you will be letting everyone down—your coworkers, friends and family. Of course, this is part of the problem. You’ve stopped putting yourself first and the demands of others have taken over your life. That’s one of the reasons you feel you need to stop and reset now.
It’s a horrible cycle to be stuck in and one you really do need to interrupt.
So how do you interrupt this pattern? You interrupt it by stopping. You need to get away from the daily cycle you are in and step back. You need to take a few days off and you need to get away from your daily routines.
Now, for most, this is the hardest part of a reset. They believe they cannot stop and step back. They, rather selfishly, think that the world, the company they work for, their friends and family cannot exist without them. This is utter utter nonsense.
The world, your company, family and friends can survive without you and quite possibly right now they would be better off without you.
You are not going to be making your best decisions at the moment anyway. Your brain is overloaded. Stepping back and taking a few days to reevaluate your priorities, objectives and systems would be a much more effective thing to do.
You see, when you are stressed out and overwhelmed, your decision-making skills reduce. When you are not making your best decisions, you become a burden on your team. That’s not helping your team.
Stepping back, regaining control of your work, your priorities and your system is helping your team because it means when you do step back in, you step back with a clear mind, a fresh perspective and a lot more energy.
So how do you do a reset?
First stop. Stop everything and take some time away. That means you talk to your boss, colleagues, customers and clients and step away. You have to move away from the cause of the overwhelm and that means you have to step away from your work.
This is where it is often best to go find yourself a quiet coffee shop or cafe and sit down with a piece of paper. And yes, I said a piece of paper. Technology is likely to be the cause of some of the stress and overwhelm and you want to remove all these sources. It also means you have no excuse for having your messages and emails and other electronic communication means open. For now, you have a block on new inputs. So turn off all those electronic devices and just sit down with a pen and piece of paper and begin writing down everything on your mind.
Do not worry about categorising anything at this stage. You just need to get everything off your mind. Project work, commitments that are bothering you, problems and issues. Anything. Just write them all down as they come to mind.
This process can take a couple of hours, it often takes longer. Just keep going until you feel you have squeezed out everything that has been bothering you for the last few months or weeks.
Once you have done that. Fold the paper away and go for a walk in nature. Get a bus or drive to a park or the countryside and just go out and enjoy nature. Get away from concrete, screens, commuter noise and just get into nature. For those of us in the northern hemisphere, we have the amazing beauty of autumn and those incredible colours. Enjoy them. For those of you in the Southern Hemisphere, you have fantastic spring and the warming temperatures. Just get outside and enjoy your surroundings.
Take in some deep breathes and enjoy the freedom.
Take as long as you want. One or two days is a good length of time for this.
When you feel ready, when you feel relaxed then you can open up the piece of paper again and start to go through it deciding what is important and what is not.
What you will find is a lot of the stuff on that list is not really all that important. Most of it can be delegated to other people, some of it would only require a two to three-minute phone call and others could be dropped completely.
The remaining stuff on your list then needs to be categorised into what needs dealing with first and so on. You cannot do it all at once—trying to do that is what put you into a stressed out, overwhelmed situation in the first place. Use your calendar to assign days to the work you want to do (keyword there… “want’ to do) and make sure you build in enough flexibility to handle new stuff coming in.
Now for the biggest challenge. Email. If you follow this advice, you will have accumulated quite an email backlog. The best advice I can give you here is do a soft email bankruptcy. That means you select all the email in your inbox and move it to a new folder called “Old Inbox”. You want to start back with a clear inbox and no backlog.
Now the thing with doing a soft email bankruptcy is that 95% of the email in your inbox will not be all that important. If it is important, the sender will send it again or will chase you for a response. So, stop worrying. There will be a trigger.
The final part of this exercise is to consider why you found yourself in this situation in the first place. What was the cause? Now, I know it is easy to say that it was the amount of work being thrown at you. You have to understand that many people have a lot of work to do but manage to stay on top of things. Usually, we find ourselves stressed out because we don’t prioritise well or we say yes too easily. These are the underlying problems. Not the amount of work we have to do. Look for the underlying problems and take action to eliminate them.
Okay, I know it is hard to take some time out and stop. It’s particularly hard if you are a business owner, a leader, a parent or responsible for sales. But you also have to understand if you are not performing well within your role or roles then you may as well not be there at all. You have become part of the problem and not helping things. Step back, reassess, and come back refreshed and energised. Deal with the backlog and return to a clean slate. That is when you will start making better decisions and your performance in all areas will improve.
I hope that has helped, Ethan and good luck. Take some time out my friend.
Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.
This week's episode is a little different as I have been away. However, all will return to normal next week, so please enjoy this episode on the three (four?) stages of project success taken from my Productivity Mastery Series over on YouTube.
Links:
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Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
How to use Evernote for your 2020 Planning
The Annual Planning sheet Download
Podcast 104
Do you ever wish you could convince your co-workers to be better organised and more productive? Well, this week that’s what I am digging in to.
Links:
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Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
How to use Evernote for your 2020 Planning
The Annual Planning sheet Download
Script
Episode 104
Hello and welcome to episode 104 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Have you ever wished you could convince your teammates and the people you work with to be a little more organised and productive? Well, that’s the topic I am tackling this week.
Now, before we get into this week’s question, I’d like to point out to all you wonderful listeners that we have just entered the last three months of the year. Yes, 2019 has entered its final few months and that means it’s the best time to begin thinking about what you want to achieve next year.
Now, this is just the thinking stage. You do not have to plan anything yet. When you begin the process in October you give yourself plenty of time to think of, ponder, wonder and reject ideas for next year. It also means that you have time to really go deep and consider all things in your life.
To help you, I have an annual planning template that you can download for free from my website—carlpullein.com— All you have to do is go to the downloads page and there, near the top, is the PDF file waiting for you to download it and start filling in.
If you are an Evernote user, you can also add the Evernote template to your Evernote by clicking on the link in the show notes. I did a video last week on how to complete the planning sheet, so if you want to learn more head over to my YouTube channel and watch the Evernote video from last week.
Okay, on with the show and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Kelly. Kelly asks: Hi Carl, I have always been an organised person but I work in a team of people who never write anything down and are always forgetting deadlines or not replying to messages and emails in a timely manner. Is there anything I can do to get my team more organised?
Ooh, great question, Kelly, and one with a simple answer—no.
You see the difficulty here is to become better organised and more productive is a choice. It’s not as if there is a switch you can pull and everyone in your office will start following GTD or COD.
However, while I was thinking about how I would answer your question, Kelly, I remembered a time when I worked in a car dealership and the general manager, whose name was Andrew Donovan, was one of the most organised people I have ever met.
Andrew wrote everything down and when he asked you to do something, you knew he would not forget to follow up with you.
Now, this was before smartphones and computers on every desk—it was the early nineties—and Andrew’s system was simple, yet brilliant.
Whenever Andrew had a meeting he would write everything down on to a sheet in a reporters notebook. Everyone in the meeting saw him do this. So you knew if he asked you to do something, it was written down. Once the meeting was over, Andrew would then add the action and follow up items to his leather A4 diary which went everywhere he went.
What I noticed was that Andrew’s system was soon adopted by many of the departmental managers and that trickled down to other team members.
Now, I don't know your position in your company, Kelly, but whatever your role, that is perhaps one way you could change things within your team. Set an example. If your colleagues and partners see how effective you are at getting your work done, how you always respond to emails quickly and effectively and hit your milestones and deadlines consistently, then they will want to know how you do it.
Your question got me thinking about how I would go about influencing colleagues and partners who have never been particularly organised or even interested in being organised before, I realised if I were teaching someone who has never been very organised or is not in the habit of writing things down I would not start with technology.
Technology might be something we are interested in, most people are not. Learning how to use an app like Trello or Todoist can be difficult for someone not used to using anything more sophisticated than their email or messaging app.
Most people still have pieces of paper and pens on their desks though. So the trick is to get them into the habit of writing things down. In the past, I have introduced people to apps and failed miserably. Not everyone is into technology, so pushing colleagues and partners to use apps like Todoist, Trello or Asana is often a waste of time. The learning curve is too steep. Let them discover apps for themselves.
Instead, encourage them to keep a list on their desk.
Andrew got his management team to change by being open. In meetings, everyone saw him write down actionable items. Every time anyone met Andrew in his office his diary was open on his desk in full view of anyone visiting so you could see very clearly how he organised his work. His system was simple and if you asked him about it, he would explain it in simple terms. That’s what you need to do. Whenever anyone asks you about how you stay organised, keep it simple. Don’t go off into the wonders of technology—that might excite us, but it does not excite everyone.
Now that said, I have a few clients who use Todoist and have found they can share a team project with their staff and within a short period of time their staff are using Todoist to manage their own projects. How you do this is create the project in Todoist and then share it with your team. (in this case, or other apps that you can share projects such as Trello and Asana would work too) This works well with simple projects and you will have to manage the project closely until your staff and colleagues are using it regularly. It will require a lot of patience from you, but if you can get your team and colleagues onboard, you will have begun the process of building a highly organised team.
If you want to do this, I have a free downloadable PDF file showing how to set up Todoist and I also have a FREE online course for beginners too. These are all designed to help you or anyone else for that matter get started with Todoist. It might help get your team involved if you are a Todoist user of course.
Another way to help your colleagues become better organised is to encourage better use of calendars. The simple calendar is one of the most powerful productivity tools out there and almost everyone knows how to use their calendar.
Show your colleagues how to block time and explain why they should be doing it. Show them how to add simple to-dos —Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar and Apple’s calendar all allow you to add to-dos in one form or another. You can create to-dos as all-day events and they will then show up at the top of your calendar--this is really how Andrew was organising things in his diary.
The reporters' notebook was his collection tool, and he would then organise when he would do the work or follow-up the work in his diary. You can easily teach this to your colleagues. It’s essentially about having a place to collect the things you have to do and are committed to doing and then spread the tasks out over the week in your calendar. It’s simple, does not involve a lot of technology or learning curves and you can see how you are doing as you go through the week.
The reality is, though, if your colleagues cannot see a benefit for themselves being better organised and more productive no amount of persuasion by you will change anything. The best approach is to lead by example. Show your colleagues how much more relaxed you are, how you are able to go home on time and enjoy a great social life.
Be willing to explain the way you do things in a broken down, non-tekkie way and be patient. People do come round if you can show them how much more in control and stress-free you are. But never boast or criticise the way other people do (or not do) things. If you criticise and find fault all you will do is turn them against you. Be positive, encourage and stay humble. Nobody wants to follow a big head.
Thank you, Kelly, for your excellent question and thank you to all of you for listening. If you would like your question answering on this show, then please send me a quick email - carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links and freebies are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Do you find you are great a creating a system and then soon find yourself not using it, or falling off the wagon as we say? It happens to us all from time t time and that’s the topic of this week’s question.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl’s YouTube Channel
Carl’s Blog
Script
Episode 103
Hello and welcome to episode 103 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I show you how to maintain your productivity system once you have it up and running and give you a few tips on how not to fall off the productivity wagon once you are on it.
Now, before we get into this week’s question, for those of you who don’t know, I also have a YouTube channel and a blog where I post a lot of productivity and time management content each week. Over on YouTube, I focus a lot on Todoist, Drafts and Evernote as well as some useful tips and tricks. And my weekly blog dives deep into some of the issues that come up from time to time and how to overcome them.
Details on all these additional resources for you can be found in the show notes.
And… If you haven’t already taken my FREE beginners guide to productivity, then that is a great place to start with your own system. It will give you the ideas and know-how to creating a system for you built around some very strong principles. Again, you can find all the details for that in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Isaac. Isaac asks: Hi Carl, I am really struggling to find any consistency in using my system. I like my system and it basically works well, but after using it for a week or two I find myself not using it and I start missing things. Is there anything I can do to stop falling off the wagon?
Great question, Isaac. I find a lot of people struggle with this one. They spend a lot of time creating a fantastic system and then after a few days or weeks stop collecting and organising and then quickly everything stops working.
Now, there are a few reasons why this might be happening. The most common one is creating an overly complex system.
You see there’s a lot of fun to be had in developing your own system. For many of us solving problems is fun and building your very own productivity system, choosing the apps to use, setting up the project folders, the collection methods and deciding how we will organise our project support materials is all part of the fun.
The problems start happening once we have built the system and start to use it in our day to day world. That's when we come up against reality and discover that what we originally thought would work well doesn't work so well and involves a lot of processing time. Now it’s no longer a lot of fun. Now it seems as though all we are doing is fixing problems and cracks which means we are still not as productive to better at using our time as we want to be.
Another part of becoming better organised and more productive is moving from our old habits and installing new ones. If you are not accustomed to collecting everything —writing everything down or collecting it into a digital to-do list manager and then processing it — it can be hard to get into the habit of spending the necessary ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day to do that.
Likewise, if you are not planning your day before you finish, you are not instilling the right kind of habits you need to maintain your system.
It’s the installation of these habits that will ensure your system continues to work.
How long does that take? Well, that depends but a study by the University of London found that to install a new habit takes 66 days. So it is going to take you around two months of consistent practice and self-discipline to take your new system and have it running smoothly and consistently.
This is where you need to apply your most effort. Developing the right habits to make sure you are maintaining your system. Once the maintenance becomes a habit, then you will find everything works much better and you are much less likely to stop using your system.
Getting into the habit of collecting and organising every day is the best way to start. If you are not collecting everything, that’s where the first cracks in your system will open.
One of the best things you can do to begin with is to find the quickest way to collect something. Set up your phone so you can collect a task or an event or note in as few button presses as possible. If you use an iPhone set up Siri to collect for you too. The least resistance you have to collect something means you will collect everything. That’s the goal. When you process you can decide if you want to keep it or delete it.
Now that process will take longer if you keep changing your system or apps. As soon as you change an element in your collection, processing or organisation structure you will have a new habit to develop. If you are changing your apps, you will have another app to learn.
This is why I always recommend you focus on developing your system and not play around with too many apps. Learning to habitually follow a system is much easier than learning to use a new app.
When it comes to processing this is where you need your calendar’s help. For me, I schedule 9:30 to 10:00 pm to process every Monday to Thursday. I don’t need to process on a Sunday because I do my weekly review on a Sunday afternoon and on Friday’s and Saturday’s I don’t have too much coming in. I will often do a quick scan of my inboxes to see if there is anything I need to be aware of before my big weekly review on a Sunday, but generally, anything collected on a Friday and Saturday can wait until Sunday.
I do plan the day on a Friday and Saturday. Planning only takes a few minutes because all it involves in checking my calendar and reviewing my dated tasks for the day. I can do this in less than five minutes and as this is a habit for me it would feel very strange if I went to bed not knowing what I wanted to accomplish tomorrow.
Give yourself thirty minutes the end of the day to process and plan. Now you can either do this after you get home in the evening or you can do it before you leave your workplace. Both work very well. The advantage of doing it before you leave your workplace is you can leave work behind when you walk out the door at the end of the day. There’s something about finishing your work day by processing your inboxes, planning what you will work on tomorrow when you arrive and then closing down and leaving the office. It clears your mind and allows you to enjoy the evenings without having to worry about anything at work.
The key to making this work is you schedule it on your calendar. If you are doing it before you finish work, block the last thirty minutes of your day on your calendar. If you are delayed and find yourself stuck in a meeting at the end of the day, don’t use that as an excuse to not do your processing and planning. Just add an extra thirty minutes to your day. You will thank yourself for it later. If you choose to do your processing and planning when you get home in the evening, make sure you set it at a time you will not be disturbed. If you have young kids, for example, wait until they go to bed so you get yourself twenty to thirty minutes of peace and quiet to do it.
Your processing and planning time needs to become a part of who you are. It is something you just do. When you reach that stage, then you are never likely to fall off the wagon again. It is just something you do like brushing your teeth or taking a shower every day.
Now if you have just developed a new system, then there are going to be a few issues. Things you thought would work in theory don’t work in practice, or you find collecting or processing is taking too long—which can happen when you are just starting out—then you should re-evaluate your system. The truth is there are always some things that don’t work exactly how you want them to. When you find that, review and adjust. It does not mean you need to start all over again. Often you just need to make a few little adjustments.
If you find collecting ideas and commitments while working at your computer is cumbersome, then see if you can set up some keyboard shortcuts. Another one you could do is have a Chrome set up where your calendar, notes and to-dos are all conveniently open in tabs. This is a great way to get your information quickly and conveniently.
If you find yourself forgetting to do something—like planning or processing—set up a repeating to-do task to remind you to do it. Make sure you get the notifications to come up on your phone or computer.
There are a lot of different ways you can adjust things to make it all work seamlessly and this will be something you will need to do. But it never means you have to tear everything up and start over. All it means is you adjust and move.
So, there you go, Isaac. I hope that has given you some food for thought and will help you develop the right habits. Remember, it’s going to take a while to develop the habits and you will need to make some adjustments. That said, I can promise you if you stick with it and make the necessary little adjustments it will be worth it in the end.
Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Remember, if you have a question you would like answering all you need to do is email me - carl@carlpullein.com or DM on Twitter or Facebook. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
What state do you find yourself in most days? Reactive or proactive? That’s the topic of this week’s question on the Working With Podcast.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 102
Hello and welcome to episode 102 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week we are talking about your state and the state you find yourself working in most days. This is not something I find a lot of people think about much. Instead, most people try to get through the day as best they can hoping to survive without having too many issues erupt. Yet, it does not really have to be like that and this week I will explain why.
But before we get to that…
Don’t forget, if you want to gain access to some of my shorter courses, you can on the Skillshare platform.
If you are not familiar with Skillshare, Skillshare is a subscription-based learning centre where you pay a monthly subscription and have access to thousands of shortish courses. I learnt Adobe Indesign and iPhoneography on Skillshare a couple of years ago. It’s a fantastic place to learn about so many amazing things from coding, productivity, creativity and photography. It’s well worth a subscription.
And, if you use the link in the show notes you can get yourself 2 months of FREE access to Skillshare’s classes. You could learn a lot in 2 months and by signing up using the link here, you help me too. Now that sounds like an awesome deal.
So whatever it is you want to learn, Skillshare will have courses for you. Take a look and if you see something you like use the link in the show notes to get yourself two months of premium courses for free.
Okay It’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Rachael. Rachael asks, Hi Carl, I’m one of those people who reads everything they can about being more organised and efficient. The problem I have is I always feel I am behind and never on top of all my work and commitments. Is this normal or is there something I am not doing quite right?
Hi Rachael, thank you for your question.
I don’t think you are doing anything wrong at all. What is likely to be happening is you are finding out that no matter what you do, the work, commitments, decisions and interruptions never stop. That’s just the world we live in today. There’s always something else. I say “the world we live in today”, but in reality, all these commitments, decisions and interruptions have always been there. The difference today is it is difficult to compartmentalise them.
What I mean by that is before we were connected to the always-on world via our smartphones, tablets and laptops, work email could only be dealt with when we were at the office, so when we left the office for the day, that was it. Work was over and we could turn our attention to our personal lives. That does not happen today. Instead, today we are exposed to a constant stream of notifications, interruptions, news and requests and unless you set yourself some barriers, you will feel stressed out, over-worked and out of control.
If you do feel you are always behind, that is often a symptom of not being fully aware of the big picture of what’s going on in your world. One of the biggest benefits of taking some time each week to step back and really look at what you have going on in your life is you get to see where you are on the journey. How you are doing with the projects you are committed to at work and in your own personal life and how you are doing with your goals and objectives. This is what most people are not doing but if you are not doing that, how are you measuring your progress? How do you know where you are? Who’s controlling the timeline of your life? You or the many people you connect with personally and professionally?
Without that knowledge—knowing where you are with your projects and goals—then you will not be making the right decisions about what to work on next. You will be working on the things that are the loudest and most urgent, and all that does is create more loud and urgent tasks coming your way every day because you are reacting to the work rather than making intelligent decisions about the work you do each day in a proactive way.
Let me give you an example of this:
A reactive person waits for urgent email before taking action. The belief here is if it’s out of mind it’s out of sight. Now that may well be true, but while it is out of sight it is growing into a monster of a problem to deal with. Instead of a regular check-in on a project to make sure it is moving in the right direction and the right work is getting done, which would take five to ten minutes, you wait for the loud, urgent email screaming at you about how the customer is very unhappy because they are still waiting for their order to arrive. Now not only do you have to expedite the order—often costing a lot more money than had you processed the order in the normal way—you also have to deal with an angry customer, (and when you call them to explain, they can talk for a very long time) get everybody on your team working on this one crisis and your stress levels increase massively.
In all, what could have taken a few minutes two or three times a week, has caused you and the entirety of your team to lose a whole morning, rushing around dealing with a crisis that could have been averted and creating more little monsters because you did not have time to check those. It becomes a vicious circle. You deal with one crisis and another appears and on it goes.
Instead, if you shift to a more proactive state, you make sure you are aware of what is going on within all your open projects. Problem projects are carefully monitored and potential crises anticipated and steps are taken to minimise their impact on your work. This shift in state does not take a lot of work or time, and when it is done consistently, it will save you a huge amount of time because you will have a lot fewer crises to deal with.
So how do you make this shift in state? How do you go from being in a reactive state to a proactive state?
Well, the first step is to get yourself organised. You need to know where everything is so you can access whatever you need when you need it quickly. If you are using multiple filing systems you are creating monsters. You won’t remember where everything is. Ideally, have one single storage system. Where possible use a cloud storage service such as Google Drive, Apple iCloud or Microsoft OneDrive. If your company insists you use their storage system that’s okay. All your work-related files, documents and or digital stuff goes there. You can then have a personal storage system for your personal stuff.
Next up, start using your calendar properly. Make sure the calendar view you have contains all your commitments professional and personal. It is not very smart to try and run two entirely different calendars in the hope of creating a fictional separation of your work and personal life. You need to see your commitments and events for the whole day in one place. That way you will know if you will have the energy to perform all your commitments all day. If you see on your calendar that you are doing a workshop all day and you are the trainer, in the evening you plan to do two hours of cross-fit, you may find that you are asking a little too much of your body for one day. Instead, you could decide to drop the two-hour cross-fit session and do a one hour walk with your partner instead. The two-hour cross-fit session can be done on a different day in the week. Being in a proactive state allows you to see this kind of conflicts before they happen so you can take steps to reduce their impact on your mental and physical wellbeing.
Finally, do a process and review session before you close down the day. Process all the things you have collected that day, get them put into their rightful place and then review what you have scheduled and planned for tomorrow. Once you have done that, step back, relax and breathe. You know what you have to perform tomorrow, you know you have the time and you have the built-in flexibility to manage the unknown that will inevitably come up.
How much time does it take to keep yourself in a proactive state? About thirty minutes each day. That’s all it takes.
Those thirty minutes allow you enough time to review the important things, prevent little issues growing into uncontrollable monsters and helps you to stay focused on the important things—the things that will move you forward on your projects and your goals. Those thirty minutes allow you to stay in control of your time.
It’s not difficult. But just having the knowledge is not enough. You have to commit yourself to make this a daily habit. It is like when on a diet, you know eating the bowel of carrots will help you to lose weight, but you eat the chocolate cake instead. You will never lose weight that way. You know that, but people still eat the chocolate cake. Knowing is not enough. You have to use that knowledge to make better decisions and take action.
I hope that has helped, Rachael. Thank you so much for your question.
And thank you to you too for listening. This podcast is for you and I hope you are getting a lot from it. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering, then just get in touch either by email, carl@carlpullein.com or by DMing me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Do you have to have a productivity system? Well, that’s this week’s question and finding the right one for you.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Get 2 FREE months of Skillshare Premium using this link
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 101
Hello and welcome to episode 101 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I am frequently asked about my own productivity system and how to set things up the way I set them up. The problem here is that what works for me may not work for you.
They way I work, the way I think and the way I organise my files have been created over many years and are a result of all those things above plus the work I do. You will be different. Your work is different the way you think is different and your goals and objectives in life will be different.
In this week’s episode I answer a question about this and why it causes so many people to give up trying to organise their lives around a few simple systems.
Before we get in to this week’s question I want to say that if any of you are in the Skillshare learning programme, then many of my shorter courses are on Skillshare.
If you are not familiar with Skillshare, Skillshare is a subscription based learning centre where you pay a monthly subscription and have access to thousands of shortish courses. I learnt Adobe Indesign on Skillshare a couple of years ago. It’s fantastic place to learn about so many amazing things from coding, productivity, creativity and photography. It’s well worth a subscription.
And, if you use the link in the show notes you can get yourself 2 months of FREE access to Skillshare’s classes. You could learn a lot in 2 months and by signing up using the link here, you help me too. Now that sounds like an awesome deal.
So, help yourself and help me at the same time and get yourself signed up for Skillshare .
Okay, onto the question, and that means handing you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from James. James asks: Hi Carl, I love this podcast. My question is: all the various productivity experts tell us to follow this system or that system and I find it all confusing. Could you tell me which is the best productivity system to follow so I don’t have to keep experimenting?
Thank you, James, for your question. I completely understand how confusing things can get with so many bits of advice out there. A lot of the advice, and I have been guilty of this myself, pushes people towards a specific way of organising and managing their work. In reality, every one of us are different and what might work for me, and the way I think, is not necessarily going to work for everyone else.
This is one of the reasons why these days I show many different ways to manage Todoist and Evernote on my YouTube channel because there really are a multitude of different ways to manage your time and your work.
That said, there are also some fundamentals that if you skip, no amount of ways you organise your stuff will help. Those fundamentals are:
Collecting everything. If you not collecting your tasks, commitments and appointments into a trusted place then you will rely on your head to remember everything. Which means you won't remember everything. Relying on your head to remember everything is what leads to the feelings of overwhelm and stress. You brain does not know how to manage all those inputs. Are they short-term reminders? Long-term? Your brain does not know how to distinguish between these, so it will remind you to talk to your partner about next years summer holiday while you are on a stage pitching your latest product to four thousand prospective buyers.
Once you have collected everything, how you organise it matters. If you collect everything into just one list, soon that list will become huge and overwhelming to the point where you no longer want to look at it. When that happens the list become meaningless.
If nothing else you need a list for your work stuff and your home stuff. After that, how you organise it is really up to you. You might prefer to organise by your projects, areas of focus or context, tag or label. That’s really up to you.
After that, all you need focus on is doing the work. That’s why COD (Collect, Organise and Do) is just a framework. How you organise things inside that framework is up to you and that is important. The organising part needs to be unique to how you work.
If you are new to getting yourself better organised, experiment for a while. See what works best. From my coaching practice, I have learnt how we organise depends on how our brains are wired for this sort of thing. It’s part of my job, as a coach, to figure out the best way for you. A lot of that can be trial and error.
The good news is it is a lot of fun learning the best way.
I have one client where their to-do list is just a list of tasks and all their planning and task management happens on their calendar. Each day they select a few tasks from their to-do list manager, enter them on their calendar for the next 48 hours and manage everything from there.
Once a task has been allocated a day and time on their calendar, they remove the task from their to-do list manager. It works for them.
And that’s the key point here. “It works for them”.
What works for you?
I like to have my work organised into routines. I work better when I have a fixed schedule. That’s why my blog posts are written every Monday morning, my videos are recorded on a Friday afternoon and I record this podcast on a Sunday afternoon.
If my wife adopted my way of doing my work, she would hate it. My wife is much more impulsive than I am. She prefers to have a list of things to do and will do whatever she is in the mood for on that day. That works for her. That would stress me out.
Another area I find can be different is when we plan our days. Conventional wisdom would suggest planning the next day the evening before, it allows you to go to bed knowing exactly what you will start with the next day. This way you avoid wasting time when your brain is at its freshest trying to decide what to do.
However, for some people that does not work. They understand the concept but try as they might, their discipline and willpower at the end of the day are not there and they skip it. Making the switch to doing it first thing in the morning can fix that, once they switch they have no problem spending ten to twenty minutes planning their day.
This is one of the reasons why when you copy someone else's system you are likely to come up against a lot of problems. The way someone else works, even the type of work they do will always be different from you.
I don't get a lot of interruptions during the day and the work I do each week is reasonably consistent. Others—in the front line of customer service, for example—each day will be different with multiple issues to solve and a lot of interruptions. For someone in that situation using my system would very quickly find everything breaking around them. It just would not work.
In a highly disrupted environment trying to build a consistent schedule for your work would be futile. Instead, you need to develop a system that allows you to quickly access work that needs doing when you have some time available. In this situation, labels, tags or contexts (whatever you want to call them) work much better. So does having access to your files on all your devices. If a file you need is on your computer and not accessible from a tablet or phone, then you are not going to be able to work on that file if you are not at your computer.
Many of my coaching clients find blocking the final hour of their day off for focused, uninterrupted work valuable. What this means is you go and ‘hide’ somewhere where you will not be disturbed and get your focused work done for the day as well as your planning and cleaning up. For some, this means spending an extra hour at work, but the extra time spent on dealing with their backlog means they are much less stressed and don’t take their work home with them. So spending a little more time at work means they have the advantage that when they do get home they are able to spend more quality time with their family.
Alternatively, if you are a morning person, you could go in to work an hour earlier. There will be no customers bothering you at that time so you can catch up with focused work and your backlog. Again, it’s all about managing stress, overwhelm and backlog.
So, the bottom line, James, is you want to create a system that fits your way of working. This is not just for your to-do list manager, but for the way you file your documents and organise your notes. Other people’s way of doing things can give you a few ideas, but it’s you who will have to use your system so you need to be making sure that your system works for your way of thinking and way of working.
Remember the foundations don’t change. You need to be collecting everything that needs collecting and not trusting that your brain will remember. Once collected you should organise what you collected in a way that will show up when you need it to show up in a way that works for you and finally you need to be doing the work that matters when it matters.
I hope that has helped, James and then you for your question.
Thank you to all of you for listening too. Without you and your fantastic questions, this podcast would not exist. Don’t forget, if you want to help me, please sign up for a FREE two-month Skillshare account using the link in the show notes and at the same time help yourself you some amazing learning.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week’s podcast is the 100th episode. So to celebrate this milestone, I have a rather special episode for you.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Tony Robbins Blog - Daily Priming
How to do “Ass-ti-tude”
Planning the next decade with Evernote
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 100
Hello and welcome to episode 100 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I want to tell you all about what I learned from Tony Robbins’ Unleash The Power Within seminar, conference, event. Last week, I was incredibly fortunate to be able to attend this event and I picked up a lot of tips and knowledge around getting maximum performance in every we do.
From a productivity perspective, I want to share some of those tips with you.
Before I get in to that though, we now have less than four months before the end of the year and if you are serious about turning 2020 and beyond in to your most successful year (and decade) then now is the time to begin thinking about what you want to change, what you want to accomplish and who you want to become. I put together an Evernote tutorial on my YouTube channel last week that takes you through six very powerful questions that will guide towards achieving a fantastic result. Even if you are not using Evernote, you will still find the video useful and you will be able to download the question sheet. The questions sheet is also available for free on my website. Links to both these are in the show notes.
And if you are ready to take your productivity, and goals, to the next level of performance, then I have also put my three-month coaching programme on special offer. You can now get three months of coaching for just $295.00 (saving yourself $75.00) With this coaching you will get me guiding you through your goals and helping you to set up the right workflow to make sure when the new year begins you start it with purpose and intention and start achieving your goals right from day one.
All the details for my coaching programmes are again, in the show notes.
The Mystery Podcast voice is having a week off this week as there is no question to answer.
So, what did I learn from Tony Robbins’ Unleash the Power Within?
The first thing I learnt—and this comes up on day one and two—is that motion = emotion. What does that really mean? Well, let me ask you a question. Have you ever been sat down for a few hours without moving? You know, just sat down, either in a car on a long journey or perhaps mindlessly watching TV? How much energy do you have? Very little. You will probably find you are not ‘in the mood’ to do very much. That’s because your body has slowed down. Your mind and body work together and so when your body does not move neither does your mind.
To change that—to change your state—all you have to do is move. Now of course if you have been sat down for a long time that is a lot easier said than done, but if you want to instantly change your mood, give yourself instant energy, then get up and move. If you can, dance—put on some lifting music and just dance for a few minutes. You will find almost immediately your mood changes, it lifts and when you are in a positive mood, you will make better decisions and you will feel a lot more positive.
I know that all sound very simple—it is—but it really does work. This is why your best decisions will always be made when you are moving. I remember nearly eighteen years ago, I made the decision to come to Korea while playing with my dog in the local park. I was moving. Prior to that day, I had spent weeks thinking about it and not really making any decision. That moment of movement was where I made possibly the best decision of my life so far. I know it works.
And if you really want to change your mood, then you need “Ass-ti-tude”. I’ve linked to a video in the show notes that will teach you all about that.
Another thing that really resonated with me was the “Pyramid of Mastery”. This came up on day three and what it means is you have seven areas of your life that need to master in order to have a great life. These are:
Physical - your physical fitness, health and vitality. (There’s that ‘energy’ again)
Emotion and meaning - if you are not controlling your emotions, then your emotions are controlling you. You need to be developing habits that put you in a positive mood every day.
Relationships - if your relationships are not strong, then you are not going to be able to perform at your best. Your broken relationships will weigh on your mind. Fixing your broken relationships needs to be a priority.
Time - You need to be in charge of your time and not allow others to control what you do each day. Mastering your time, learning to say no and giving yourself quality “me-time” each day is a must.
Career and mission - If you are not happy with your career and your mission in life you should be re-evaluating why you are doing what you are doing. What is your purpose? If your career (and life’s mission) are not motivating you, then you either need to reassess why you are doing what you are doing or you need to change careers completely.
Finances - I suppose this is an obvious one. If you are worried about your financial health, finding you have too much month at the end of your salary, then this will put a huge burden on your emotional strength.
And finally, Contribution and spirituality Fulfillment does not come from achieving your goals. Fulfilment comes from who you become in attaining your goals and what you give back to the world. When you are giving, your spirit is placed into a positive state. When you are taking you never quite feel right.
That, for me, was powerful stuff and I have already begun the process of building my goals around these seven areas of mastery for next year. And if you follow me on YouTube, then you will find a number of videos this week where I show you how you can build these seven areas into your daily routines.
There were two other big things I learned and have already implemented into my daily routines. The first is my nutrition. Now, I’ve always been pretty good with nutrition, but I learned the value of eating a more alkaline based diet to help keep my health strong and energy high. And I also learned about priming. Priming is where you give yourself ten to fifteen minutes in the morning to prepare yourself for the day ahead. It’s a form of meditation, where you essentially put yourself in a positive state. On the Tony Robbins blog, you can find a lot more information about this as well as a guided video. I would highly recommend you incorporate this into your daily life. Again, I have linked to that in the show notes.
Would I recommend Unleash The Power Within? Absolutely! I’ve been on a lot of workshops and courses in my time, but nothing comes close to this one. UPW (as we call it) changes lives. It’s highly energetic, at times emotional and the music played will stick with me for life (I’ve already created a playlist!)
And finally… The firewalk. Did I do it? Absolutely! Did I learn anything from it? Definitely. The purpose of doing the firewalk is to show us that when we get control of our mindset, focus and physical self, we can achieve almost anything. To do the firewalk we are shown how to put ourselves in to “state” that place where we are determined, focused, certain and ready to do something we have previously feared. When you take that “state” out into your own world, a lot of things can change for you.
The confidence generated from the firewalk is incredible and it is something that will live on in me for the rest of my life.
Before I finish I would like to say a huge thank you to all of you. This is the 100th episode of this podcast and we recently went past 100 thousand downloads. That’s an incredible achievement for a less than two-year-old podcast. So thank you so much to all of you for making that happen. I do these podcasts for you and I feel so grateful that I get the chance to serve you each and every week.
Thank you also to all of you who have sent in your questions. Your questions are the lifeblood of this podcast and it is what makes it what it is. So, I want you all to reach over your head and pat yourself on the back. You are all incredible and in the words of Joseph McClendon III… “You Freaking Rock!”
Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast, just send me an email or DM me on Twitter or Facebook. I’d love to answer your questions.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 99
Are you spending too much time planning each day and not enough time doing? That’s the question for this week’s podcast.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Time And Life Mastery 3
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 99
Hello and welcome to episode 99 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week we have a question about time spent planning and reviewing. It’s a great question to follow up on last week’s podcast.
But before we get into this week’s question, as we are now getting close to the end of 2019 and the start of 2020, now would be a great time to begin thinking about what you want to accomplish in the next decade. That’s right, I did say a decade. We are about to start the 2020s and that gives us a fantastic opportunity to think about what we would like to achieve over the next ten years.
I am reminded of a saying Tony Robbins repeats and that is “most people over-estimate what they can accomplish in a year and under-estimate what they can accomplish in a decade”.
If you want to create a life that brings you joy, happiness and prosperity then you can. But it does start with knowing exactly what it is you want. Figuring out what changes you need to make to the way you live your life today to achieve that goal and then taking the necessary action to make it happen.
If you haven’t taken my Time And Life Mastery 3 course yet, now would be a great time to do so. The course is designed perfectly for the next decade as it guides you through the process of discovering exactly what you want, then shows you how to build motivation and momentum to do the right tasks and build the right habits so that each day you move that little bit close.
Now is the time to plant the seeds for the life you want and Time And Life Mastery 3 will guide you all the way. Details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Adriana. Adriana asks, Hi Carl, I sometimes feel I am spending so much time planning that I do not have enough time to do my work each day. How much time do you spend planning each day and what do you plan?
Thank you for your question, Adriana. I’ve always been curious about how long it takes people to do their daily and weekly planning. I did ask David Allen how long it took him to do his weekly review, but he rather diplomatically didn't answer the question.
The truth is it depends. If you’ve been away on a business trip for a week and have not had a moment to yourself throughout the trip, your planning and reviewing when you get back is likely to take a while. If you are at home, doing your normal daily routines, then it should not be taking you too long. Ten to twenty minutes for a daily review and plan and around forty to fifty minutes for a weekly review.
What I discovered was if you skimp on the weekly review, that will have a knock-on effect with your daily planning. If you are not entirely confident you have all the right tasks scheduled to show up when they need to show up, you are going to be wasting time in the week double-checking your projects to make sure you haven't missed anything. That’s almost like having to do a full weekly review every day. If that's happening then you are spending too much time planning.
Let’s look at what’s involved in a daily review. First, clear your to-do list’s inbox. Get tasks into their right projects, add labels and dates if they need to be done this week—or before your next weekly review—and then review what you have planned for tomorrow against your calendar.
Things change during the week. New meetings and appointments could have been added so you do need to make sure you haven't overloaded your day with too many tasks and appointments.
Now if you’re following the 2+8 Prioritisation technique, you would now select your two objectives for the day and the eight other tasks you want to complete tomorrow and then you’re done.
In total, that should not be more than ten to fifteen minutes.
The rest of the time you should be doing your work.
Now if it is taking you longer than that, Adriana, then take a look at how you are doing your weekly review. I find most problems with planning and reviewing start here.
The weekly review is about getting clear—that means clearing your inboxes, making sure your projects are up to date and it’s about deciding what you will work on next week. For the things you want to (or need to) work on next week, you date the necessary tasks so they come up when you want to see them.
Remember, this is a weekly review and if you are consistently doing a weekly review you only need to add dates to tasks for the following week. Anything that does not need doing next week should not have a date unless a particular task has to be done on a specific date because you will be reviewing all your tasks again at the next weekly review.
By only dating tasks one week ahead, you will avoid task overwhelm and you will maintain a lot more control over what you are doing each day. Of course, any new tasks you collect that need to be done before your next weekly review should be dated. If it doesn’t, don't date it just drop it into its appropriate folder.
This is where a lot of issues arise. When you have a lot of tasks with what I call “wishful dates” on them—tasks that do not really need to be done that day—then you will spend a disproportionate amount of time each day rescheduling tasks. Now, I know why people put ‘wishful dates’ on tasks, it’s because they do not trust their system. The reason for not trusting a system is because a proper, consistent weekly review is not being completed. It’s like a vicious circle. People claim they do not have time for a weekly review, yet by not doing a weekly review they spend more time having to reorganise their to-do lists every day. It’s a false economy. Do the weekly review and you will spend less time during the week having to reschedule and plan your days. Trust me on this one, I’ve been there, made that mistake and learned a valuable lesson. A good, consistent weekly review means I can spend more time doing during the week safe in the knowledge that what I am working on are the right things that will move me forward on my current projects and areas of focus.
If you add up the total time spent each week on planning then you are looking at, say, fifty minutes for a weekly review and twenty minutes per day for your daily planning. That’s around three and a half hours per week. If you work a forty-hour week, then you are looking at just over 10% of your work time each week spent on planning. That’s a good ratio.
For me personally, I have my daily planning down to around ten minutes per day and because I do a weekly review every week, my weekly review takes about forty minutes. I know which projects need careful reviewing and which project just need a cursory glance. I also know which projects don’t need reviewing on a week to week basis. That’s what happens when you get consistent. Planning and processing times drop.
My whole COD system (that’s Collect, Organise, Do) is based on the idea that you spend around 90% of your day doing and roughly 10% of your time planning and processing. If you haven’t taken the free course yet, then there’s a link to the course in the show notes.
Email can cause a few problems here. If your work is heavily email dependent, you may find you need to spend a little more time processing. However, email just needs attending to—keeping your inbox clear as much as you can and separating out actionable email into an “action today” folder. Just make sure you clear out your action today folder every 24 to 48 hours. Try to resist the temptation to forward email to your to-do list manager. All that does is clog up your inbox and create duplication. Instead, just create a repeating task to remind you to clear your action today folder in your email. That way you do not have to keep switching between apps. However, that said, replying to actionable emails is doing work, it’s not planning or reviewing.
Hopefully, this answers your question, Adriana. Really it comes down to making sure to give yourself fifty minutes or so at the end of the week to do a good weekly review. Add dates to the tasks you know you need to do the following and remove any dates from tasks that do not need doing. You can always add a label or tag to tasks you would like to do such as ‘next actions”, so on days where you have been brilliantly productive, you can move into that label or tag and start working on some of those.
Then at the end of each day, give yourself fifteen to twenty minutes to process your inbox and plan your day for tomorrow. Once done, sit back, relax and have a wonderful night’s sleep.
Thank you for your question and thank you again, to all of you for listening. It is such a wonderful pleasure to be able to put these podcasts together for you each week.
And if you have a question you would like me to answer on this show, just send me an email - carl@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
“I don’t have time”, “There aren’t enough hours in the day”, “I’m busy”. Do you use these phrases regularly? If so, then this week’s episode of the Working With… Podcast is for you.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Life & Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe 28 December 2019
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 98
Hello and welcome to episode 98 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week we are returning to the question of time, and how to manage your time on a daily basis. I know so many people really struggle with this, yet there are a few things you can do to reduce your feelings of stress, overwhelm and that feeling of busyness.
But before we get to this week’s question, for those of you in the UK—or anywhere really—the Life and Time Mastery workshop is returning to Scunthorpe on the 28th December.
This workshop is going to be very special. We are calling it “Life and Time Mastery - the 2020 Edition - Start Fast. Start Strong” and its single purpose is to help you to set yourself up for the best decade you have ever had.
So if you are in the UK and want the opportunity to visit the wonderful Lincolnshire town of Scunthorpe, spend a day with some incredibly energised, positive and amazing people plus Kevin Blackburn—a regular guest on this podcast—and myself, get yourself registered soon. Places are limited and they are selling out very fast.
It would be fantastic to meet you in Scunthorpe in December. AND… There might even be a possibility to meet this show’s mystery podcast voice. Now there’s a fantastic reason to join us.
Okay, onto this week’s question and that means it’s now time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jake. Jake asks: Carl, I know you talk a lot about the 2+8 Prioritisation system and I do understand it, but I have so much to do each day, I really can’t cope. There’s no time for me to block time off for focused work and even thinking about working on my goals is a joke. Is here anything you can suggest that will help?
Thank you for your question, Jake.
Okay, let’s start with time. Everybody gets the same amount of time each day. Twenty-four hours. Some people can get an amazing amount done in that time, while others struggle and seem to be always telling everyone who will listen how busy they are.
So if we start with the premise that we all have the same amount of time, the only variable is what we are doing in those twenty-four hours.
Let me tell you a little secret. The way to get the most out of the time you have available is to get realistic about what you can achieve.
If you have a complex 100 plus slide presentation to create, you are never going to do that in one day. Not if you accept that throughout the day you will get interrupted and distracted. It just isn't going to happen. Take a typical Apple keynote presentation, for example, we know, from the books that came out following the death of Steve Jobs, that one of those presentations took around six months to prepare. And in the two weeks leading up to the keynote, a team of people were spending all the time they had available putting the finishing touches to it.
So, if you have a project as big as an important two-hour presentation, you are going to need more than a week to prepare it. If you are the kind of person who leaves those kinds of tasks until the last minute then sure you are going to feel busy and overwhelmed, yet those feelings are entirely of your own making.
What you have to understand is that a lot of the work you have to do, if you want to do the work properly, will need more than a day to do so you need to spread out your work. Short sprints over a longer period of time will result in better performance and a lot less stress.
Here’s a trick I do. At the end of every day, I look at my calendar not just at tomorrow but for the rest of the week. I am looking for days that have filled up with appointments and comparing that with my task list for the rest of the week. I spend around ten minutes each day, just getting a big picture view of my week and making sure no day is overloaded with too many appointments and tasks.
If I do find I have a day with too many appointments and tasks, I will re-schedule some of those tasks to quieter days. Or remove the non-urgent tasks altogether from that week. I’ve even been known to re-schedule less important appointments. If I have a couple of quiet days and three busy days, I will do as much as I can of my bigger project work on those quieter days. Just getting those big tasks started is often all that is needed to keep the overwhelm and stress at bay.
In a way, you need to develop the mindset of protecting your time.
Let me ask you a question... do you have the courage to schedule rest time? I ask that because I’ve seen people try and work through an enormous amount of work and meetings only to find their effectiveness becomes so bad they end up having to redo a lot of the work they did when they were exhausted because of all the mistakes in there.
When I ask them about rest periods, they tell me their client, customer or boss “needs” it tomorrow morning. When pushed, they usually confess that they could ask their client, boss or whoever if they could send it later that day and almost always they would be allowed to. The reason they don’t is that they are afraid that they may be told no. Part of getting in control of your available time is asking for and setting realistic deadlines. If you don’t have the courage to ask, then you only have yourself to blame.
If you think you can do a week’s worth of twenty-hours a day and get yourself on top of your work you are deluding yourself. You won't. You would get far more work done if you just did five or six hours of concentrated focused work each day.
Never be afraid to schedule some rest time. An extra hour of sleep will do far more for your effectiveness than trying to work an eighteen hour day.
So, what else can you do?
One of the most powerful ways of getting in control of your time is to begin the day knowing what it is you want to get accomplished. And when I say knowing what you want to get accomplished I mean in a realistic sense.
One of the most common reasons for feeling overwhelmed and stressed is setting unrealistic expectations. When you fill your day with appointments and tasks something will break, usually, that will be you. Your discipline will fail, you’ll look at your list of things to do and no matter how determined you are to get everything done, either you will run out of time or your resolve will break at some point in the day.
The truth is there is a limited amount you can effectively do each day. We are living human beings. We are not machines. You will get tired as the day goes by and your ability to focus will reduce. This is something you really need to understand if you want to become more effective and productive. And no matter how super-human you think you are, you are still a human being and you are not as super-human as you think you are.
One thing we can all do is to find where our optimum is. What I mean by this is where the point at which our effectiveness begins to reduce.
In my case, I know I am good for around 2,000 written words each day or roughly four hours of concentrated work. If I try and do more than that, while I can do it, my effectiveness diminishes and I end up having to rewrite those extra words the next day or redo a lot of the work I did. Not very efficient.
A recent similar example of this occurred with my exercise schedule. Over the last six months, I have been exercising very intensely. Each week I have pushed myself harder. Last weekend I ran 5 miles - no big deal, except I haven't done much running over the last few months. Instead, I have focused more on circuit training—that’s the old fashioned name for CrossFit—so naturally, as I was unwisely pushing myself through the last mile, I felt a pain in my Achilles' tendon. Then the following day as I was pushing myself towards the end of a bench press session, I felt a sharp pain in my neck. The following two or three days I was walking around with a limp and a stiff neck. Why? I pushed myself too hard and did not take enough rest. I was not able to exercise at all for three days. How effective was my exercise? Had I reduced the intensity a little, got enough rest, I would have been able to exercise those three days instead of feeling frustrated.
Remember you are human. There’s a limit you can do each day and when you go beyond that limit something will break and that is more likely to be you. You are not indestructible.
Your most effective tool at managing your workload is your calendar. Your calendar does not lie. It has those twenty-four hours on it each day. You can add your meetings and appointments and you can schedule blocks of time to get your work done. If you adopt a policy of ‘what goes on my calendar, gets done’ then this will work incredibly effectively. If you start to ignore what's on your calendar then you will soon find yourself stressed, over-worked and overwhelmed.
Here’s a trick I use with my calendar. If someone asks for a meeting I always reply “I’ll check my calendar and let you know later.” I could very easily look at my calendar on my phone right there and then and give an answer, but I want to see the big picture of my work before I commit to a meeting. I want to see where I am before and after the suggested meeting time and I want to know how much work I have on at that time. I cannot do that if I am forced to make a decision there and then.
Don’t be so quick to confirm an appointment. Be more deliberate with your scheduling and you’ll find you will soon become much less stressed and overwhelmed.
SO there you go, Jake, I hope some of these tips have helped you. Remember, you are a human being and there is a limit on what you can do each day. Be deliberate with the work you choose to do, make sure it has the biggest impact on your projects and try to schedule enough time each day for rest. You will get far more done if you are rested and not fatigued.
Thank you for your question and again, I thank you all for listening. If you have a burning question you would like answering on this show, then please email it to me at carl@carlpullein.com and I will be happy to answer it for you.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
The weekly review. Are you consistently doing one? If not you might just be missing out on the one thing that will elevate your productivity to the next level
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Pathway To A Productive Life Bundle
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
Live (ish) 2+8 Prioritisation Processing in Todoist
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 97
Hello and welcome to episode 97 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, we have a question about the weekly review. Should you be doing one every week and would a daily review be more effective?
But before we get to that as we are heading towards the end of the year—there are only four months left—now would be the right time to get yourself set up for the new year which this year will be the start of a new decade.
So more than ever before, starting the year right is going to be crucial if you want the next decade to be the best decade you’ve ever had in terms of your finances, your life pursuits and goals.
To help you, I have a bundle of courses designed exactly for you to help you build the right goals, have the right systems in place and to have a plan in place ready to hit the year not just running be at a sprint.
So I urge you to take a look at my Pathway To A Productive Life bundle, take the courses over the next four months and be ready to start 2020 with the right plan and the right system for you. This bundle includes, From Disorganised to a Productive Life, Your Digital Life 2.0 and Time and Life Mastery 3. And all for an amazing price of just $145.00. That’s a tiny investment to set yourself up for an amazing decade.
Okay, on to this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Angela. Angela asks, Hi Carl, I keep hearing that it is important to do a weekly review every week, but I am so busy, the last thing I want to do is look at my to-do list on a weekend. Do I really need to do a weekly review or would a daily review, say Monday to Friday, be okay?
Hmmm okay, where do we start with this one?
One of the biggest parts to becoming better organised and more productive with your time is knowing what needs doing and by when. This is where the weekly review comes in. It is the part of your week where you can sit down with no distractions or interruptions and for around forty-five minutes go through all your projects and tasks to see what needs doing. It gives you a big picture view of everything you have going on in your life.
You see, without that big-picture view, you are going to miss something. A project deadline will get missed, a task does not get done when it should be done, an important call not made when you said you would make it and your partner’s birthday gets forgotten. None of these things is nice, but that’s what happens when you miss your weekly review. It might not happen every week, but over time these things will happen.
Another reason for doing a weekly review is it puts you back in control of your time. It’s when we don't know what’s coming up and when - that makes us feel overwhelmed and stressed out. We feel out of control and that is not good for your productivity or your health.
So when should you do your weekly review? Well, that depends on you. What you are looking for is around one hour where you will be uninterrupted. You will need your computer for this too. I’ve tried doing it on my mobile phone in the past but found the limited screen size does not allow me to see the big picture—my calendar and to-do list next to each other for example.
For me, Sunday afternoon, after I finish exercising, is the best time. I am relaxed and I’ve completed my admin work for the week. I sit down at my desk, turn on some fantastic music and with a nice cup of Yorkshire Tea, I clear all my inboxes.
And that’s an important point. Part of what makes the weekly review so effective is it gives you time to—in the words of David Allen—“get clear”. What that means is you have made decisions about all the tasks you have in your inbox and they are organised where they need to be organised.
This also goes for your email and notes. Get all the inboxes clear. There’s nothing better than to start the week with cleared out inboxes.
Now a word of advice here, your weekly review is about reviewing, organising and clearing inboxes. It is not about doing. I wouldn't even apply the two-minute rule here either. The goal is to get clear and to decide what work needs to be done next week. The time spent on your weekly review is never about doing work it’s always about getting clear and having everything processed and organised. Of course, if you have time once everything is clear, do some of those 2-minute tasks.
Part of the reason you will feel busy, Angela, is because you have not identified what is important and what needs doing throughout the week. Not doing a weekly review means you are going to be reactive throughout the week as opposed to being proactive.
And that’s another reason why you should be doing a weekly review, it puts you into a proactive state. Without a complete review of what you have, what you are committed to and what deadlines you have coming up, you are going to be starting the week in a reactive state and that reactive state is where all the stress, overwhelm and feelings of being busy are.
It is far better to begin the week, knowing exactly what you want to get accomplished and what needs to be done that week. You know where you need to be and with who and the decisions about what is going to be done, and when, have been made.
I’ve seen it time and time again where someone hasn't done a weekly review they waste all of Monday morning trying to work out what to do next. When you have done a complete weekly review, you know exactly what you will do on Monday morning and by lunchtime, you could easily have completed 25% of your objectives for the week.
So where do you start when you are doing a weekly review?
Again, this is entirely up to you, but as a starter, start with your inboxes. Go through your to-list inbox and process. Organise your tasks into their projects or areas of focus. Then move on to your email inbox and do the same. Process. Move emails to their appropriate folders and if there are emails you need to reply to move them to an action folder. Again, I should stress don’t do the replies, even if they will take only a few minutes. Now is not the time to be doing. Now is about getting clear.
Finally, once you have your to-do list manager and email processed move on to your notes app and clear that inbox. Delete old notes you no longer need and then make sure you don’t have any scraps of paper lying around with notes and to-does on them. Make sure you check any notebooks you use for action items and notes.
Once all your inboxes are clear, it’s time to go through all your projects in your inbox. Go through each one individually and with your calendar open at next week’s view, identify which tasks in your projects can be done next week.
Now, I don’t usually date tasks beyond the following week unless they do need to be done on a specific date. Randomly dating tasks just creates daily lists of tasks that don’t really need doing that day. Instead, I add a label to the very next task without a date in each project called “next actions”. This means on days when I have been particularly productive, I can move into my next actions label and start working on those tasks.
Now, that’s just a basic overview of how I do the weekly review, the key thing here is you develop your own weekly review method. Everyone is different and everyone has different priorities. You will find you will modify how you do the weekly regularly, but eventually, you will settle on a way of doing it that works for you. The important thing is that you consistently do it week after week. It should never be a chore. It should be something you look forward to doing each week. It’s like setting the reset button on your week. For me, it nicely ends the week and leaves me feeing relaxed, in control and ready for the week ahead.
Now, you mentioned a daily review, Angela, and that is a good idea. But the daily review is just to make any adjustments to your weekly plan. Our weeks rarely go to plan and new priorities will come up from time to time. This is why I do my Golden 10 every evening. This is just ten minutes at the end of the day where I review my tasks for tomorrow and make sure they are still relevant. Last week, I did a video on how I do this and I will leave a link in the show notes for you to watch that. It’s only ten minutes and will give you a complete picture of how a daily review should go.
Now I should warn you, the first few times you do the weekly review properly, it will take you longer than one hour. But as time goes by and you develop a more efficient system for doing it, you will get faster. For me, it takes around forty to fifty minutes. I also know which project folders don’t need reviewing every week. Folders such as my routines and Someday | Maybe folders don’t need a review every week. I would normally review these once every two or three months.
Okay, so there you have it Angela, the case for doing a weekly review. The biggest reason for doing it is it gives you clarity, peace of mind and ensures you are working on the things that are important to you. It gives you a plan and it makes sure you are not missing anything.
I hope that has answered your question, Angela. Thank you and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering, just email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
Are you finding your projects list overwhelming? Then this week’s podcast is just for you.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Pathway To A Productive Life Bundle
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 96
Hello and welcome to episode 96 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week’s question is all about managing an overwhelming projects list. A projects list that keeps moving, changing and growing. The problem here is not actually with your projects list but rather the way you are thinking about your whole system.
But before we get to this week’s question, I’d just like to remind you about my current coaching offer’s imminent end. It’s true, my coaching programme’s summer offer will be ending this week. Right now you can sign up for the programme for just $99 and if you wish to continue you can save yourself up to $300 on any of my longer programmes.
I know from my own personal experience how a coach can change your outcomes. As a teenager, I was a pretty useful middle-distance runner. But before I discovered that, a teacher at my school saw me running in a cross country race and recommended I get a coach. He saw something in me I did not see, I guess, but I decided to do just that. I got a coach.
Very quickly my running got better, my speed endurance improved and my race tactics became sharper and more focused. That was because there was now someone guiding me, encouraging me and making small incremental changes to the way I trained and the way I ran races.
I learned that if you want to perform at your best, you cannot do it alone. To get the best out of yourself you need a coach. Someone on the outside who can help you improve your technique. To hold you accountable when you try to take shortcuts and to keep you focused on the goal.
So as we head towards the end of this decade and the start of a new decade, now would be the right time to get yourself a coach. Someone to look at your current system and give you guidance, strategies and methods to improve your overall set up so you can start the new decade Sharpe, focused and motivated to make it the best decade of your life.
All the details of what you get in the programme are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Dinh Hai. Dinh Hai asks: Hi Carl. I have lots of projects running at the same time. I am having trouble keeping track of all of them. I use Todoist and Evernote quite regularly. Do you have any ideas on managing multiple projects at the same time?
Thank you, Dinh Hai, for the question.
Okay, I think we need to go back to basics here. Whether you are using a pure GTD set up that is operating through contexts (people, place or tool) or you have your own setup, a project folder is just a list of tasks related to a single outcome. Unless you decided to work on a single project all day to the exclusion of everything else, then you are never likely to be working from your project folders. So the number of projects you have going on at any one time is not relevant.
Ultimately, what you do each day is controlled not by the number of projects you have but by the time you have available to do the tasks associated with those projects. You only have 24 hours—the same as everyone else.
We normally work from a daily list of tasks we have decided we want to do today or we are working from a list of tasks that we can only do given where we are, who we are with or what tools we have available.
If we did not have these project placeholders, our inboxes would become a very long list of unrelated tasks and ultimately become overwhelming. That’s why we need a way to categorise and organise our tasks. Whether you do that by project or context doesn't really matter.
So, the only decision you have to make is what will you do today? That is really the only thing you can decide.
Let’s say you have eight hours to do your work today. So the time available is already decided. The decision you need to make is what will you do during those eight hours? If you receive an email that you know will require two or three hours of work, you need to decide whether you will use two to three of your eight hours today to do that task or spend one hour today and one hour tomorrow. That’s the only decision you can make on that work. Of course, you may have the option to delegate or even not do it at all, but it really does not matter where you put that task. What matters is when will you do it?
I think sometimes we overthink our productivity systems and make them far more complicated than they need to be. What it comes down to is how much time do you have to complete your tasks and what tasks will you do in that time?
Now, of course, those decisions will likely be based on time sensitivity—when something is due—and perhaps who gave you the work to do. But those are entirely different decisions to make. The daily decisions you are making are based on what work you will do today given the amount of time you have available.
This is why your calendar should be a big part of your overall productivity system. Your calendar is going to tell you where you are meant to be, what meetings and appointments you have and how much available time you have to do your tasks.
Let me give you an example.
Wednesdays are currently busy teaching days for me. I have five hours of teaching from 8 AM to 6:30 PM. If my working day is between 8 AM and 7 PM that gives me eleven hours of work time. In that time, I will need to find the five hours for teaching—which is fixed, time to eat lunch, exercise, respond to emails and messages and get my daily admin done. I will also need to be aware of the travel time to get to the classes I will teach, which will involve another two to three hours. This means every Tuesday evening when I do my daily planning, I can see there is going to be little or to time for specific project work.
What I will do is see that I have two to three hours of travel time. That essentially is dead time. I travel by public transport to these classes so the question is what work can I do on my phone while I am travelling? For me, that means responding to emails and messages and writing. That’s it. I cannot design a presentation, record a video or podcast. All I can do is do work related to communication and writing.
So, as I am planning my day, I can go into my “writing” and “communication” labels in Todoist and look for work that can be done while I am travelling, assign tomorrow’s date to the task and I am good to go.
This means when I begin my day, the only tasks on my task list for the day are tasks I can do based on where I will be and the available time I have.
This is why spending ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day looking at your calendar and to-do list planning what you will work on tomorrow is important if you truly want to become more productive. The weekly review is where you make decisions on what you want to accomplish next week and gives you an opportunity to get your projects and other lists cleaned up and current, but it is the daily planning and review where you plan out what you will do the next day.
Now, I know a lot of people feel everything is important, everything needs to be done right now and they are so much busier than anyone else. The reality though is quite different. Everyone has the same amount of time each day and unless you are working on an assembly line cranking out identical widgets all day, you have some degree of flexibility to decide what you will work on next.
It does not matter how many projects you have or how many tasks are in those projects, you are constrained by the amount of time available and what type of work you can do based on where you are, what you have with you and who you are with. I would add another factor too—how much energy you have. If you are sick, suffering from a lack of sleep or just exhausted, your effectiveness at doing your work is not going to be great.
Now you cannot change the laws of physics or the laws of time. You are never going to be able to turn 24 hours into 30 hours. So stop trying to do that. That is just a waste of energy. Instead, work on the things you can affect. That means looking at your calendar, seeing where the gaps are between meetings, training courses, appointments, eating and sleeping and deciding what you will work on from your projects list in that available time.
Get better at prioritising and planning. Learn to say “no” to new commitments that do not excite you and get enough rest. And remember, none of these tips will be of use to you if you are exhausted and have no energy to do the work you want to do.
As I keep saying, becoming better organised and more productive is simple. Doing it is a lot harder, but it’s not impossible. The choice you have to make is between trying to do everything at once and accomplishing very little, or being more strategic and planning out the day ahead with a clear mind and intention in a well-rested state. With those, you can accomplish a lot more in a lot less time.
Well, I hope that has helped you Dinh Hai, I know it is hard to prioritise and get everything you have to do in perspective, but remember we cannot change the laws of time and we can only do what we can do in the time we have available each day.
Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. I am so grateful to all of you because we have, or will have, reached 100,000 downloads of this podcast. I am humbled to be able to help so many people to become better organised and more productive. Thank you all so so much. I want you to know I do this for you and I have no plans to stop doing what I do.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Has your system has become overly complex and unwieldy over the years? This week’s podcast is all about getting back to basics.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Pathway To A Productive Life Bundle
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 95
Hello and welcome to episode 95 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Over the years you have probably read all the productivity books, read countless blog posts and watched hundreds of productivity and time management videos. The result? You have created a monster. An overly complex hierarchy of projects, tags and apps that requires so much daily attention there is little time left to actually do the work you want to do.
If that describes you, and you may have to get really honest with yourself to answer that question, then this week’s question is for you.
Now don’t worry this happens to us all and it is quite simple to fix it, but it may involve letting go of some of your shiny toys and that can hurt. But, as they say, “no pain, no gain” and that is what this week’s answer is all about - showing you how to gain more time to focus on what really matters to you.
Now, before we get in to this week’s question, if you have tried over and over again to create a system that works for you, but still feel you have too much stuff to do and don’t know where to start, or you want to start your own business, podcast, blog or YouTube channel and just want some advice on where to start and how to build a successful side business, then take a look at my coaching programmes.
These programmes are designed to give you guidance, help and advice to get moving in the right direction. My programmes have helped hundreds of people find a system that works for them, have built side-businesses, blogs and podcasts that are growing.
Programmes start at $99 and the 3, 6 and 12-month programmes are on special offer right now. To find out more, I have put a link into the show notes.
Okay, onto this week’s question and that means it is time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Terry. Hi Carl, I’ve been a productivity nerd for over twenty years now and have read every book I have found on time management and productivity. The problem is I have taken tips and tricks from so many places and downloaded loads of apps, I find I spend so much time updating my to-do list and notes app. I don’t have time to finish all the work I want to finish each day. Do you have any advice to help me get more work done
Hi Terry, thank you for your question. I think this is a problem many people have.
It’s very easy, over the years, to collect new ways and apps for doing things. We read an article about mind mapping and get ourselves an app like MindNode to do mind mapping. We watch a video on creating a Kanban type board of all our projects and start using Asana or Trello and then we get sucked into the hype surround apps like Notion that promise to be all things. We read about a new way of organising our notes or to-dos and we add that to our system.
Of course, the problem now is we have a lot of apps doing similar things and a hybrid system of multiple systems that just becomes a confusing mess.
So how do we sort this out?
Well, the first step is to stop adding and to start subtracting. Subtracting apps and sections of your productivity system will clear things up pretty quickly. To do that though, you do need to step back first and decide what exactly you want.
Now, for me, a great productivity system is based on two things. Simplicity and speed. When something is simple to use, you are much more likely to use it and if it is fast you are going to be getting back to the work that matters much faster and you will be less likely to resist collecting what needs collecting.
So if we start from the premise that your system needs to be fast and simple we can start with COD. Now COD (collect, Organise and Do) is just a simplified version of David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology. So it is a good place to start.
How are you collecting? What’s your “ubiquitous capture tool” or “UCT”? For most people, that’s their mobile phone. Your phone is with you everywhere you go so if you have a thought, or you need to add a task, it is easy to pick up your phone and collect it there. Now, if we go back to the principle that your system needs to be simple and fast the question becomes “How are you collecting stuff”? Are your to-do list and notes apps on the home screen of your phone? How many clicks do you need to make to start typing what you want to collect?
A good guideline here would be two clicks and type. That’s open the app, click a plus button and type. If you have to click more than twice to start typing, you need to review how you collect. You could use an app like Drafts (if you are an iOS user) that’s one click and type.
Next up is Organise. How are you organising everything you collected? Now there are two parts to this. There’s processing—that’s the getting what you collected into its rightful place, a folder, a project list etc and deciding what the next action is and when are you going to do it—and there’s the overall organisation of your folders and projects.
Processing needs to be fast. The way to make processing fast is to organise your projects and files in a simple way as possible. For example, only have active projects in your projects list. Anything else should be in a someday maybe list—for me that would mean anything that is not due to start for six months or more would not be in my active projects list. These projects would be held in my Someday | Maybe folder and would only move up to my active projects list when they are due within the next six months.
When you are fully aware of your projects and what is going on in your world, processing becomes much faster. There’s little to no hesitation about where something should go because you have clearly defined projects.
This means the way you organise your folders also needs to be simple and as accessible as possible. I have an active folders list in iCloud. Anything I am working on will have a folder in my active folders list. That includes this podcast, my YouTube channel, my blog posts as well as my current active projects. I can access any of these folders simply by opening up iCloud. Processing and organising at the end of the day rarely takes me longer than fifteen minutes.
If it takes you longer than fifteen minutes to clean up your files and process your to-do list inbox at the end of the day, that’s an indication things are a little too complex. Go back and look at how your folders and projects are organised. Do you really need to have so many sub-projects? Are all your folders clearly defined? If not then start simplifying.
Now on to the tools.
This is often where most problems start. The latest cool app might sound and look good, but when you start adding all these apps to do different things you will find you start duplicating. When you start duplicating that will cause a drag on your system and slow you down. For example, Notion is the hottest kid on the block now. Notion can essentially be everything for you. If can be a wiki of information, a goal planning tool, a notes app even a to-do list.
Now the problem here is what if you already have a to-do list manager and a notes app? Let’s say you use Microsoft OneNote and have done for years. You know OneNote inside out and when you use it, you do not have to think about creating a new note, a checklist or clip an article from a blog you liked. Every year for the last five years you have developed your goals in OneNote and you have a wonderful archive of project notes, goals and other stuff in there.
If you add Notion to your tool kit what will you use Notion for? While Notion may present the information more beautifully than OneNote, no matter what you use Notion for, you are now going to have two places where something could be. It’s another app that needs managing and it’s another app that needs to be learnt. That will slow you down and add complexity.
In this situation, to stay effective and efficient, you are going to have to choose between OneNote and Notion. If you feel Notion is so much better than OneNote then fine, start migrating all your notes to Notion and from now on only use Notion. There will be a learning curve, but after a little time, you will learn to use Notion effectively.
The thing is, there’s going to be a time cost involved in switching over. So you will have to decide whether that time cost can be repaid once you are up and running with Notion. Remember, great productivity systems are built on simplicity and speed. Will Notion make you that much faster?
The way to simplify and get faster so you can spend more time getting the work done is to review all the tools you use and decide if they really are the best tools for the job. For writing I use Ulysses. I know it inside out and all my written work is organised cleanly and simply in there. Once something has been written, edited and published, the written piece gets placed into an archive. It’s a simple process and takes just a few seconds to organise.
I use Apple’s Pages and Numbers for specific work. For formatted written work, I use Pages. I don’t have to think about whether to use Pages, Word or Google Docs. If a written piece of work needs formatting and exporting as a PDF, then it’s Pages. Likewise for my admin work. If I need to monitor and measure some information, it will be created in Numbers. Again, I don’t have to think about what tool to use.
Al this keeps my whole system simple. Specific tools for specific jobs and no duplication.
So there you go Terry. To get things back to a more manageable system, do a complete review. It may take you a whole day to do this, but in this case, the time/cost-benefit will be worth it. Purge apps you don’t use or create duplication. Choose one tool for each type of work you do.
Review how you are organising your projects and folders. Ask yourself if this is the best and fastest way to organise this stuff. If it is not, review it and find a more simple and faster way to organise them.
And remember, all great productivity systems are built on the foundations of quick and easy to collect, organise so you can spend more time doing the work itself. When you free up more time to do the work and spend less time in your productivity systems you have more free time at the end of the day and that’s always a good thing.
I hope that has helped, Terry, and thank you for your question. Thank you also to all of you for listening.
Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like me to answer, all you have to do is email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook and I will be happy to answer your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, it’s all about building a personal learning system using the productivity tools we all have.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Pathway To A Productive Life Bundle
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 94
Hello and welcome to episode 94 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this week’s show, I’m answering a question about developing a personal learning system using the tools we use or can use every day. Now I did this last year when I developed my own system for learning Korean and you can use a similar system for creating your own education system whether you just want to have a continuous learning system or you are going back to university in the next couple of months.
Now, before we get into this week’s question, I’d like to tell you about my Pathway to Productivity course bundle. This bundle contains From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days, Your Digital Life 2.0 and Time And Life Mastery 3. It is everything you need to build your very own productivity system—a system that not only handles your current work and your backlog but also shows you how to develop and build in your goals to your everyday life.
No matter where you are in your goal planning and productivity journey, this bundle of courses will give you everything you are looking for and is only $145.00. Details of the bundle are in the show notes.
Okay, onto this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Kalp. Kalp asks: Hi Carl, I heard you talking about developing a system for learning a language and I was wondering if you could tell me how I could create my own learning system. I recently started at university and I am struggling to keep all my learning materials and notes together so I can find them later.
Great question and a timely one too, Kalp as I know many people will be returning to university and college soon after the summer break.
Okay, the first thing you are going to have to decide is where will you keep your notes? There are a lot of choices here but you do need to choose carefully. Your notes, class handouts and other learning materials need to be searchable and you need a notes app that is robust enough to hold all sorts of documents.
The two big players in this field are Evernote and Microsoft OneNote. There is little to choose between them but OneNote may have the edge as it is free. Evernote does have better search functionality, but if you organise your materials effectively, then OneNote will be perfectly fine for this job.
When organising your notes app make sure you create notebooks (both Evernote and OneNote call folders “notebooks”) for each subject you are studying. You want to be able to open the app and get straight to the materials you have for each subject quickly and efficiently. It’s no good, having a notebook called “science” and then having a mix of biology, chemistry and physics scattering around that notebook. Separate them out. In this example, create individual notebooks for biology, chemistry and physics.
Just one tip here. If you have digital textbooks and large PDF files, I would recommend you use a cloud-based storage system. Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Apple’s iCloud would work well here. Just create a folder for each subject you are studying in your cloud drive. While OneNote and Evernote will hold these documents for you, because of their size they will slow down your notes app.
What I do here with my teaching materials is to divide the textbooks up into chapters and add the chapters individually to my notes app for better digital annotations. But that rather depends whether you want to use a tablet for annotating your learning materials or not.
And that leads me nicely to how you will take your notes. If you prefer the digital way, then here Microsoft OneNote is great. Using a stylus or Apple Pencil with OneNote is a great experience—particularly on an iPad. Evernote falls rather short here and I would not recommend using Evernote as your digital writing tool. Hopefully, that will be an area Evernote fixes pretty soon.
For me, I use an app called Notability. It has fantastic digital annotation functionality and all my teaching materials are kept in here.
If you prefer to use pen and paper for taking your lecture notes then I would suggest you buy A4 ring bound notebooks for each subject you are studying. Make sure you label the notebooks clearly or buy different colours for each subject. These notebooks are light and easy to carry in a bag.
A good practice to get into the habit of doing is scanning your notes into your notes app at the end of each day. That way you will always have a backup copy of your notes and you can use them for studying for you example later from any device you have wit you.
Next up your calendar. My advice would be to go with Google Calendar. Almost all universities and colleges with have a link you can subscribe to which will populate your calendar with the right events and classes. Make sure you subscribe to your course’s calendar subscription feed, rather than the university’s main feed. You don’t want to be seeing stuff you are not interested in there.
If there isn’t a way to subscribe to a calendar, then you will need to add your lectures and tutorial classes manually. Save yourself time by making them recurring events. You can always delete individual classes when they come up.
Make sure you add the dates for submitting course work and assignments. Put them in as all-day events that way they are clearly seen at the top of your calendar.
Now for your to-do list, Here you want to create project folders for each subject you are learning. For example, when I was at university studying law we studied five individual subjects each academic year. In one year we may have had Contract Law, Tort, Land Law, EU Law and Law and Legal Skills. Each one of those subjects needs to be individual projects. As you go through your studies there will be tasks you need to do related to those subjects and you can put them in there. These tasks could be things like research Donohue v Stephenson or begin writing an assignment on medical negligence.
Now the final part to your set up is to create a social project too. Part of being at university is the social side and having a project for your social life is just one of those things you will need to manage.
Now, one of the best ways to stay on top of your studies is to make full use of your calendar. Once you have your lecture and tutorial sessions in your calendar you will see where you will have time for doing your studies. Schedule your study time on your calendar. How you do this is really up to you. For me, I would always schedule my study time on a week to week basis. It becomes part of a weekly review. Often I found there were group sessions that needed to be scheduled as well as my social life—a band I wanted to see was visiting the student union club for instance. So trying to set my self-study time in stone was not really possible. Maintaining a little flexibility here really helps. It also means you can add more study sessions as assignments become due or you are preparing for exams.
So how does all this work on a day to day basis?
Well, as you go through your day with lectures and tutorial sessions you are going to be picking up tasks. You can collect these into your to-do list manager’s inbox. Process you inbox every 24 to 48 hours and get those inbox tasks into their correct project folder and dated, if necessary.
But the biggest task you will have on a day to day basis is to make sure you are keeping your study materials up to date. If you let this slip, it will very quickly become a mess. Just ten to twenty minutes each day will keep you up to date and current. For me, I would create a recurring task for every Monday to Friday to clean up my study materials. Scan in anything that needs adding and making sure all my lecture notes are filed into their correct place. I would also make sure I did this at the same time every day. Either just before or after dinner or first thing in the morning. It does not take long if you do it daily, it becomes a nightmare if you leave it and do it weekly. That’s when you forget what something means to you and if you haven’t titled or dated the notes correctly it becomes impossible to keep up. Do it daily. You will thank yourself for that later.
And finally, before you start, take my Beginners course on COD (Collect Organise and Do) - it’s free and it will give you everything you need to get your system set up.
Getting set up and ready now will save you a lot of stress and organising once you get to your university or college. It is not difficult to stay on top of things. It’s as Jim Rohn said: “a few simple disciplines practised every day”. That’s all you need. Just ten to twenty minutes daily and you will very easily keep up to date and organised and will have a very pleasant time during your studies.
I hope that has answered your question, Kalp. Thank you for sending it in and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this show, just send me an email carl@carlpullein.com or DM me of Facebook or Twitter. I will be very happy to answer your question.
It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week I have a fantastic question about managing interruptions and distractions throughout the day.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 92
Hello and welcome to episode 93 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Okay, so we all get them, they are a part of life and they can cause us so much stress and pull us away from the work that is important to us. What am I talking about? I’m talking about all those interruptions from colleagues, customers and clients and yes, friends and family. What can we do to, not eliminate them—after all that’s not going to be possible—but at least reduce the impact they have on our day? That’s the topic for this week’s podcast.
Now, before I get into this week’s question, for all you newbie Todoist users, don’t forget I have just launched my new, FREE, Getting Started With Todoist online course. It’s around one hour in length and will take you through everything you need to know to set up Todoist, understand how tasks and dates work and build a fully functioning system. The course is available on my learning centre as well as on Skillshare. To enrol in the course you can find all the links in the show notes.
Okay, on to this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Neil. Neil asks: Hi Carl, could you share your thoughts or system that will help me to resume my work after getting interrupted. I am not distracted by social media much, but I am facing these kinds of issues and it's slowing down my productivity.
Great question, Neil.
Being interrupted while at work is just a part of life. It would be very rare for us to ever be in a situation where we could go all day without any interruptions. Things like other people’s emergencies, customers urgently needing the answer to a simple question and our boss wanting something done yesterday.
Now I feel I am quite lucky here because in the distant past I spent four happy years working in hotel management and in the hotel industry, the guests always come first. This meant that no matter what I was doing if a guest asked for something everything had to be dropped and whatever the guest wanted, if it was possible, we attended to it right away. That could be something as simple as an ironing board or something more complex such as finding a suitable meeting room. Whatever it was it had to be done immediately.
And the worst thing of all, these interruptions came in the form of a beeper. A little black box that you attached to your belt via a clip and whenever you were needed, you would be ‘bleeped’. It was horrible. I still have nightmares of that beeping sound almost twenty-five years later!!! When it did bleep you either picked up the nearest phone and dialled 1 or you ran up to reception and asked what they wanted.
I have to say, though, it was a great way to stay fit and healthy. Eight and a half hours of running around. Nothing beats that for keeping the weight off!!
To manage all these interruptions, and if you were the duty manager that day you had to deal with them yourself, I always carried a little notebook with me with a list of all the things I needed to do during my shift. When we started a shift we did a handover with the manager who was on duty before, so you knew about any issues and you also knew what needed to be prepared for while you were on shift. That could be a meeting, a special dinner or a VIP guest arriving.
I would write down all the things that needed to be done while I was on shift on one page of that notebook. Then as I went through my shift I crossed off what I had done while I was doing them.
This meant that as the bleeps came, and they always did, I could stop what I was in the middle of, deal with the interruption and once I had dealt with the guest or problem I would check my notebook and return to where I was before I was interrupted.
It was a simple, easy way of making sure I did not end up with a lot of half-finished jobs by the time I finished my shift,
Now, of course, we have smartphones which beep and buzz all day and a lot of those beeps and buzzes are not important at all. We have to exercise a little judgment. For the most part, I have notifications turned off. The only notifications I have turned on are for text messages as any text message that comes in is likely to be reasonably urgent. It could be a student telling they need to cancel their class or it could be my wife asking me something—and whatever that is, it is ALWAYS urgent and has to be done NOW.
However, I do still follow the same ‘system’ I developed while I worked in the hotel industry all those years ago. Instead of carrying a little notebook with me though, I have my phone and I have a list of all the things I need to do today in my to-do list manager.
These days, it is a little easier, the work I do now and the work I guess most of you do today is not as diverse as the kind of work you have to do in hotel management. Right now, for example, I am recording this podcast, my phone is on do not disturb and so is my computer. For the next thirty minutes, I cannot be disturbed as I record this.
However, let’s say as I am recording this, there’s a knock at the door and my dog barks—he has his job to do - to protect me from the postman. That would destroy any recording I have done and I need to attend to whoever is at the door. So I stop recording, thank the dog for protecting me and ruining the recording, and see who is at the door. Once that is done, I can return to my recording.
Now I have a decision to make. Do I pick up where I left off and edit out the bark, or do I start recording from the start again? But that’s all I need to do.
And that’s really the key here. Having clearly defined tasks.
Okay, so recording a podcast is an easy thing to get back to. What about if you were working on a complex Excel file? Now this one is a bit more difficult. If you are interrupted while in the middle of that kind of work, it could take a long time to get back to where you needed to be. For that kind of work, you really have to go ‘dark’ as I like to call it. Going ‘dark’ means you need to come off the grid and remove any possibility of interruptions.
That means your phone needs to be off, you need to ‘disappear’ and that means finding a place to work where you will not be disturbed.
Now, what I’ve found is if you tell people—your colleagues, boss and clients that there will be times when you are not contactable but you will always return calls and emails as soon as you are finished, people understand. They often say they envy your discipline (ah, there’s that word again) It’s simply not true to say “my customers do not understand”. Your customers are humans too. They would understand if you set the boundaries. Most people do not set boundaries.
And that takes me to the next point. Managing expectations. If you are serious about getting your important work done, you have to do this. You have to manage the expectations of those around you. If you were to tell everyone that between 10 am and 12 pm you would not be available because that is when you get on with doing your work, everyone would respect that. In almost twenty years of working in law and teaching, I have never once had anyone get upset because for two hours each day I was not available, Never. In fact, what I have found is I have received a lot more respect from clients and students and other faculty members than my colleagues who are always available have.
I do this with email too. I tell everyone I will always reply within twenty-four hours. And I stick to that rule. This is why my “action Today” folder in email is so effective. I set the sorting to first in at the top and the last email in at the bottom. That way, the oldest email is at the top and I can quickly see when it came in and when I need to reply by. If I cannot answer the email because I am waiting for more information, I will still reply within 24 hours and explain I am still waiting for information.
For most of us, we need to be available to our clients, customers, colleagues and bosses for most of the day. But that does not mean you have to be available for the full eight to tens hours of your working day. Tell the key people in your work life that you need to go dark at some point in the day to get on with your work. I have a client who is a doctor who goes dark between 5 pm and 6 pm every day to do his processing and daily mini-review and deal with the email in his “Action Today” folder. It helps him to stay on top any backlog and his patients all know he cannot be contacted between those times. He never has any problems and no one has got upset because they cannot contact him during that time.
When you have a realistic list of the work you have to do each day on your daily to-do list, you use your calendar to block time off each day for focused work you will always know what you need to do. If you do get disturbed while you are in the middle of something just make a note of where you are and deal with the interruption.
If you need your full concentration for a piece of work, then put all your devices on do not disturb and get on with the work. I promise you, no one will be upset if you are unavailable for an hour or two.
I hope that has helped you in some way, Neil. I know it is not easy to set boundaries and to go ‘dark’, but try it for a week. You will be surprised at what happens. People do understand and you will find people will respect your time a lot more than if you made yourself available all the time. Set some boundaries, manage expectations and you will see a huge boost in your productivity.
Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you too for listening. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast all you have to do is email me or DM me on Twitter or Facebook and I will be very happy to answer your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week I have a fantastic question about the difference between processing and doing and when to apply the two-minute rule.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The FREE Beginners Guide To Todoist
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Episode 92
Hello and welcome to episode 92 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a fantastic question about processing items in your inboxes. This question perfectly describes a problem I see many people have when it comes to using GTD—or COD—for that matter and that is the speed you process the items you collect throughout the day. The problem though does not end with the items you have collected that day, it also affects how you process your email and collected notes.
Now before we get to this week’s question, I would like to tell you about my new FREE, beginners guide to Todoist course. This course is a simple, onboarding course to help you get started with Todoist. It covers all the basics and allows you to develop a system that will work for you. The course is ideal for anyone you would like to introduce to Todoist and also if you are new to Todoist, then this will get you set up and running in next to no time at all.
Of course, for all you advanced users out there, I have over 200 videos on Todoist over on my YouTube channel, so if this course does not cover what you are looking for, I am sure you will find it on my YouTube channel.
Oh, and don’t forget my summer sale on my coaching programmes. You can save yourself up to $200 by getting yourself into the programme now. Details of what you will receive from the programme are all in the show notes to this podcast.
Okay, on to this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Justin. Justin asks: Hi Carl, I’ve watched many of your videos and you often talk about processing your inbox as only taking around 10 to 20 minutes. For me, it takes more than 30 minutes - often an hour - is there anything I am doing wrong?
Hi Justin, thank you very much for your question.
Let’s start with a recap on what processing is. Processing, or organising, is where you sort out everything you have collected into your inboxes and make decisions on them based on what a collected item is, what needs doing with it and where to put it. In theory, this should be relatively quite a simple task, yet I know it causes people so many problems that in the end they resist doing it and things start to build up in inboxes. When that happens you soon stop collecting and that’s a sign your system has failed and you need to reassess your structure and overall system.
Now, there are two inboxes that will need your attention every day - or at least every forty-eight hours. Your to-do list manager’s inbox and your email inbox.
Let's deal with what you collect in your todo list manager’s inbox first.
Here we have some control over what’s in there. When you are collecting notes and to-dos you get to choose where they go—tasks go into your to-do list, ideas and plans to your notes app. Now in the rush to collect something, we may not have defined whether something is a task or a note. That’s okay, but you will need to make that decision at some point. If you have time when you collect the item, make that decision then. That will save you time later.
With email, you have little control over what comes in. That said, I do think you have more control than you probably think. For example, do you really need to subscribe to all those newsletters? Do you really need all your LinkedIn and social media notifications coming to your inbox every day? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. That a choice you can make.
You can also set up rules in most email apps that will filter emails as they come in. You can arrange it so that all newsletters get automatically sent to a specified newsletter folder for example or have emails that have you as a cc’d recipient send to a specific folder—when you are a cc’d recipient it generally means the email is for your reference only. The only thing you will need to with these folders is to make sure you are reading and reviewing them once a week or so. I would set up a recurring task in my to-do list to remind me to do this.
Next up, do not confuse processing with doing. What I see is people going through their inboxes and trying to do the tasks instead of making decisions about them. Now, of course, you may say what about the two-minute rule? I’d say what about it? You see you need to apply the two-minute strategically. If you have an inbox of 100 items and you apply the two-minute rule to just ten of those items, that’s twenty-minutes gone. In those twenty minutes, you could easily have cleared your inbox.
And that the thing here. What are you trying to achieve? Clear the inbox or do the work? The two parts are very different.
The problem I have seen if you combine doing the work and processing you don't do a very good job at either. You don't get as much work done as you would hope and you still have unprocessed items left in your inbox.
It is far better to focus on processing only. Decide what something is and what needs to happen—if anything— next. Once those decisions have been made you can put the item where it needs to go. Using keyboard shortcuts and drag and drop I’ve found to be the fastest way to do this.
Processing is all about speed. The faster you can do it, the sooner you can get down to doing your work. If you spend too much time deciding what something is and what to do about it, then your processing will take far too long. This is why the way you structure your to-do list manager, email and note app is important. If your projects, folders and notebooks are too vague or are very similar in nature you will find you hesitate before making a decision. It will drag down the speed at which you process. When you have clear, well-defined projects and notebooks then you will make your decisions about where something should go much faster.
Of course, if you have plenty of time to do your processing and you do not have many items to process, then you can apply the two-minute rule. I often do this when I process my to-do list inbox at the end of the day. If I have less than ten items in there I will do those tasks that will take less than two minutes. Yesterday, I collected a task to save Fast and Furious 6 to my watch list on Netflix for example. A less than two minute task. I just went over to Netflix, found the film and saved it to my watch list and cleared the task—I’m catching up on the Fast and Furious franchise of films at the moment.
However, if there are a lot of items in my inbox, then the focus is on processing those items. I will just process everything first. I will leave tasks that can be done in two minutes or less in the inbox if I intend to do them in that session of work, but if not, they get processed and organised in their rightful folder. Remember organising and doing are two entirely different things.
Now you may find your notes app inbox does not get that many items in it on a day to day basis. I don’t collect items into Evernote every day, so I don’t process that every day. Anything going into Evernote will not be urgent or time-sensitive for me. They are often things I want to read later, ideas that I want to develop at some time in the future or an article I think will be useful for a book or blog post I am writing. As I don’t send too many items there, I only process it once a week. Usually, I have around twenty to thirty items to process, so I can get those processed and organised in less than twenty minutes.
If you use an app like Drafts, you can collect a lot of your stuff, such as items to a checklist or ideas list directly, and bypass the inbox. That’s a real time saver.
Also, with apps like Evernote you get a unique email address you can use to send items directly to your inbox, you can use this email address for subscribing to newsletters. This then brings the newsletter direct to your Evernote inbox and I can process it from there instead of my email. Again it’s really all about saving time and speeding up the processing time.
Before we finish this episode let me share with you an area of processing I do every morning. It might help to give you an idea of how long your processing should take.
Because I live over in the Far East, while I am asleep, North and South America and Europe are awake. So, when I wake up in the morning I will often have over a hundred emails in my inbox. Now, before I take a shower I boil my egg and to get the water boiling and the egg cooked to my favourite level, it takes 12 minutes. That gives me twelve minutes to process just over one hundred emails. Often I can actually do that in under ten minutes, but on average, because I only allow my egg boiling time to process those emails, I will get it done.
For me, it’s simply just about making a decision about what something is, whether I want to take action on it or read it later. Because those folders are at the top of my email folder list, I just drag and drop them as I go through my inbox. Once finished, I have an empty inbox, a list of actionable emails I have twenty-four hours to respond to—my personal rule: respond to all emails within twenty-four hours—and I’m ready to step into the shower and really start my day.
And that’s the goal to have, process as fast as you can and then get on do the work that matters most to you.
I hope that’s given you some ideas, Justin. Thank you for your excellent question. And thank you to you too for listening.
Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this show, just send me an email or DM me on Facebook or Twitter and I will be happy to answer your question if I can.
It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 90
This week I am delighted to welcome back to the show, Kev Blackburn.
In this episode, part 2 of 2) we continue our talk about getting back on track if you have fallen slightly behind on your goals.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
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Kev’s YouTube Channel
Podcast 89
This week I am delighted to welcome back to the show, Kev Blackburn.
In this episode, part 1 of 2) we talk about getting back on track if you have fallen slightly behind on your goals.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Kev’s YouTube Channel
This week we are back to managing email and how to manage multiple email accounts.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
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Script
Episode 88
Hello and welcome to episode 88 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
We’re back to email this week with a very interesting question about managing multiple email addresses and whether to have them all in one place or to have different apps for different email addresses—a sort of compartmentalisation for email.
If you haven't discovered already, my summer coaching sale has begun. In this sale, you can get incredible savings on my coaching programmes.
I want to help as many people as I can to become better organised and more productive and I know investing in online courses or coaching programmes might not be everyone’s priority. But I strongly believe when you invest just a small amount of money in yourself, your wellbeing and your ability to handle stress you are investing in something much more than a short-term dopamine hit, you are investing in something that will stay with you for life.
If you want to learn more about the savings you can make head over to my website and discover so much more. The link is in the show notes.
Okay, it’s now time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Salvatore. Salvatore asks: Hi Carl, I have four email addresses: work, personal and two volunteer group emails. What do you recommend? One email app per address (Outlook, Gmail, web) or should I have all emails delivered to one inbox and filter somehow. Thank you!
Thank you, Salvatore, for your question.
Many people have multiple email addresses. We have our work email address, a personal address and probably a few others we have accumulated over the years. The question is how do we manage all those emails.
The ideal is to have one email app and have all your accounts coming in to that one email account. Now of course, I know this might not be possible in all cases. You may have Outlook for your business email and you company could have strict policies about how you use that account. In that case, you have no choice. In many ways that can work for you as it will enable you to place a hard edge between your work and your personal life.
But let’s zoom out a little here. Email, whether it is a business related email or a personal one is still the same thing functionally. It is an input that needs a decision making on it. What do you need to do with the email? Reply? Save it for reference? Send it to someone else to deal with or delete it. It does not matter where that email comes from. You still need to make a decision about it. So, having everything come in to one place rather than multiple apps means you have less to check and therefore there less chance anything will get missed.
I use Apple Mail both on my computer and my phone and iPad. All emails I receive come into that one app. I have folders set for each account though. For example, my two businesses - the productivity work and my English communication work each have their own email addresses. I also have a personal account for personal messages and online shopping. They all come in to the one app and one inbox.
My basic email folder structure is:
Action Today - this folder is for any email that requires action. It could be a reply, it could be something I have to read or it could be something else I need to do. If whatever it is I need to do will take longer than two minutes, then I will put the email into that folder for the right account.
Next up I have my Waiting For folder. Usually, the only emails in there are emails I am waiting for something to be delivered. Online shopping for example and occasionally an email I waiting for a reply on. I check this folder once a day and once I have received the order or the reply I am waiting for I will remove the email and archive it.
Then there is my archive folder for everything else. Once I have dealt with an email I will swipe left and the email automatically goes off to my archive folder.
The question most people have is what about emails related to specific projects. This one is really your call. If you feel more comfortable having emails related to projects you are working on in one place, you can create folders for those specific projects. I don’t typically do this, but I do create specific folders for trips I am making. For example, last April when I went over to the UK and Ireland I created a folder for that trip because I have airline itineraries as well as hotel booking confirmations and car hire details. I wanted to have all these in one place in case I needed them while I was on the trip.
Once I got back home I archived all those emails and deleted the folder.
I have another trip coming up in September when I will be going over to Singapore. Again, I have created a folder specifically for that trip so all my hotel booking confirmations and flight itineraries are kept in there. This means if I need to access any information quickly at an airport or hotel, I can get it very quickly without having to search through all my emails.
Now, if you do have strict rules about what comes in to your work email account you have no choice. You will have to have separate email apps for your personal email and your work email. That should not be a big problem though. The only thing you need to do is to make sure you are processing your personal email every twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
This can be easily forgotten as you probably don’t treat personal email as important as your work email. A tip here would be to use your to-do list manager to remind you to check your personal email once a day. If you only check it once a week or once every few days its inbox will fill up and you will have to spend a lot of time clearing it out. Spending ten minutes or so each day processing your inbox here will keep you up to date and make sure you are not missing anything important.
I think the biggest problem with email is we treat it as something more than just another input. But that it really all it is. It’s another input of stuff requiring your attention and a decision. So the secret, if it really is a secret, is to make sure you are processing it regularly and make those decisions about what needs to happen with it. Creating a system for processing your inbox or inboxes will help you to become much faster at making those decisions over time. If you can have all your email coming in to one app, that’s ideal. But if that is not possible, then make sure you build the system of processing your various accounts on a daily basis. Work related email may need checking several times a day, your personal email less frequently. That’s the choice you need to make.
For me, the advantage of using Apple’s Mail app is its ability to create rules within the Mac OS system. Sadly this does not work on iOS mail, but I have created a unified Action Today smart folder where all my actionable emails come into one folder on my Mac. All three of my accounts have an Action Today folder and I want to see all these emails in one place. To do that I set up a Smart Mailbox to collect any email that I have designated as an Action Today email. I have tested many email apps over the years and I have never found an app that will allow me to do that. Newton, Spark and AirMail allow me to have multiple accounts but these are all separated within the app. So, if I use any of those apps I have to check three folders for actionable emails. With Mac OS Mail, I only have one folder to check.
To overcome this, you can flag actionable emails, and most of these third party apps will collect all your flagged emails into one place. Once you have dealt with the email you can simply unflag it. It’s not a perfect way to do it, but it does work.
So there you go, Salvatore. I hope that has helped. Try to keep all your accounts in one app. If that is not possible make sure you are using the minimum number of apps and check them everyday so they do not start to become overwhelming. Doing that should help you to keep everything under control. And remember, any email—personal or work related—is still just another input you need to make a decision on and then do something about it.
Thank you for the question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you’d like answering, then you can email me - carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Do find you are always looking for the best app for your productivity yet never seem to be able to find it? This week, I answer a question that might just help.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Script
Episode 87
Hello and welcome to episode 87 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week’s it’s all about productivity apps and how to get the right one and more importantly stick with it once you have made the decision.
But before we get into this week’s question, don’t forget the Time And Life Mastery online course has been updated. It’s a great course that will show you how to develop a plan for your life and then how to create the process for achieving it.
This course has helped thousands of people over the years and now it has been completely updated, re-recorded and is proving to be a bit of a best seller. So get yourself enrolled and take control of your life and your time now.
Details of the course are in the show notes. I can’t wait to see you on the course soon.
Okay, onto this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Heather. Heather asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been trying to get myself more organised over the last year or so, but I can’t seem to find the right apps. I’ve tried so many, but find I am soon looking for another one. Do you have any tips that will help me to find the right apps? There’s just so many to choose from.
Thank you, Heather, for your question. I’ve written a lot about this over the years because I used to be obsessed with the latest and shiniest new apps. I tried pretty much everything out there, always telling myself that this new app was going to solve all my productivity problems. I think on some weird, deep level I hoped these new apps would do the work for me.
The truth is, no app is ever going to do the work for you and the latest and shiniest app will have the just as many frustrations as the previous app you used.
Let me give you an example. When the new Apple Notes app came out two or three years ago, I thought this is it! This is the perfect app. Built for the Apple ecosystem and with the Apple Pencil in mind. I thought, finally an app that would rival Evernote and give me everything I wanted.
Ha! That didn't happen. Apple Notes is great for taking notes, there’s no question there. But you wait until you have a few hundred notes in there and you want to find a note you made several months earlier. Good luck with that.
So while Apple Notes does look better than Evernote, in my opinion, it doesn't come close to being as good as Evernote when you want to find a specific note.
I had the same issue when Notion came along. I spent a whole afternoon playing around with it. WOW! This app promised to do so much. It could be a place for me to store my goals and plans, be a research tool and be a replacement for Evernote. It appeared to be able to do everything for me. I was particularity drawn to the idea of it being able to act as a dashboard for me. A place where I could see all my open projects, goals and other stuff I wanted to see on a daily basis.
As I played around with it I began to realise that while Notion could do so much, what it could do was not as good as the existing tools I was using. I could see so many frustrations. So the advantage of having everything managed in one app, was negated by the compromises I would have to make and of course, there was the problem with all those settings. When you have an app that allows you to customise almost everything from fonts, background colours and images, you are never satisfied, so you spend a lot of time messing around with them and not doing any work. (Although you convince yourself you are doing work because all these changes to your settings will somehow improve your workflow)
So, you need to choose your apps with care. To do that, the best place to start is with a pen and piece of paper. Ask yourself what do you want your apps to do for you?
Let’s take your to-do list manager for example. Do you prefer to see things in a simple list, or are you more of a visual person? Do you prefer to see things as cards or as lists of projects? Apps like Things, OmniFocus and Todoist will give you your to-dos in a simple list format. Or would you prefer to see things in a more Kanban layout where you see your projects as cards on a board? For that, an app like Trello or Asana would be a good fit.
When it comes to notes, again how you want your notes to be presented to you is important. Google Keep gives a card like layout, Evernote and Apple Notes will give you a more traditional list layout.
Another question for your notes app is how many notes will you want to keep in there? If you are planning on storing all your digital notes in the app, then Evernote or Microsoft OneNote is the way forward. If it is just a few notes, a quick place to capture your ideas, then something like Apple Notes or Google Keep would work well. But, and this is a big but, you need to choose something that works for you.
And that really is the point here, Heather. Find something that you like and works for the way you like to work. I’ve done the “if it works for that organised person then it must work for me” thing in the past. The truth is it will not necessarily work for you. We all work differently, think differently and have different ideas about what looks nice and what doesn’t. Many people don't like the way Evernote looks, that’s okay. I’ve got past that. Many people cannot. There are plenty of functional, aesthetically pleasing apps to choose from out there. Personally, I think Microsoft OneNote looks better than Evernote, but that’s just a personal thing.
Once you have chosen what apps you want to use, then the next stage of the process begins. Learn everything you possibly can about the app. Go to YouTube, find tutorials, read blogs and go through every menu item to see what each one does. Set up a ghost project (a fake project to use for experimentation) in your chosen to do list manager and test out every possible variation you can think of.
That’s really the trick with becoming better organised and more productive. Knowing how to use your apps. Knowing how to quickly add a new item, process that item to its correct place and being able to retrieve it when you need it quickly and effortlessly.
And that brings me to collecting stuff. For me, this is the biggest one. If it is quick and easy to collect my to-dos and notes, I am not going to resist. If it is complicated, involves too many button clicks or I have to think too much, I will resist. Reducing the button pushes and clicks for me is vital. I have what I call “the changing trains” test. Can I easily collect a thought or idea when I am changing trains? I do actually test this. Any new way of collecting must pass that test before I adopt that new approach. If you can collect a task, idea or note while switching trains then it is fast enough. There must be a lot of people in Seoul who think I am very strange taking into my phone or watch to test while switching trains to see how fast collecting is haha.
Another consideration for me is how easy is it to organise my projects? You see, you do not want to be spending too much time inside your productivity tools. You productivity tools are not where your work happens. Your work happens in your email apps, Microsoft Word, Google Docs or PowerPoint or Keynote. The more time I spend inside my writing app, Ulysses, for example, the better. That’s where the work happens. The productivity apps I use must have drag and drop for tasks into projects for example. I can process an inbox of 15 tasks in Todoist to their rightful projects in less than five minutes. That includes adding any necessary dates, priorities or labels. The same with Evernote, I process my Evernote inbox every weekend—usually as part of my weekly review and I can easily process twenty to thirty notes in less than ten minutes.
But processing is not the only thing that needs to be fast. Being able to search and find what you are looking for is also a crucial element. If searching for something is laborious or difficult then the app fails my tests. The app must be easy to search within. Evernote’s search is legendary. I think at the moment that one feature is what is keeping Evernote relevant. Likewise, Todoist search is incredibly fast and the search bar is at the top in every part of Todoist.
So there you go, Heather. To find the right app you do need to do a little testing. Four things need testing:
The first is how fast can you collect your tasks, ideas and notes? Would your app pass the “changing trains” test? If not, then it won’t work for you. Find an app that you can collect your stuff quickly and easily with the minimum of clicks.
The second is, do you actually like using the app? If you don’t like the way it works or you do not like the design, then you are not going to want to use it. So choose an app that appeals to the way you work and your own aesthetic tastes. We are all different here.
Thirdly, how fast can you process the things you collected? You want processing your things to be fast. Remember your productivity apps don’t do the work for you, they only tell you what needs doing and how. So the less time you spend inside your apps, the more work you will get done.
And finally, can you easily find what you are looking for when you need to find it? Searching is a crucial element when you are building your own productivity system. You are going to be throwing a lot of stuff in these apps and if you are not able to find what you put in there, the app fails. So check out the search function. It will be important.
So those are the four tests. And remember, once you have learnt everything you can about these apps, then stick with them for at least a year. You need to give the app time to become part of you and part of your system. If you are constantly switching your apps you will never learn how to user them properly and no app will be good enough for you. Stick with the apps for at least a year and make them work for the way you work.
I hope that answers your question, Heather. Thank you for sending it in.
Thank you to all of you too for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question about productivity, time management or goal planning, then send me an email—carl@carlpullein.com—or DM me on Twitter or Facebook. I’ll be very happy to answer your question for you.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Is your to-do list overwhelming and the cause of a lot of your stress? This week, I answer a question about reducing your to0do list to a more manageable level.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Script
Episode 86
Hello and welcome to episode 86 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week it’s all about getting overwhelming to-do lists down to more manageable levels. It’s having to look at a to-do list that drops off the bottom of the screen that causes so much stress and ultimately makes us not want to look at our daily to-do lists, which is really not what a to-do list is meant to do.
Before we get into the question and answer, I would just like to thank all of you who have enrolled in the Time And Life Mastery version 3 course. Your support enables me to keep doing what I do and to help many more people become better organised and more productive and I am so grateful to you all.
And if you are not ready to purchase an online productivity course, that’s okay. I do have a free basic guide to building your own productivity course that you can enrol in. It is a short, forty minute or so course that will give you the basics of creating a productivity system that will work for you. Remember, any system needs to work for you. This course gives you the foundations on which to build your own system and to help you become better organised and more productive.
Details for this free course are in the show notes.
This week’s question comes from Claire. Claire asks: Hi Carl. Every time I look at my to-do list I just feel completely overwhelmed and never complete it. Every day I have to move a lot of tasks to another day. Am I doing anything wrong?
Hi Claire, I'm pretty sure you are not the only one experiencing this. With so much being thrown at us every day from all sorts of places it is very hard to get everything we plan to do each day done. However, there are a few techniques you can use that can help you.
The first is to get realistic about what you can and cannot do in a day. We often think we can do a lot more than we actually can.
A few years ago, I did an experiment to find what the optimum number of tasks I could complete each day was—I know, I lead a very exciting life— I monitored my daily task completion for a week and averaged it out. It turned out I averaged twelve tasks per day. That was a bit of a shock. I always thought I was efficient and got a lot more tasks done than that, but there it was, in black and white, so to speak, twelve meaningful tasks per day.
Now I did not include my routine tasks in that number—you know the little things that just have to be done each day that do not improve your life in any way. Taking the garbage out, walking the dog, doing the washing up etc.
Having this information was great though. It meant I could plan my days with realism and not optimism.
You see, our brains have no real concept of time or context when we think about our work. That’s why when we think about a project we would like to complete we sometimes believe we can do it all in one day. The reality is you can’t—not if you want to do the work to a high degree of quality. It is also why a task such as a reply to an email, can often cause anxiety because our brain is telling us it will take hours when in reality it would only take around ten minutes.
This is why using your calendar to plan out your day is so helpful. Because calendars are organised by time slot you can allocate those slots to the work you have to do. It gives you a realistic perspective on how much time you have available to do your work each day.
Going back to the number of tasks you complete each day, if you do the same experiment, then average out the number of tasks you complete per day you will find your optimum daily number of tasks you can complete. I would then suggest you reduce that number by two.
For me, that got me to ten tasks per day.
Now the beauty of just having ten tasks on your main daily to-do list is it never looks overwhelming. It’s manageable and is based on the reality of the number of tasks I can complete each day. There is no point in me fighting this. Sure, I would love to get more tasks completed per day, but the reality is I cannot.
Instead what I had to do was become better at prioritising my day—which, when you think about it, is no bad thing—It forces me to decide what tasks are important. The tasks that will move my life and projects forward, and what tasks are what I like to describe as vanity tasks—tasks that feel good to check off, but do not really move anything forward. Things like: clean up my desk, reorganise my notes and clean up my to-do list.
When you develop your skill at prioritising you begin to get much better at moving the right things forward. What I also found was that projects that were not moving forward consistently began moving towards completion much faster. There was a lot of wins in this small, but significant change or approach.
As for your routines, a lot of these don't need to be on your to-do list at all because there are some natural triggers. A natural trigger is something that naturally reminds you to do something. You know when to take the garbage out because the trash can is full. You know when to refuel your car because the fuel warning light will come on and you know to do the laundry because your laundry basket is full. All these are what are called natural triggers. You don't also need a task on your to-do list.
Look around for these natural triggers. They are your best friend.
Now for the routine tasks that do need to be on your to-do list, then these can be tagged as routines so you can filter them out. Again, this depends on the app you are using, or if you are a pen and paper person, you could have them listed in your notebook on a separate page and you can go through them one by one to make sure you have done them.
When I add my routines to the ten tasks I have committed to, I find I am completing on average fifteen to twenty tasks per day and I am not having to reschedule many tasks at all. A lot of my routine tasks are optional, but I often find at the end of the day, I only have three or four of these left to complete so I just get them done.
Another way to help reduce overwhelming lists is to make full use of tags and filters. Now, this depends on what app you are using. If you use OmniFocus, you can create perspectives which allow you to filter out tasks you cannot do or do not want to do right now. Likewise, with Todoist, you can create filters to remove tasks you do not want to see first thing in the morning.
I filter tasks by the time of day. I use the flags in Todoist for this. Red flags are the objectives that must be completed that day. I limit these to just two per day. I use orange flags for my morning tasks and blue flags for the afternoon.
For those of you not using Todoist, you can use tags. Just create a tag for AM and a tag for PM and when you plan your day... you do plan your day don't you?— you can add those tags based on where you are going to be that day. This way, when you start the day because you have already decided what you will do in the morning you can just open up the tag, filter or perspective for the right time of day and get started. If you have prioritised your day and limited the number of tasks you commit to for that day, then this list is going to be much smaller and ultimately much more motivating.
Finally, plan your day the day before. This for me is a no-brainer. When we process our inboxes, we often add dates to tasks that are not really based on the day they really need to be done. We tend to date things wishfully. We date tasks for dates we “wish” to complete them. The problem with this approach is that often we end up with days—towards the end of the week funnily enough—where we have far too many tasks. If you sit down for ten minutes or so at the end of the day, look at your list for tomorrow, check your calendar to make sure you have the time available and make a decision on what tasks you will complete and when you fill always start the day with a rock solid, achievable plan for the day. This is what I call the 2+8 prioritisation technique. Ask yourself what are my two objectives for tomorrow—the tasks I will complete whatever happens and what are the eight other tasks I would like to complete?
Once you have that done, you can go home, relax and know your day is planned and you have set yourself an achievable amount of work for the day. No more overwhelm no more stress or anxiety. Just that great feeling of knowing you have everything under control.
Thank you very much, Claire, for your question and thank you to all of you for listening to this episode. If you have a question about productivity, time management or goal planning, then just send me a quick email, carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Do you have the patter of tiny feet around your home? Are you raising a bunch of lovely kids? How’s your productivity going? In this week’s episode find out a few strategies to cope with those little bundles of joy called kids.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Script
Episode 85
Hello and welcome to episode 85 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a great question about coping with a young family. Now anyone with children will understand the difficulties these little ones pose to our overall productivity. But with a few simple adjustments and a little shift in your mindset, this period of life does not need to be stressful or too harmful to our productivity.
Don’t forget, if you haven’t enrolled in the third edition of Time And Life Mastery yet, you should do so soon. The early-bird discount period ends tomorrow (Midnight Monday) and I would hate for you to miss out on not only a fantastic, life-transforming course, but also a great price - just $85.00.
For those $85.00 you get Time and Life Mastery version 3, the Updated Time And Life Mastery Workbook AND… You also get free access to Your Digital Life 2.0 Online. That’s an incredible value for just a tiny investment.
So go on, get yourself enrolled today and begin transforming your life into a life you want to live.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Matt. Matt asks: Hi Carl, I'm a father of 2 daughters, (3 and 1) and naturally they take or impact a lot of my time. I've been trying to build a productivity system for a long time that works for me, as well as implementing a lot of the tips and routines suggested by you and others. However, everything I have found seems to rely on building a predictable routine for oneself, which is near impossible with children. Do you have any tips that will help me?
Hi Matt, Thank you so much for this question. I am sure there are a lot of people experiencing this joyous, life-changing experience as well as the challenges that come along with it.
Having small children around is a huge demand on your time and disrupts the most organised of people. But let’s be honest here, raising children is likely to be the biggest responsibility and best experience you will ever have in your life and one you should enjoy, cherish and let it be where you do your best work not just professionally but as a parent.
The first point is as you say, Matt, it is almost impossible to stick to any kind of plan when your kids wake up at different times each day and in all likelihood go off to sleep at different times too. So what can you do?
Well, the first thing to understand is if you are trying to stick to a routine at the same time each day you are only going to be fighting yourself. It is not going to happen with any consistency and ultimately you will fail. On that point no matter what you do your kids will win in the end. So rather than have a set time for morning routines, it would be better to start your morning routines when you wake up. Now that could be 4am or it could be 7am the key is you begin the day the same way.
Now we all follow some kind of routine each day. When we wake up we make our coffee, we brush our teeth, shower etc. So whether you are consciously aware of it or not, you do still follow some kind of routine each day. With kids, you have added tasks. Breakfast needs preparing, kids need dressing etc. All these routines are things you just do because you have to do them.
It can be useful to have a morning ‘have I done?’ checklist. What this means is you have a list of things you have to do in a morning - not wish to do things - wish to do things should never be on this list. This list is for things that you absolutely have to do and all it is doing is asking “have I done this?”
This question—“have I done this?”—is a powerful question because rather than telling you to do something it is asking you whether you have done it and if you haven’t you can decide if you want to do it or not. It gives you a better sense of calm, when all around you may be chaos. I know this might sound simplistic, but it works. You should try it. It is far less commanding and gives you an option to decide.
Now as an aside here, if you create this morning checklist on a little whiteboard in your kitchen you can involve your children in the process too. You can ask them the questions one by one and they can check off the tasks as you go through them. By starting them young you are installing habits that they will get a great deal of benefit from in later life. Now that’s a win-win for all of you.
Now as for your own personal morning routines, again you need to be flexible. You will have to accept there will be days when you are not going to be able to fit in exercise, or reading. Your kids are going to demand your attention. But from a parent’s perspective, that’s a great thing. You are getting some quality time with your kids. If possible, involve your kids in your exercise. You can ask them to sit on your back while you do press-ups for example, or you can get them to hold your knees when you do your stomach crunches. Another thing you can have them do is press the stopwatch start button and tell you when you have done 30 seconds or a minute. There are endless ways of involving your kids in an exercise programme.
Of course, you might not get the exercise session you want, but at least you get some exercise and you have just given your children some quality time with you.
Okay, what about your personal projects
For the most part, your projects are going to have to be realistic. You will need to reduce the things you used to do before your children came along. There’s no point in thinking that your kids will all go to bed at the same time, sleep soundly and wake up at the same time each day. That’s never going to happen. So if you have any thoughts about being able to micro-manage your day you are heading for a big surprise. That won't happen. But that’s okay.
Rather than micro-scheduling your day, you are better working from a master list of projects and working on them as and when you get time. I’ve found it’s often better to plan what you would like to do on a weekly basis and keep that plan to the minimum of projects.
It’s really all about what you can do in the moments of time you get when your kids are either asleep or engaged in their own activities.
Your kids might be watching tv or drawing. While they are doing that you can do some of your own work. Of course, once again it is not ideal, but doing that is better than not doing anything at all. Just being able to move your projects forward a little is better than not moving forward at all.
With all that said, collecting your stuff and spending ten to fifteen minutes each day to organise that stuff should be possible even with the most energetic of kids. Kids drop off at some stage and when they get organising. It might be your only chance all day.
You could, of course, do what my mother did when she wanted some quiet time. She’d give me a spoonful of cough medicine and within twenty minutes I was sound asleep. I didn't turn out that bad... or did I? hahaha oh those were the days.
Now there is the other part to this and that is to negotiate time with your partner. Some friends of mine came up with an arrangement where when the husband came home from work—usually around 7—their young son was his responsibility. He was also responsible for their son on a Saturday.
Those Saturdays turned into some huge adventures from parking in the car park near the end of the local airport’s runway to watch the aeroplanes land and take-off to fishing at a local river. It was not only a great experience for their son it was hugely beneficial for the husband too because he was able to get time away from screens and work.
Whatever way you look at it, having kids running around the house is a joyous thing. For our own personal productivity, we need to adapt and create systems and strategies that allow us to have that important quality time with our kids and carve out some time for ourselves to work on our own projects.
It’s not easy, of course, but with a little foresight, creativity and a good strong list of things you want to complete is not impossible.
I should point out that the one thing you need to keep a tab on is your own sleep cycle. A lack of sleep will kill any ideas you have about staying productive, no matter how organised you are. Pay close attention to your own sleep. If you are not getting enough, prioritise catch-up time. This isn't about reducing your available time still further. This is more about making sure when you have time available it is not sabotaged by your own exhaustion. A lack of sleep will lead to mistakes which will need fixing, missed deadlines and poor performance. It just isn't worth it. If you are exhausted and you have a choice between clearing your email inbox and getting a twenty-minute nap. Take the nap every time.
Your email can wait. Your sleep cannot.
Whether you have kids or not, no matter how busy you are when you are at home, you will always have pockets of time to get on with the things you want to get on with. If you have a master list of projects you can look at when you do have a pocket of time, then no matter how busy you are you will be able to make progress on something. And that is what it is all about. Taking advantage of those pockets of time to get the stuff you want done.
I hope that goes some way to answering your question, Matt and thank you for allowing me to use your question.
Thank you too to all of you for listening. Don't forget if you have a question you would like me to answer on this show, just email me, carl@carlpulllein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, we return to that familiar problem of sticking with your system once you have created it.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3 Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Script
Episode 84
Hello and welcome to episode 84 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week we return to sticking with a system, the most common question asked this week, indeed I think on the last few weeks it’s been the number one question.
Before we get into the question, in case you missed it, The Time And Life Mastery version 3 launched last week. This is a massive update with almost all classes re-recorded and with an updated workbook and downloadable sheets.
This course is truly transformational. It takes you on a journey of discovery. You learn how to discover the things you want to do in your life and I show you how you can develop those dreams and goals and turn them into actionable steps that take you towards achieving them. You get to learn about the visual timeline, the 5 transformational questions to ask yourself and you begin work on your 50 things you want to do and achieve.
And once you have your list and developed your plan on your visual timeline, I show you how to master your time so you can start taking the steps you need to take to achieve them. It’s not going to be easy—but then nothing worthwhile is easy—but the journey, the experiences and the achievement is what your reward will be and nothing can beat that.
To find out more there is a link in the show notes to the Time And Life Mastery website and if you are quick, you can Dave yourself $15.00 by getting yourself an early-bird discount.
Ok, back to this week’s show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Brian and Nilesh. They ask: We have set up our systems as you suggest in your courses, but now, after a few weeks we find we are not sticking with the system. Do you have any tips to keep us using the system?
Thank you, Brian and Nilesh, for the great question.
Okay, let’s start at the beginning here. For most of you, when you create a whole new productivity system things are going to be different. You are going to change a few habits and you are going to have to do things differently from the way you have done them before. That means you are changing habits and that is not going to be easy. A few weeks is not really very long to install a new way of doing things and of course, there are going to be times when crises and emergencies will take over the day. That’s just life and we have to develop strategies for dealing with those for when they happen.
So, understanding that in order for any new system to work for you, you will have to change. Now for you to change old habits, you need to take things slowly. Take each step at a time. For instance, I always recommend that you focus on collecting to start with. The reason is simple. If you are not collecting everything into a trusted place, then you will have nothing to organise at the end of the day, so the whole system collapses before you even start.
Now, when it comes to collecting, to stick with that, you need to get fast at collecting. Speed is the objective here. Most of the things you will be collecting will be done on the fly, so your mobile collecting needs to be fast. Whether you are using your mobile phone or a pocket notebook to collect, you need to a) make sure you have it with you at all times and b) you can collect with the minimum of barriers.
I like the old Steve Jobs analogy here. When they were developing the first iPod the goal was to be able to get to any song within three clicks or less. The engineers spent months testing and testing every scenario so that no matter where you were on your iPod, you were no more than three clicks away from the song you wanted.
You need the same mindset when developing your collecting system. No more than three clicks to type. Actually, it should be less for capturing. Ideally, one click and you are typing if you are using a phone—that’s the reason I use Drafts for all my collecting. It’s one click and I am typing what I want to collect.
Part of developing your system is finding the fastest way you can to collect everything. That also includes paper documents. I carry a plastic A4 wallet in my bag so I can slip any paper documents or name cards into that. I empty that out every two or three days, but if something is urgent I will add a task into my to-do list manager.
So, collecting is all about speed.
Organising is about setting time aside each day to organise and decide what needs to happen next with whatever you collected. That could be just adding a task to its rightful project or it could be you decide you no longer need it and so you delete it.
Now with organising, the best way to develop this habit is to set aside 15 minutes at the end of your working day to do your organising. You should only need ten to twenty minutes to do this. So scheduling 15 minutes in your calendar every day at the same time will force you to stop whatever you are doing at that moment and begin organising. This is a little like tidying your desk at the end of your day before you go home.
Let’s say you finish work at 6pm. So, schedule 5:45 to 6:00pm every day as your organising time. I like to call it the Golden Ten - the ten minutes you need to process and plan.
Now, whatever happens, you make sure you do your organising and planning at that time. Even if you are in the middle of something. Stop. Do your organising and then return to whatever you were doing. The reason for this is if you continue working on whatever it is you were working and finish say at 8:30pm or 9:00pm you are going to begin skipping your organising and that’s when your system begins breaking down. Miss one or two like that and you lose momentum. Do not skip it!
It’s only for 15 minutes. Everybody can find 15 minutes each day to do their organising and planning. Schedule it and make sure it happens at the same time each day. It will quickly become a routine and then a habit and once it has, you are much less likely to skip it.
So there you go. Focus on collecting and organising to get you started. These are the easiest parts to becoming better organised and more productive. So develop those habits first.
So the next part to develop is planning and prioritising. This can be a bit more difficult because it takes time, and a little experience, to learn to identify which tasks have the biggest positive impact on your projects and goals. However, if you make sure you are doing your organising every day, you soon begin to see patterns. You see which tasks have a greater impact on the progress of a project. You can then start making sure they are prioritised each day.
You should also reduce the number of tasks you have on your to-do list as much as you can. Long lists of to-dos create overwhelm, and overwhelm will stop you from looking at your lists. When you stop looking at your lists you stop planning and prioritising and then you are at the mercy of everyone else’s emergencies and urgent tasks.
A simple way to do this is to look for natural triggers. Natural triggers are things that automatically tell you something needs doing. The fuel warning light in your car is a good example of a natural trigger. When the low fuel warning light comes on in your car you know you need to put fuel in. You do not need to add that to your to-do list. Likewise things like doing the laundry or taking out the garbage. You know they need doing when the laundry basket or the garbage can is nearly full. You can see that. You do not need them on your to-do list.
You can also reduce your to-do lists by creating an “action today” folder in your email program and putting any email that needs action in there. Then all you need is one task in your to-do list manager that tells you to check your “action today” folder in email. This saves you from having to send actionable emails to your to-do list manager.
Finally, as I talked about last week, you need self-discipline. Without that, you will never stick to any system. You need to give any system or app at least one year to develop and grow with you before changing it. If you are constantly changing apps, or you are constantly changing the time you do your organising and planning then you will fail. It just does not work like that. You need to be disciplined and stick with it no matter what you feel like.
I can promise you if your system keeps failing it is not the app that is causing the failure it is you. You are not giving enough time to develop your new habits and to learn the apps you are using properly
Finally, your calendar is your guide throughout the day. Your to-do list only tells you what to work on next. It is your calendar that tells you how much time you have before your next meeting. Your calendar tells you where you need to be and when and with who and it is your calendar that tells you you need to stop and do your organising.
If you do not treat your calendar with the respect it deserves your whole system will come crashing down. You need to adopt the policy of “what goes on my calendar gets done”. No excuses.
If you start to ignore what you have planned on your calendar then your calendar loses its power. This is why you should never give up control of your calendar to anyone. Not even your boss. It is your calendar and it is your time. Do not let anyone else have control of it. You can allocate time for other people to make appointments with you, but you need to be in control over when that time will be. You also need to block off time for focused work each day. Usually, the best time for that is early in the morning when everyone else is checking their email. You will have at least an hour each day when all your colleagues and customers are checking email so they won’t be bothering you. Use that time wisely and block off time each day to do some undisturbed important work. Again. No excuses. It is the only way you can control what gets done and leaves you in control of your time, and more importantly, your life.
Well, I hope that has helped in some small way, Brian and Nilesh. Really it all comes down to self-discipline and without that, no system, app or device will work. If you don’t develop your self-discipline and habits and change your bad habits then nothing with ever stick.
You need to make a decision now. Be disciplined, collect everything, schedule those fifteen minutes at the end of your day for organising and planning and make sure that what goes on your calendar gets done. That needs to be your focus for the next three months.
At the same time, keep working on becoming faster at collecting so you never resist. Remember if you are not collecting, you will have nothing to organise and that means you have no system.
Thank you for the question, guys and thank you all for listening. Don’t forget to take a look at the Time And Life Mastery course. I put my heart and soul into this course because I know it works and I know it can transform your life is so many positive ways.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Are you struggling to start any kind of system? Then this week’s podcast is for you.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Time And Life Mastery Course Version 3 Website
The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Script
Episode 83
Hello and welcome to episode 83 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week it’s all about setting up your system and sticking with it. I know a lot of people want to create a productivity system—something that helps them to stay on top of their work and the things important to them—yet fail to stick with their system or find they are always changing their system and apps and never really feel they are getting better.
Before we get to this weeks question, I have something really exciting to announce. The Time And Life Mastery 3 online course is coming later this week. This course will transform your life completely and this year it has been completely re-written and re-recorded.
This course takes you on a journey of discovery. We start with your life. What do you want to achieve? What do you want to have in your life and how to create a plan to change the way things are today so you can begin down the road towards achieving those goals.
Once you have a plan in place you begin the time mastery part of the course where I show you how to build your plan into your daily life and make sure each day you are making progress towards hitting your milestones and your objectives.
This is a complete life course. I have divided it up over four days—although for you big achievers it is possible to do the course in just one day—and throughout the course, you complete a number of exercises designed to help you create the vision and plan you want for you and your family.
More details of this course can be found on the course website which is www.timeandlifemastery.com.
Okay, onto this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question
This week’s question comes from Richard. Richard asks; Hi Carl, I have tried everything to get my life more productive but I just can't get anything to stick. Do you have any tips on how to get started and stay with a system
Oh boy, this is one of those questions I get all the time. There is so much advice out there—a lot of it great advice—but I think sometimes that’s the real problem. There’s so much great advice it can be very hard to choose which advice is best for you.
And in that statement is the heart of my answer to you, Richard. Whatever advice you take, it has to work for you.
Now, I understand we all work differently. That’s one of the wonderful things about being human, we are all so amazingly diverse. With that, though, comes the issue that one size definitely does not fit all.
I like all my stuff to be organised and in its rightful place. When I get home at the end of the day, my bag goes next to my desk. My phone goes in the same place and my AirPods immediately get put back in their case.
My wife, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. Her bag goes wherever she drops it and her AirPods sometimes get out in the dining table, sometimes on her dressing tables and in the winter sometimes put in her coat’s pocket.
So the reality is, you need to build a system that works the way you work and to do that you need to understand how you work.
An example of this is I recommend you spend around ten minutes at the end of the day processing all the stuff you have collected that day in your inbox and planning what you will prioritise tomorrow. In most people’s cases that work very well yet, I have a number of clients who wake up early and find doing their processing and planning early in the morning.
Now, processing and planning are important if you are going to get control of your day. Without a plan, the day will grab control of you and your time and you will feel very busy but achieve very little of importance.
So there is a great starting point. When will you do your planning? Morning or evening?
Pick one. Then schedule it. Schedule 20 to 30 minutes for processing. Of course, the goal is to get that down to ten minutes (hence the phrase I use “The Golden 10”) but in the early days of your journey, it will take a little longer.
Once you have a set time each day to process and plan you are really 50% of the way to having a great system.
Now, for the other 50%.
This is really dominated by collecting. If you are not collecting everything that comes your way, you will have nothing to organise at the end of the day and if you have nothing to organise you will have nothing to plan for. So collecting needs to be done.
I’ve found this is an area a lot of people skip because they erroneously believe they will remember to do something. So they collect some things and not collect others.
The problem with not collecting everything is it only takes one drama for your brain to forget what it was you wanted to remember. For instance, you could be waiting to cross the road and remember you need to send something to your colleague in Frankfurt. As you are waiting, a friend you haven't seen for a long time taps you in the back and you then you engage in a short conversation ending with a promise to do lunch next week.
Now you have two things to remember, but you are so excited about catching up with your friend you completely forget about sending the file to your colleague in Frankfurt.
When you take those few seconds to collect your tasks, ideas and events you do not forget. You’ve collected them and those things can now be processed when you have time for processing later in the day.
So how do you get started? This is possibly the hardest part. The reason is that you need to stop fire fighting and for many people fire fighting is addictive. You feel you have to always be running around putting out fires and when you are not doing so, you feel incredibly uncomfortable.
You have to stop.
Now depending on how much backlog you have and how much important work you have neglected this will determine how much time you need. Typically, I find most people need at least one whole day, although it is not unheard of some requiring two or even three days to get themselves sorted out.
Often the GTD mind sweep is a great place to start, but I have found setting up a framework to collect and organise your stuff is a better place to start. After all, if you follow the concept of dumping everything on your mind into an in basket at the end of the process you have an in basket full of stuff and nowhere to organise it.
Selecting what tools you want and what storage you want to use, I feel is a better place to start. This way if the tools you select are new to you you can be learning to use those as you collect and organise - a sort of killing two birds with one stone. Part of a great system is you know how to use your tools properly and more importantly your use of them is fast.
Once you have the framework in place you need to gather all the stuff you have around you that needs doing. Go through your email, go through any inboxes you have for notes and go through any bits of paper you may have collected that have ideas, tasks or events on them. Get then all in the right place.
Set up your calendar to work for you too. Your calendar is the anchor that brings everything together. Your calendar is what tells you what needs to be done and when and how much time you have available each day for the work that needs doing. This helps you to get realistic about what you can achieve each day.
Okay, so you have taken the plunge. You put a stop to all your inputs for one day, you have a framework in place and you are ready to reopen the floodgates and allow stuff to restart. How do you get yourself to stick with your system?
Two words... self-discipline.
Yes, you are going to need a lot of it. You are going to have to install some new habits and to do that you will need self-discipline and, according to research, sixty-six days to install those habits. That is going to be hard. You are going to fall off the wagon and you are going to slip up on some days. But just because you fall off the wagon or you slip up occasionally, doesn't mean you don't get back up and carry on the journey. Getting back up and continuing is part of the process. We all slip up from time to time, but the important thing is you keep going.
Really, all you need to focus on is collecting and giving yourself ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day to organise what you collected and plan your day. Collecting is just something you do. Sure, you may have to remind yourself from time to time to collect something, but it does not take long to get into that habit. And as for finding those ten to twenty minutes at the end of the day for organising, well… If you can’t find ten to twenty minutes then you have bigger problems than productivity and time management. Schedule that time on your calendar. Pick a time at the end of the day and create a recurring event with a notification that comes up to remind you. When that notification comes up, stop what you are doing and begin organising and planning.
If you need to go back and finish off some work, that’s okay. The important thing is you have processed and you have a plan for the next day.
You see, the plan you have for the next day gives you your purpose. It prepares your mind for the work you plan to do and you give yourself a fighting chance of actually getting those important things done.
Now, for those of you who have not already done my FREE COD course, I highly recommend you take the course now. The course is just a basic introduction to COD (collect, organise and do) and it will give you a simple framework in which to build your own system. The forty minutes you take to do that course will save you a tonne of hours later and will help you to finally get you to a place you feel in control.
Thank you, Richard, for your question and that you all for listening. Don’t forget if you have a question then you can email at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
So you work in a paper based office or work hybridly? Then this week’s episode of The Working With Podcast is just for you.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Complete Guide To Creating A Successful Life Course
Why I quit law and went in to teaching video
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Script
Episode 81
Hello and welcome to episode 82 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I've received a lot of questions about how to implement the COD system in a paper environment. Is it possible? Well, the answer is yes it is possible and today I will explain how to do it.
But before we get into the question if you are struggling with time management and productivity and don't have a system at all, then take forty minutes and do my FREE COD course.
It will give you the framework in which to create a system that works for you. COD is very flexible and as you will see today is not just designed for the digital world. You can use it in an analogue world too.
Details of how to enrol in the course are in the show notes.
Okay, on to this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jerri and Janet. They ask: Hi Carl, we work in a largely paper-based work environment. How would you go about organising your work when you have to deal with paper and paper files?
Thank you, Jerri and Janet, for your questions.
At its very core COD is simple and incredibly flexible. It’s intentionally so because one size does not fit all and we all have different ways of organising and working. Many of us love to develop ideas with pen and paper, others prefer to collect everything into a digital system. And the truth is there are no right or wrong ways to do this. The only right way to do it is the way that works for you.
So, to implement COD in a paper-based way you first need to get yourself a notebook. Now you want to get a notebook that is robust and one you can carry with you wherever you go. This will become your to-do list manager.
Now just as an aside here, back in the days when I used a hybrid system, I carried a little pocket notebook with me. One with easy to tear off sheets. This I carried in my pocket whenever I couldn't carry my main notebook. I used it for those ‘just in case moments’. Times like when I was having lunch or dinner. This way I still had a way to collect everything no matter where I was or what I was doing.
Okay, so you have your notebook to manage all your to-dos, now where do you put all the incoming paper? Well, you will also need an in-basket. Now, your in-basket should be at your main workstation. If you work from an office and home, it might be a good idea to have two in-baskets. However, I never felt the need for two. Because I was collecting into a notebook I carried with me everywhere I went I just tore off the notes and put them into my in-basket at my home office when I was next there.
Now the notebook you are using for your to-do list manager is where you put your lists. All you really need is a master list and a daily list. Put everything on your master list and when you do the 2+8 prioritisation at the end of the day you can put tasks from master list to your daily list.
But again, how you organise your daily to-do list is entirely up to you - it has to work for you. But even wit paper, you can still operate the 2+8 Prioritisation system. Every evening, before you go to bed you open up your notebook, with the next day’s date at the top and start with your two objectives. Then leave a line space and write you eight focus tasks for the day—the eight tasks you really want to complete.
You can use the right-hand page for your notes for the day, observations and little reminders if you wish.
Okay, now for all your paper files.
For this, you will need a way to store all your project materials. The best way is to get yourself a filing cabinet, but that might be hard to do these days. Now when I was transitioning to a digital system I used a shelf on my bookcase next to my desk. I could see the names of the files clearly on the folders I used so it was always easy to access papers I needed.
The key with this system is to make sure once a project is completed or you no longer need the documents you were keeping you remove them. Either throw them away or archive them in a box somewhere. You do not want to get in that awful position of having a mix of completed and active projects all in the same place. You would just go numb to all the files you have in there.
Now your notes, use your notebook.
Again, you want to have your current notes with you at all times. Here all you need to do is start at the back of your notebook. Keep your daily lists at the front and your notes at the back. You can use post-it notes to separate projects and give you easy access to your notes. The thing here is not to have too many notebooks. I know a lot of people have different notebooks for different projects and that’s okay if it works for you. Personally, I never liked that idea, and so kept meeting notes and projects ideas at the back of my one current notebook.
One area I would not move to a digital system is my calendar. These days, airlines and other places you may make bookings will send you a calendar link that adds all the right information you need to your calendar. Likewise, when you use a digital calendar you can share calendars with family and friends. All you need to do is print off your calendar for the week after you have done your weekly review and fold it into your notebook. You can then add and delete events by hand.
One of my friends here in Korea, a very successful businessman and teacher, does this every week. Every Monday morning his assistant prints off his calendar for the week and he folds it into his little pocketbook. He can reference that paper anytime he wants to see where he needs to be and when. He is one person I’ve met who has never missed an appointment, so it must work.
Now speaking of printing things out, if you want to maintain some digital system and make things a little easier for your processing and storing, then remember almost all to-do list managers do give you the option to print out your daily list. Todoist, for example, can send you an email every morning with your daily list. It is organised beautifully and you can print that out. You can add new tasks, cross of tasks when you have done them or add a new date and update your system when you get back to your computer. This would actually be a great way for those of you who like using pen and paper. It allows you the ability to organise digitally but still maintain your daily task management in an analogue way.
In many ways, if you do print out your daily to-do list and carry that with you all day, crossing off completed tasks and adding new tasks to that one sheet of paper, it will give you a great way to review your day and plan the next. All you would need to do is give yourself the ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day to sit down with your computer and update everything add and plan out your next day. Sounds almost idyllic to me.
Now, remember, while paper-based working still exists, the digital way is a lot more efficient and means you can have access to all your notes and files through the cloud. If you have a smartphone then you still have access to your Google Drive, Dropbox or iCloud. So it is worth thinking about still maintaining your files in the cloud. Of course, there may still be documents that you need to retain hard copies of and for that you can create physical files. What you do need to do though is to make sure you are maintaining those files and keeping them current.
COD is very flexible. It is designed to be a framework that allows you to collect your tasks, ideas and events into a single place, give you time at the end of the day to organise those things you collected and focuses you on doing the work. How you collect and organise is up to you. All you need to do is find the best method for you. That can take a bit of experimenting, but it is worth it because once you do have a strong framework in place your effectiveness and efficiency improve and you become a lot less stressed and overwhelmed.
So there you go Jerri and Janet. I hope that has answered your question and given you some ideas about how to use COD with your paper-based working.
Thank you for your wonderful question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like me to answer, please email me at carl@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Twitter or Facebook.
It just remains for me know to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 81
Do you have difficulty completing projects? Then this week’s episode of the Working With… Podcast is just for you.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Complete Guide To Creating A Successful Life Course
Why I quit law and went in to teaching video
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2 for 1 Spring Sale
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 81 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I have a question about a problem several years ago I had. That is being excellent at starting projects and having ideas, but terrible at seeing those projects through to completion. It took a lot of self-analysis and introspection to understand why I did that and to change my behaviours so I would start completing projects.
But, before we get into that, I'd just like to remind you all that I currently have a Spring Sale on where you can get my Your Digital Life 2.0 online course for just $65.00 and if you buy that course this week, I am throwing in From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days completely free.
When you add in the free access you get to my Email Mastery and Ultimate Goal Planning Course you get with Your Digital life 2.0 you are getting a package worth $240 for just $65.00.
I must be mad! So go on, get yourself enrolled today as this offer will end very very soon… Well, this week actually.
Okay onto this week’s question and means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Daniel. Daniel asks: Hi Carl, thank you for all the content you put out. Could you help me? I have hundreds of ideas and I collect all these into Evernote. But when I look at my list of ideas I realise that I am just not completing any of them. I think it is because I don't know where to start. Do you have any tips that might help?
Hi Daniel, thank you for your question.
I should congratulate you on actually collecting your ideas. Far too many people don't collect their ideas and just leave them in their heads only to see them disappear as soon as their attention is diverted and never surface again.
So what we need to do is see collecting and developing your ideas as part of a process. You need to give each idea some time to develop.
So, you collect an idea and while you are still buzzing about it you should take five or ten minutes to develop it. A one-line title in your notes app is not going to inspire you very much in a few days time. So take five minutes now and note down some thoughts to give your idea some context.
Let's say I have an idea for a new course. I will collect that idea in Evernote and then take a few minutes to jot down the purpose of the course and what I would expect students to learn from it. I would also probably write out a few lesson titles. I know saying that now sounds like quite a lot, but in reality, it is only a few lines.
Once I have a few lines expanding my idea I can leave it.
Often I will leave the idea for a few days. For me, if I cannot stop thinking about an idea and I keep adding to the note then I know it will become a project and I need to spend some time to really develop it.
For this purpose, I use a tag in Evernote called “Incubator”.
Now I should explain about my incubator. This is a tag in Evernote that has no more than ten notes in it. If I have additional ideas I can still collect them, but they can only go in my incubator if I move another note out.
This keeps my open, active, in development ideas to a maximum of ten. It also ensures that whatever is in there is still relevant.
Now the thing about ideas is they are only moving forward when you are working on them. It can be easy to collect your next billion-dollar idea in your notes but over time, if you don’t do anything with it, it soon disappears under all the other notes and stuff you collect. So you need to keep them utmost and foremost in your mind.
To do this you should make it a habit to review your ideas—those in your incubator—regularly. I look through my ideas every Wednesday and Sunday (when I do my weekly review) I choose Wednesday because by Wednesday I have usually finished creating the content I want to put out that week and I have time and mental space to think of new ideas.
Here, what you do is a quick scan. Does anything jump out at you? If it does, open up the note and set yourself 15 minutes or so and really dive deep thrashing out some concepts and ideas. Get them all written down add them to your idea.
Now, for most of you, there will be one idea that is consuming you more than others. Often when I have a new online course idea this will be constantly on my thoughts. Because the idea was collected into my Evernote inbox it is very easy to open up Evernote and see the note at the top of my notes list. I can then add additional ideas to the note as they come to me. Often by the time I reach my weekly review, the note has developed into a long list and that is a sure sign that this is a project worth taking to the next stage.
The opposite can happen too. Around this time last year, I had an idea to do a build your own Google productivity system. For a couple of days, I was really excited about it. I collected a lot of notes and decided to take it to the next stage and build a project out of it.
Now to build a project out of an idea what I do is allocate an hour of development time. Usually in the early morning when my brain is fresh and at it’s most creative. I go through my collected ideas and pull out all the next actions and list them at the bottom of the note. Once the obvious next action tasks are out, I will copy and paste them into Todoist as a project and allocate time on my calendar for doing those action steps.
As I was developing this project, I realised I didn't have enough knowledge of the Google productivity apps and when I investigated further I decided that I would need to learn a lot more than I had time to learn. So I abandoned the project. You see projects can be abandoned at any time. It best, of course, to abandon projects in their early stages, but for your personal projects that do not involve other people, you are free to abandon them at any time.
You see, you do need to be realistic, Daniel. There are a lot of considerations to take into account. For one do you have the actual time to do this project? How many other projects do you have going on at the moment? I’ve found if I have more than three active projects going on at any one time I am having to compromise on time to be able to allocate enough time to each one. That’s never a good thing.
One way to overcome this—If you can do it—is to allocate one project to focus on each week. Right now, I have all my focus on Time and Life Mastery 3, my biggest online course. I have not just allocated this week to this project, but I have given over the whole month. This means outside my regular work, producing this podcast, recording my YouTube videos and writing my blog posts, all other work time is being spent on that one project. I know that for me to get it planned out, recorded and edited so it can be ready for publishing next month, I have to focus completely on this project.
And that leads nicely to my next tip. That is set yourself a deadline. Of course, with your regular work projects, you may have a deadline imposed on you. But for your own personal projects, you get to control when you complete these. I often see people creating amazing projects and then calling them a “hobby project” which is just a get out clause so you don’t have to finish them. If you are serious about the project and it is something you really want to do, then set a deadline. The truth is without a deadline, you will never finish the project.
Okay, so there’s quite a lot in this week’s answer so let me summarise what you can do. The first step is to make sure you are collecting your ideas. Remember, if you decide later to abandon the idea, that’s fine. That’s far better than not collecting the idea in the first place.
Once you have collected the idea, the next stage is what I call the discovery stage. This is where you develop your idea, throw links and other support materials into the mix and be aware of your own limitations in knowledge and time. How long this takes is really up to you. Take as long as you need to really develop the idea.
Then leave it for a few days. Let your subconscious mind absorb everything and think about it. Then when you come back to it, you will either decide it’s not for you, or you will decide to move on with it. Moving on with it means going through the notes you have collected and pulling out all the next actions and moving them over to your to-do list manager as a project.
Then be realistic about your available time and choose the right time to begin working on your project.
The key is to really restrict what you work on at any one time. Keep an incubator file for no more than ten ideas at any one time. Less if you can. I used to keep 20 ideas in my incubator but soon found a lot of those ideas were not getting touched. That’s why I reduced it to ten. I sometimes think ten is too many, but for now, it works for me.
Finally, I would advise you have a someday / maybe folder somewhere. This could be in your to-do list manager or your notes app. Inside your someday/maybe folder you keep all your project ideas and other things you have ideas about and review this folder once every month or so looking for something you would like to work on next. This prevents you from losing your ideas and will always give you a feed of new projects to work on whenever you want to work on them.
I hope that answers your question, Daniel. Thank you for sending in your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget you too can have any of your productivity, time management or goal planning questions answered by emailing me—carl@carlpullein.com or DMing me on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 80
Your calendar, probably the most powerful productivity tool you have in your toolbox. On this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about how to get the most out it.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Complete Guide To Creating A Successful Life Course
Why I quit law and went in to teaching video
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2 for 1 Spring Sale
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 80 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week’s episode is all about the humble calendar. They’ve been around for a very long time is one form or another and because of their simplicity have helped millions of people through the ages to schedule their work and to create amazing things.
Before I get in to this week’s question, though, I wanted to give you a heads up to a couple of very special offers I have on at the moment, not only do I have my Complete Guide To Creating A Successful Life course at 50% off, I also have a Spring Special on where you can get two courses for the price of one. Yes, you can get From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days for FREE when you buy Your Digital Life 2.0 Online. That’s a value of over $240 for just $65.00.
That 2 for 1 offer is on for a limited time only so hurry. Remember, with all my courses once you are enrolled you are enrolled for life and will get all future updates for free. All the details are in this week’s show notes
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Sanjid. Sanjid asks: Carl, I really struggle to know how to use my calendar. I use a to-do list manager and I don’t know what I should be putting on my calendar and what to put on my to-do list. Can you help clarify things for me?
Hi Sanjid, thank you for your question. It’s a very valid question and what to put on a calendar and what to put on a to-do list can cause quite a lot of confusion at times.
Before we go into the specifics lets take a step back and look at how not just your calendar and to-do list should work but also your notes as well.
We have three basic tools in our productivity armoury these days. The calendar, to-do list manager and your notes app. All three have a specific job to do. In a very basic way, your calendar tells you where you need to be and with who on what day and time. Your to-do list tells you what tasks you need to perform on a specific day or within a specific project and your notes is where you keep all your ideas, meeting notes and other similar reference materials.
Now a good productivity habit is to keep a hard edge between these three tools. What that means is you do not duplicate. When you keep a clean edge between these tools you don’t need to have tasks in your calendar or events in your to-do list.
What should happen is you look at your calendar and see what meetings and appointments you have and where you need to be, and then look at your to-do list manager to see what tasks you can complete in between those meetings and appointments or if there is anything you need to do at a particular location.
For example, Let’s say you start the day and look at your calendar. Your calendar tells you you have a meeting with your boss at 9:30am at your office. You can then go to your to-do list manager and pull up your tag or label for your boss and see what actions you have that relate to your boss. During the meeting, you would take notes into your notes app, and after the meeting transfer any tasks to your to-do list manager—and that should not take you more than a few minutes.
That’s essentially how everything should work.
The whole point of keeping these tools separate is to avoid overwhelm and a confusing mess. I’ve seen people try and keep their tasks and appointments in a calendar or trying to keep everything in a hybrid calendar, task list and notes manager and in almost every case it has ended in tears. You end up with things all over the place and in today’s world of massive distractions, it becomes incredibly easy to miss something important. When that happens you lose trust in your whole system and then things become worse because you no longer collect everything.
Your calendar is also your best planning tool. When you use your calendar properly—for events—you can see what your future days look like. You will know when you have a forthcoming business trip or workshop and on those days you can remove all but the essential tasks from your task list. You know you will not have much time to do tasks on those days because you need to be fully engaged in your workshop or you will be involved in back to back meetings. On those days you switch into what I like to call “collection mode”. This is where you are not completing tasks, instead, you are just collecting.
It also means you can plan ahead. Let’s say you have an offsite two-day workshop on Wednesday and Thursday next week and you have an important project update to present on the following Friday morning. When you have the workshop and the presentation scheduled in your calendar, you will see that and know immediately that you need to get the presentation completed by Tuesday at the latest leaving you only needing to practice your presentation on Thursday evening or early Friday morning. Alternatively, you may see the workshop and presentation and decide to request a postponement of the presentation to the following week. Without that kind of alert, you are going to be worrying about preparing the presentation while you are doing the workshop which means you will not be able able to fully engage with the workshop and so not get the full benefit of what you are learning.
In my experience workshops and business trips are often planned quite far into the future. I know, for example, I have a workshop in Singapore in September, which is four months away. At the moment, I do not need to do anything about it, but as it is a four-day workshop I will need to arrange hotel accommodation and, of course, my flights to and from Singapore. The event is scheduled in my calendar as an all-day event which prevents me from double booking myself, and I have a project for the workshop in my to-do list manager that will tell me to organise my flights and hotel accommodation on the 1st July—two months before the event.
And that is a good example of a to-do list and a calendar working together. My calendar is telling where I will be, and my to-do list manager tells me what I need to do.
Of course, there will be other tasks associated with the workshop. I will need to arrange to cancel any classes I have on the days I am in Singapore and I will need to block the dates on my client scheduling system so I do not double book myself. All these are tasks and are in my to-do list manager. They are tasks, not events.
And that is the clear blue water between your calendar and your to-do list manager. Tasks go on your to-do list, events go on your calendar.
What you want to develop is a calendar that allows you to quickly see what you have on, and where you will be on a particular day so you can make granular decisions about what tasks you will do on those days.
When you put everything on your calendar—tasks and events—it becomes incredibly difficult to see at a glance what you need to do. When something looks full and busy you will resist looking at it and when you do look at it you will feel overwhelmed and things will get missed.
Now there is another area where your calendar can help you and that is with doing focused work. I’ve found, psychologically, that when I schedule a period of writing time on my calendar I am much less likely to resist doing it. I have a recurring task on my calendar every Monday morning for writing. Now, generally I will write my weekly blog post at that time, but occasionally, I have something else that needs writing that is important. Because I use the general term “writing time” on my calendar, I get to choose what I write. Likewise, I have time blocked out on a Friday afternoon for recording my YouTube videos. My calendar does not have anything specific, just “video recording time”. That way I know I will have a three-hour block to record videos. If I need to record anything specific it will be in my to-do list manager and that task will come up on Friday so I know I have something specific to record.
This all means that when I look at my calendar either the night before or when I am doing a weekly review I get to see the blocks of times I have allocated for the work I have to do and I get to see where I have gaps for doing errands or other unscheduled work that comes up such as phone calls, sorting out student issues or just to take some time out and get some fresh air.
Finally, a tip for those of you struggling to fit in your hobbies, side projects or exercise to your week. Schedule the time in your calendar. Every Sunday afternoon when I do my weekly review I schedule out my exercise for the week. I like to exercise five times a week and exercise is an important part of my life. So it gets scheduled. I can look at my calendar and see what I have on and where I need to be and then fit in my exercise time. Again, once it is on my calendar it becomes much more difficult to find an excuse not to exercise. It also helps me to prepare mentally for it and to decide—based on how I feel on the day—what kind of exercise I will do.
So there you go, Sanjit. I hope that has helped you and given you some ideas on how best to use your calendar. Thank you for your question and thank you to all of you for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like me to answer on this podcast, all you have to do is get in touch either by email or by DMing me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 80
Do you have this nagging feeling you are not doing enough and feel you need to do more? That’s the topic I am answering this week in the Working With Podcast
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Complete Guide To Creating A Successful Life Course
Why I quit law and went into teaching video
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2019 Edition of Your Digital Life 2.0
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 79 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this week’s episode, it’s all about that annoying feeling we all get from time to time where no matter how much we do each day we still feel we haven’t done enough and our brain is telling us we should be doing more. Today, I’ll explain how you can quieten down this voice.
But, before we get into this week’s question I have some very exciting news for you all. My Complete Guide To Building a Successful Life course is 50% lower this month. This course was inspired by my journey from training to be a lawyer and discovering I had made a mistake and what I did to change my life and my career and end up doing something I love doing every single day.
So, if you feel unhappy with where you are today and want to make some big changes in your life then this course is definitely for you. I don’t often promote this course so this is a great opportunity for you to get yourself enrolled now and starting learning how to turn around your life so you can start doing what you love doing. Full details are in the show notes together with a video about my story and why I passionately believe anyone can turn things around whatever your current situation.
Okay onto this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tony. Tony asks, Hi Carl could you do a podcast on the feeling of needing to do more - I eat the big frogs, do a bunch of other stuff and still feel I need to do, do, do even if the tasks aren’t critical or important must do that day tasks.
Great question, Tony. First off, I should confess. I used to have this problem too. It was most noticeable when I began getting up earlier and doing all my writing and creative tasks before 9AM. Although I was still doing ten hours or so of work each day, because I was getting my work done by two or three PM in the afternoon I felt I had not done enough and felt I should do more. It was an unpleasant feeling. It left me feeling guilty.
In the end I came up with a simple solution. I knew I was doing a lot of work, yet my feeling was I wasn’t. So I began writing in my journal exactly what I had done that day. So, for example, if I wrote my blog post, as soon as it was written I would take twenty seconds and write that in my journal. That went for anything I did that was not immediately noticeable. Of course, teaching a class or attending a meeting was in my calendar, but a lot of my work is done on a computer and so it is not immediately obvious what I had done. By writing a list of what I had done I could see as the day progressed the list getting bigger and bigger and if I ever felt I had not done enough all I had to do was take a look at my journal and see a long list of things I had done.
That solved the problem for me and it is still something I do today.
However, I think this goes a little deeper. One of the reasons I started doing the 2+8 Prioritisation system was because I wanted to make sure the important things were getting done each day. One of the reasons we feel we are not doing enough is because it is true. We’re NOT doing enough. Enough of the important things that is. It is very easy to lose control of the day and end up running around reacting to other people’s priorities and issues leaving the work that is important to us undone. When we get to the end of the day and we think about what we have done for the day we feel we have done nothing. And that’s because we haven’t moved anything forward that important to us.
The 2+8 Prioritisation technique solves this because it gives you a total of ten tasks that you identify are important to you. Two of which are critical MUST DO objective tasks. This then gives you a focus for the day and still allows you enough flexibility to manage other people’s issues as they arise.
What happens when you practice the 2+8 Prioritisation technique is you get to choose what you work on each day. The night before, you sit down with your list of work that needs doing and identify what tasks would have the biggest impact on your projects and goals. Pick ten of those and make it a priority to complete them all. No excuses. When you do complete them you know you’ve had a productive day and you have done enough. Of course, if you have time and you still have enough energy, then you can go into your next actions list and start completing some of those tasks. But, the important thing is you are doing the ten tasks you decided were important to complete that day and you do whatever it takes to complete them.
Sometimes I think we are a little hard on ourselves. We are not machines. We are human beings. There are days we get plenty of sleep, wake up the next day and feel fantastic! And there are days we don’t get enough sleep or we wake up with a bad cold or in a bad mood and our energy is very low. That’s natural and is just something we have to deal with on a day to day basis. A lot of the time it is really just about doing whatever you can based on your feeling and mood that day. Hopefully, you have more good days that bad.
This is really why it is important that you take care of your health. Eat healthily, get enough sleep and exercise. If you really want to be performing at your best every day and getting all the things that are important to you done, then these are important things that should be put on your calendar. There’s a reason why super successful people like Tim Cook, Sir Richard Branson and Jack Dorsey exercise every day. They understand that to perform at their very best they have to take care of their health and well-being. You get a lot more done, you feel good and it gives you a routine every day that encourages great work and more consistent moods and energy levels.
With all that said, the biggest change you could make, Tony, is you make sure every day you have a plan. Plan out what you want to accomplish for the day and when done making the plan tell yourself if you complete all those ten tasks (not including your regular routine tasks) you will have had a very productive day.
Now don’t be greedy and give yourself too many tasks. I spent years figuring out that all you need is ten important tasks per day to move all the right things forward. When you start being greedy and plan fifteen to twenty tasks a day you are going to find yourself rescheduling a lot of tasks and that will make you feel you are not doing enough. Be realistic and stick to ten tasks. You ARE going to be interrupted and you ARE going to be dragged off into other people’s crises. That’s just a part of life.
One of the things I remind myself of regularly is that Rome was not built in a day and that all great work takes time. Doing a little every day soon builds up and that’s how you complete big projects, it how skyscrapers are built, it’s how books are written and how, in my case, online courses are made. They are not made in a day and you need to understand that doing a little every day will take you towards the finish line on almost every thing you decide to do—eventually.
One final tip is to make sure you focus on one thing at a time. I know I have just said doing a little each day soon creates a finished project, another reason you may be feeling you are not doing enough is because you are doing too much on too many things at once. This is something I used to do. I used to have multiple projects ongoing at one time and this meant the time I spent on each was very small. This left me feeling I wasn’t doing enough. To change that I realised I needed to focus on less each month. These days I practice a system where I am working on one big project every six weeks. I know most big projects will take no more than six weeks to complete and so I only have one big project ongoing at any one time. This means I can focus all my energies on that project.
That doesn’t mean I am not doing anything else, I am still doing all my regular content, but it also means in between doing that work, I am working on that one project. It helps me stay focused on the important things and I know that something special will be finished every six weeks.
Now for this to work you do need to plan ahead a little. I planned out my whole year with a particular focus in the first two or three projects at the beginning of the year. I left the second half of the year flexible because I know things and situations change over time. But I do still have a list of projects I want to complete this year and each quarter I review my list and decide which two projects I will work on in the next quarter.
At the end of the day, it all comes down to having a realistic plan for the day and making sure you have enough flexibility built in to handle other stuff that WILL come up. Then giving yourself credit and knowing that if you do complete your plan for the day you will have had a productive day.
So, Tony, don’t be too hard on yourself. Make sure you complete your 2+8 Priority tasks each day and know that as long as you complete these you will have had a VERY productive day.
Thank you for your question and thank you all for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like me to answer on this podcast, all you have to do is get in touch either by email or by DMing me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 78
This week’s episode is a special episode and is all about making sure you achieve the things you want to achieve each day.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Checklist Manifesto Book
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2019 Edition of Your Digital Life 2.0
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 78 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, in a slight change to the usual format I want to give you some tips on maintaining your focus on what is important to you.
I’ve recently finished reading The Checklist Manifesto by Dr Atul Gawande, a physician from the US. It’s a brilliant book and I highly recommend it. (I’ve put a link to the book in the show notes)
In the book, Dr Gawande talks about how in almost every complex business from complex construction projects, to flying aircraft you will find a checklist. Now as those of you listening to this podcast are likely to be interested in becoming better organised and more productive as well learning how to achieve the goals you set for yourself I realised as I was reading that we can apply the ideas in this book to keep us focused on what is important to us.
As I was reading the book, I was thinking about how I could apply these ideas to my own system and I began to formulate an idea around a morning and evening checklist. Not a routine, but a checklist to make sure I was doing all the important things I needed to do to ensure I have the best day possible. After all, to achieve your goals, to be happy and to perform at your very best every day all you need to do is apply some daily actions consistently. After all, to improve your golf game requires consistent practice - you are not going to get your handicap down if you only practice or play once or twice a year. If you are serious about becoming better at golf you have to practice much more frequently.
Now the key to a good checklist, according to the book, is it needs to be short and very clear. You’d be surprised how short a pre-flight checklist for a commercial airliner is. Just google it and you’ll see. The idea is you only need to check the vital things. The things that matter most and if you did not do them there could be a catastrophic failure.
So as I began thinking about this I realised there are a number of things I need to do each day that would give me the best day possible. The first is my morning routine of 30 minutes of Korean study, 15 minutes planning and review and 15 minutes meditation. These three parts of my morning routine, when done, always puts me in the right frame of mind to tackle the day with positivity and energy. It sets me up for a great day.
So for a morning checklist, I need to add “Have I done my morning rituals?”
Next up is the make sure I have all the right materials with me for the classes I am teaching in the morning. Now I operate a paperless system for my teaching materials and keep all documents in Notability. So I need to check that the right materials are in my Notability app on my iPad. So, next up on my morning checklist goes “are all teaching materials downloaded onto my iPad?”
Another check I put on my morning checklist is “Have I planned today’s exercise?” I’ve found if I plan my exercise for the day in the morning I am much more likely to make sure it is done. If I don’t plan it in the morning I either waste valuable time thinking about what to do or I find an excuse not to do it.
The final check on my morning checklist is “have I given Barney his medicine?” Although I rarely forget this, I know it is possible if something urgent was on my mind, so it is something I need to make sure I have done.
And that’s really all I would need to put on my morning checklist. Just four things:
Have I done my morning rituals?
Are all teaching materials downloaded onto my iPad?
Have I planned my exercise for today?
Have I given Barney his medicine?
However, the evening checklist is quite different. This one sets up the day for a great day much more so than my morning checklist. This is about avoiding those little annoyances we all get from time to time. Things like leaving the house and your phone only has 10% charge left. Or getting halfway to your place of work and discovering you left an important document at home. Things that with a little thought, and a checklist, can be avoided.
For my evening checklist I have the following:
Is my phone fully charged?
Does my iPad need charging?
Do I need to take my laptop with me tomorrow?
Is there anything else I will need with me tomorrow?
Now those four are the next day set up checks. After that, I have another list to make sure I have done all the things I know I need to do to complete my day. Things like:
Have I completed all my admin for the day?
Is all feedback written up and sent?
Did I do my exercise for the day? (If not why not?)
Have I given Barney his evening medicine?
Is there anything I need to add to the shopping list?
Have I written my journal?
Have I done something to move closer towards achieving my goals?
And that’s it. I discovered that all I need is 15 checks for the day to be a great day.
Now for this to work I need to make sure I am completing these checks every day. It does not take long to go through each checklist either. The morning checklist takes 35 seconds and the evening one takes just over a minute. So for less than a 2-minute daily commitment, I can set up each day to be a fantastic day.
Of course, I know I have to do the tasks themselves. Each one takes a different amount of time. My morning rituals, for example, take an hour, exercise also takes an hour and so does my daily admin tasks. But the checklists are there to make sure I am doing the things that are important to me and to ensure that I am moving forward each day on the things I have identified I want to achieve.
Now the next step is to date the checklist. Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer, has a whole department dedicated to creating checklists for their planes and each checklist is dated before publication. The reason for the date is to ensure that old and out of date checklists are not being used. Obviously, a good reason as planes are being updated all the time. By dating your checklists you can make sure that they are always up to date. Your life will change, new priorities will come along and old priorities will fall away. Regularly reviewing your checklists to make sure they are current will stop you from going numb to them.
You can then start adding other checklists to a checklist folder too. For example, create a checklist for your weekly review, a checklist for presentation preparation and a travel checklist. I have had a presentation checklist for years because I’ve always used a MacBook and in Korea, we live in a PC world. I need to make sure I have all the right cables and adapters with me. That checklist has saved me so many times because I have moved a cable or adapter from my bag and discovered it wasn’t where it should be when I did my check.
The final piece of this system is to create a folder or tag in your notes app to keep your checklists. I did think about keeping them in my to-do list manager, but then all these checks would just fill up my to-do list manager and it would become very messy indeed.
Instead, I created a notebook in Evernote for all my checklists. I will be creating more over the coming weeks.
For airlines, there are the standard pre-flight checklists they use for every flight made, there are also checklists for pre-taxi and for landing the plane. These are now digital and come up on the flight screens in the cockpit.
However, they also have a whole book of checklists for different situations that may occur during the flight. Those are fortunately rarely used, but if they are needed they are kept in a book next to the pilot. and as with the checklists on a plane where there is a book (or iPad) full of them in an easily accessible place for the pilots to pull out when they need them, I want to have a place in Evernote where I can easily pull up the relevant checklist whenever I need them. Evernote seems to me the best place for these.
Evernote allows me to link the checklist to a note in my To-do list, so all I need is a linked task set to repeat every day which says “Do start of day checklist” and a repeating task for the evening which says “Do end of day checklist”. As the checklists take around a minute at most to complete doing these tasks will not prove to be burdensome.
It also means all I need to do is create a linked task for any travel projects I have for my travel checklist as well as any other checklists I create over the next few weeks.
In our effort to stay productive, have more time to do the things we want to do and achieve the goals we set for ourselves, the humble checklist is something that could push you towards achieving all those things. They are simple, they work and have been used for years to great success. All you need to do is keep them as short as you possibly can, make sure what you write is simple and clear and most of all you use them when you need to use them.
Podcast 77
In this week’s episode of the working with Podcast I answer a question about getting clear about your goals.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2019 Edition of Your Digital Life 2.0
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 77 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I have a wonderful question about really getting clear about your goals so the next steps become obvious.
Before we get into this week’s question, I would like to let you know I have taken 25% off my Email Mastery online course. I know many of you really struggle to get your email under control and even when you do finally achieve the fabled inbox zero, within a few minutes your inbox is filling up again.
This course will give you the tactics and know-how to get your email under control and to keep it that way with only a little daily maintenance. You were not employed to spend all your days answering email, and you don’t have to.
Take the Email Mastery course and finally get away from having to deal with overloaded inboxes forever.
Okay on to this week’s question and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Stephen. Stephen asks Carl I am really struggling to get started with my goals. I know what I want to do, but I am finding it really hard to get started. Do you have any tips that might help?
Thank you, Stephen, for your question.
Now, goals are a very interesting thing to me. I was very fortunate when I was a teenager to be a track and field runner. I was lucky because I had some great coaches and at the end of every season I would sit down with my coach and discuss the season just finished. Look at my best times for the year and make a decision about what times I wanted to achieve next season and what races I wanted to do well in.
I remember well the end of the 1984 season when I finished with personal records of 2 minutes and 6 seconds for the 800 metres and 4 minutes 16 seconds for the 1,500 metres. My coach and I decided that 1985 would be the season I would break 2 minutes for the 800 and 4 minutes for the 1,500.
We then put together a winter training programme that would build my strength and head in to the spring training season where we would work on speed endurance training to get my fitness and strength up to the level so I could break those barriers.
That focus on a specific outcome—breaking 2 minutes and 4 minutes—was simple. I knew exactly what I wanted to achieve and it had a time line—by the end of September 1985—this meant that throughout the winter of 1984/85 I was focused on one goal - achieving what I called “the double sub”.
And that’s how you need to be to achieve your goals too. What’s the outcome and what do I need to do to achieve that outcome in a specific period of time.
Too often goals are too vague. Goals such as to loose weight, to run a faster 10k time or to get a promotion. These goals are not specific enough. How much weight do you want to lose and by when? What time do you want to run the 10K? Under 1 hour? What position do you want to be promoted to? It’s this kind of specific you need to get to.
Let’s take the promotion goal. I get this one quite a lot with my language students. I will ask a student what do you want to improve your English? And the reply is usually “So I can get a promotion”. Okay, so I’ve established that improving English is not the real goal here. Improving English is just a part of a bigger goal. When I ask the student what position do you want to be promoted to, they often don’t know. They are just thinking in terms of the next step up.
You see this does not work. The next step up is not ambitious enough for you to get truly motivated. Basically, if you do a reasonable job at your current level and don’t make too many mistakes, you will eventually get that promotion. And deep down you know that.
What you need to be doing is thinking much farther ahead. Where do you really want to end up? What position do you want to be in in 10 years time? Let’s say you are a junior finance administrator at your company today, but in ten years you want to be CFO. Great now that’s a fantastic goal to go for.
Okay, so what do you need to become the CFO of your company? If you don’t already have it, perhaps a degree in accountancy, Your CPA qualifications, maybe an MBA. And that’s just the academic qualifications. What about the skills you will need. Leadership, strategic planning, management etc. There’s a lot to figure out.
So let’s look again at Stephen’s question. How do you get started once you know what you want to achieve.
The first thing to do is to create a time line to success. Create a simple line across a piece of paper and on the right hand side write 2019. At the other end of the line write 2029. So now you have a line that represents ten years.
Now on that timeline write out what you have to do to achieve the position of CFO by 2029. Mark years off along the way. For example, by the end of 2020, you will have completed your degree in accountancy. Great. What do you need to do next? Perhaps get your CPA qualifications. Okay, get that on your timeline. Keep going until you have completed everything you decided needed to be done to achieve the CFO position.
Now, as we are currently in 2019, you need to expand on whatever needs to be achieved this year. If you really are just starting out, you may need to find a university to study your accountancy degree. You will need to apply to that university. You may need to decide whether to study full or part-time. A lot of decisions to make. These need to be made into a project and added to your to-do list manager.
There are no shortcuts. There’s a lot of decisions to be made and a big goal like becoming your company’s CFO in ten years time will need breaking down into it’s component parts. Beginning the year by asking yourself what do I have to accomplish this year that will take me a step closer to becoming the CFO? That’s where you start. Apply to universities to get enrolled into an accountancy course. Commit sufficient time each day / week to your studies and focus on completing that step. Once you have your degree, move on to the next step and keep going. Review, evaluate where to go next and get moving.
To achieve your big goals needs a lot of patience, action, consistency and time. (PACT) but before you get to building on these cornerstones you need to have a plan in place on a timeline. You need to know the steps to get there. Once you know the steps, you can then take the first step, break it down in to actionable tasks to perform so you have a place to start.
Back to my running story, because I had a very simple goal, that I gave a nickname to “The Double Sub” all that winter I trained very hard. I came in to the spring stronger, leaner and determined to hit my goal. By the end of June, I had run 1 minute 54 for the 800 and 4 minutes 3 seconds for the 1500. I was so close, and that gave me the determination to give it one more push. I worked so hard in July to improve my speed endurance so I could get under that elusive 4 minutes and at the end of July, I ran 3.58.9. By the end of the season, my times stood at 1.54.2 for the 800 and 3.54.8 for the 1500.
For me, the lesson I learnt in 1984 and 1985 has stayed with me ever since. All goals are achievable if you make them simple, clear and are determined enough to achieve them. As long as you stay focused on them, are will to do the work necessary to achieve them and are prepared to push that extra mile to get there you will get there.
But it always starts with that first step. You will achieve nothing unless you are willing to take that first step. Cemeteries are full of people with unrealised dreams and goals because they never took that first step. They never established what the first task was and they never went that extra mile to make it happen. Don’t let that happen to you. Do the planning, create the time line and take the necessary action to make it happen.
This is where your to-do list comes in. Once you have done your planning, you need to take the first part of your goal and make it a project in your to-do list manager. Then create recurring tasks that will take you closer towards achieving the goal for the year. If you want to break 1 hour for a 10k make sure you have your daily training in your to-do list manager. If you want to finish your degree in accountancy, make sure you have your reading and studying tasks in your to-do list manager. Break everything down into daily tasks and make sure they are coming up on your daily to-do list every day. Only by taking action consistency over a period of time will you get to where you want to go.
I hope that has answered your question, Stephen. I know so many people really struggle with setting and achieving goals, but as I say, when you use a simple piece of paper and draw out a timeline, then turn you goals into small, daily activities, you will amaze yourself about what you can achieve.
Good luck and thank you.
Thank you also to all of you for listening and don’t forget, if you have a question you would like me to answer, then get in touch either by email or by DMing on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 77
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about getting to the next level of productivity mastery.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The March Madness Sale Website
Life And Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe. UK.
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2019 Edition of Your Digital Life 2.0
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 76 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
A quick reminder for all you in the UK: this week, on Saturday (20th April) I will be co-hosting a FREE life and Time Mastery Workshop in Scunthorpe. It’s an all-day workshop where Kevin Blackburn and I will be sharing with you some great tips and tricks to develop and achieve your goals using tried and tested techniques. All the details are on my website. It would be fantastic to be able to meet you. So get yourself registered. Registration will be closing in the next 24 hours or so, so don’t delay.
Okay, on to this week’s question and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alex. Alex asks: Hi Carl, I’ve been following GTD and your COD system for some time now, but still feel Stressed out about everything I have to do. Is there something I am missing?
Great question Alex. This is something I have been writing about recently and that is moving to a higher state of organisation and productivity.
You see, having all your tasks, events, ideas and notes perfectly organised, is one thing. It's a very important one thing, but it is just the start. To move to the next level, so to speak, is to be in a state where no matter how much you have to do, you are completely comfortable doing what you are doing right now.
A mistake I see a lot of people making is not making any decision about what it is they have collected. Let’s say your boss asks you to develop some ideas for a sales campaign next month. So you collect the task and write “develop some ideas for sales campaign next month”.
Now that’s a good start, a clearly written task. Then what they do is either create a project or move that task to an area of focus and then move on to the next task they collected.
Here's the problem. You’ve not made a decision on that task. What happens next? What exactly do you have to do to make that task complete? How will you present your sales campaign ideas to your boss? Will you send them a written document or will you be presenting your ideas? When will you develop those ideas? These are the micro decisions that need to happen to get this task completely off your mind. Knowing exactly what you need to do next and when you are going to allocate time to do it.
These undecided tasks are what, in GTD speak, are called open loops. Sure you collected the task and got it into your system, but as there is no decision made on it about what needs to happen next and when then you are not going to be able to completely let go of it in your mind.
If you have a lot of tasks in your system like that—tasks that have no next action or decisions made on them—you are still going to feel overwhelmed and busy. Your brain is not going to trust that you have them externalised properly.
Now it’s okay to not make a decision on something. That in itself is a decision, but you still need to decide when you are going to review it. Let's say you receive an invitation to a party in 6 months time but you are not sure if you will able to go or not. Making a decision not to make a decision until 3 months before the event is a decision. Add a task “decide whether to go to Derek’s party or not” and date it for three months later is fine. You have decided to postpone a decision. Now that will be off your mind because you know you are going to come back to it in 3 months time.
In three months if you still are not sure, just change the review date and review it again later. There is nothing wrong with rescheduling decisions like this. You have made a conscious decision not to make a decision right now and that is a decision.
Another reason for not feeling completely at ease with what you have to do is you have not done a complete mind-dump (again, another GTD phrase) what this means is you have got everything on your mind out of your mind and into your system.
I’ve found with my coaching clients when they do an initial mind-dump they get around 75% of what’s on their mind out, but there’s still 25% lurking in there somewhere. It can take a few days to get everything out. This is why I recommend you take a piece of paper or a cheap notebook and carry it around with you for a few days. Things you need to do or remember will come at you from all places and you can quickly get them down onto the paper and then later, get them into your system. These ‘hard to reach’ tasks, events and ideas come eventually. When they do you can make the necessary decisions about what you want to do with them. Again, it may be you don’t want to do anything with them yet and that’s okay. Put them in a folder called “Someday | Maybe” and make a decision about when you will review them.
I review my Someday | Maybe folder every three months. Nothing in there is urgent or current. When I do review the folder, I find I delete off a lot of projects and ideas which is a great way to keep this folder from overflowing with stuff you are never likely to do anyway. Again, be comfortable deleting these “never going to do” tasks and ideas. If you do find the idea or task comes back to you, then you can always add it again. That’s something that very rarely happens for me, but does happen from time to time.
Another reason for not feeling completely relaxed about everything is although you have everything in your system, your system is not organised in a way that works for you. This usually occurs because you have tried to copy someone else’s organisation system. I used to do that. I would read a great new way to organise my notes using a combination of notebooks and tags and then after spending several days reorganising everything I found I could not find anything I wanted to find.
Eventually, the penny dropped and I realised I had to work out for myself how I would naturally look for something. This can be hard because we have picked up filing and organisation systems in the various jobs we have done in the past. My first experience in an office, for example, used a simple alphabetical filing system using folders and filing cabinets. I soon discovered this was my natural way for organising things. Alphabetically. So that is how I have all my notes organised. I created a digital filing cabinet system in Evernote using alphabetically organised tags and I’ve never had a problem finding anything since. It’s incredibly simple—embarrassingly so—but it’s also very effective. It also means when I process my notes inbox I can process very quickly because my brain is using its natural filing methodology.
Be careful about copying other people’s system. It’s a great way to get new ideas and to breathe new life into a tired and uninspiring system, but if your system is boring it usually means its’ working because you don’t have to think about it. When you don’t have to think about your system you have reached a very high level of organisation. Things just get collected, organised and done. Exactly what you are wanting to achieve.
Finally, trusting your system in a key part of reducing stress and overwhelm. If you don’t trust that you have collected everything that matters to you, or you don’t trust your to-do list is showing you everything you need to see on the right day, then you are going to feel stressed. Trust is not something you will get immediately either. It is only through continued use and practice that trust will develop. It can take anywhere between a couple of weeks to several months to finally get to the point where you know what you see on your daily to-do list and on your calendar is exactly what you need to see. Don’t despair. Be patient. It does come eventually. Stick with one system, modify where you feel it does not work and make sure you learn how to use your chosen tools properly.
Find apps that work for you. If you are a visual person and you like to see projects and areas of focus arranged in cards, then apps like Asana and Trello might be the best tools for you. If you like to see things more linearly then apps like Todoist are likely to work better for you. Give yourself permission to experiment. It is important that the tools you use work best for you. But… Once you have made your decision, stick with it. Only change apps if, after a few months, they really don’t work for you. Changing apps every few weeks will destroy your trust and takes up a lot of time having to take stuff from your existing system and move it over to your new system.
So there you go, Alex. I hope that has helped and given you a few ideas about how you get yourself to the next level of productivity. It’s a great level to achieve because when you know you have everything decided upon and it is organised in a way you can find quickly and you trust your system you will feel a huge sense of relief and that overwhelm and stress you fee will disappear.
Thank you all for listening and I hope to see many of you in Scunthorpe on Saturday at the Life and Time Mastery Workshop.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 76
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about getting started once you have created your system.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The March Madness Sale Website
Life And Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe. UK.
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2019 Edition of Your Digital Life 2.0
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 76 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have an excellent question about actually getting started once you have a system in place. I know I produce a lot of content that concerns setting up a system, but there’s not a great deal of content out there about actually getting started once you have a system in place. So I will change that this week.
The answer to this question will also help you if you have fallen off the wagon, so to speak, and will help you get back on and get started again. We all fall off from time to time and so having a few strategies that allow you to get back when it does happen is always a good idea.
Don’t forget if you have taken my FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD system course you get a huge discount on the 2019 Your Digital Life course. Details of the discount are in the COD course. Your Digital Life takes you to the next level by showing exactly how to build your goals, projects and routines into daily activities so nothing gets missed. AND… You also get a FREE workbook, a FREE copy of Your Digital Life 2.0 book as well as FREE access to my Email Productivity and Ultimate Goal Planning courses. That’s excellent value for money, it’s almost like giving away a whole productivity course. Details of both courses are in the show notes.
Okay, onto this week’s question and so it is time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Frank. Frank asks: Hi Carl, I have just read your book Your Digital Life and I have read GTD. the problem I have now is where do I start? I have everything in place inbox, projects and areas of focus, but there seems to be too much for me to do. Can you help?
Hi Frank, thank you for your fantastic question.
The first thing we need to understand is that our to-lists are never going to stop filling up. Life will always throw up far more than we can ever do. I think most people begin to realise that after a while. It’s why inbox zero only lasts for a few minutes. As soon as we get our email inbox down to zero, pretty soon more email will begin arriving. It just isn't going to stop.
So that’s the first thing we all have to accept. Zeroing everything out is temporary. Clean everything out, take your dog for a walk and when you get back you will have stuff accumulating again.
So where do you start? Well, just start at the top and keep going. That’s really all there is to it. Of course, things are a bit more complicated than that. Some things will be more important than others. Some tasks are time sensitive, others less so.
Part of becoming more productive is developing skills that will help you to prioritise. Which of all your collected tasks need to be done sooner rather than later? Which tasks, if you did right now, would take a lot of pressure off you? And which tasks have your attention right now? All those should be dealt with first. These tasks will be taking up a lot of mental energy and so the sooner you either do them or make a decision on when you will do them the better.
Quite often all you need to do once you have everything in your system is to go through all your projects and areas of focus and decide what needs to happen next to get things moving forward. It’s surprising how by spending an hour or so doing a weekly review you soon get everything moving forward and you begin to relax.
But before that, The primary objective when you start using any kind of productivity or time management system is to build trust in your system. If things get missed and you are not seeing what you need to see when you need to see it, you will not trust your system and when that happens you stop using it and you’re back where you started. Blaming yourself or the system for you not being able to be productive. Having trust needs to be objective number one. When you trust you are collecting everything as it comes to mind, you are collecting your great ideas and all events are put on to your calendar—that’s when you begin to relax and great things happen. If you don't trust your system you will have tasks in your to-do list and they will still be in your head. You’re duplicating. When you trust your system, your mind can let go knowing everything is collected and is either processed or will be processed very soon.
Now, where do you start? Well once you know what has your attention you need to establish what is time sensitive and what tasks will have the biggest impact on your projects you can begin doing the work. Start with those. As you complete those tasks you will feel a greater sense of accomplishment. You will feel yourself relaxing, becoming less stressed because the things that are most pressing are getting done.
At the end of the workday, spend a few minutes organising what you collected. Deal with the most urgent, process the rest so you will see them when you need to see them and enjoy the rest of the day.
What I have found is we become more stressed and feel more overwhelmed when we don't get whatever is on our mind out of there and into a place we know we will check later. Being more productive isn't about doing a lot of work in less time, being more productive is about doing the work that matters and discarding the stuff that doesn't matter. To do that takes courage.
It’s very easy to think everything that comes our way is important. It’s much harder to make decisions about whether something really is important or not. But if you really want to get control of your time so you can spend more of it doing the things you want to do, that is something you are going to have to do.
I get a lot of requests to review apps from hard-working app developers. I feel for them because I know it’s incredibly hard to come up with the idea, develop the concept and to them build the app. That takes a lot of time and hard work. I also love looking at and trying new productivity apps. But I am not an app reviewer and I really don't have the time to review an app properly. I am very clear about the things I want to spend my time doing. So I politely decline any offers that come my way. The truth is there are people out there who would do a far better job reviewing apps. So although I really want to help these developers get noticed, I know reviewing apps is not my thing and so I say no.
It’s hard to say no, but it is better for me and for the developers that I do. That way I don’t waste anyone’s time.
And that’s the way you need to become. Understand what is important to you so you can spend more time doing that and less time doing stuff you don’t enjoy or don’t want to do.
Of course, I know that isn’t always easy when the stuff you don’t like doing is given to you by your boss or customer. But we also get a lot of opportunities each day that look very attractive, but at the end of the day are just going to suck time away from you and prevent you from doing the things that really matter—those time-sensitive tasks that do need doing today.
So go through your task list, decide what has your attention and what is time sensitive and prioritise those tasks. You can add a date, add a flag or create labels or tags that tell you whether something is important or not. You can decide to focus on one project and get that project completed by the end of the week. You do have a lot of freedom about where you want to put your attention. The thing is, once you have made a decision about where you want to put your focus you need to stick to the plan. There’s no point in having a plan for the day and then making it easy for you to change that plan just because you received an email that looks more attractive. You do not want to have too many tasks assigned each day, you do need to keep some flexibility in your day for those urgent requests from your customers or boss. But you do need a plan for the day. If you don’t have a plan, someone else will give you one and their plan is not going to be a very good plan for you.
The secret is really all about knowing what has your attention and making sure you have made a decision on what you are going to do about it and when. When you have instilled that practice and it becomes a habit, then you will find everything slips into place and you start getting a lot of very important work done and at the same time your stress levels fall and you start to feel much more relaxed about doing what you are doing.
So, make sure you are collecting everything that has your attention. Then when you process that stuff, ask yourself what you need to do about it and when and if you decide it is not important and is not going to contribute to your overall life plan then get rid of it. Being more productive is all about saying no to a lot of things and sousing all your energy on the things that you decide is important.
If everything is out of your head and into a trusted system and you know what needs your attention will show up when you need it to show up, then you are well on your way to becoming super-productive.
I hope that has helped, Frank and thank you so much for your question.
Don’t forget if you have a question about productivity, time management, GTD or goal planning, get in touch either by email (carl@carlpullein.com) or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All my contact links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 75 (Part 2)
This is part 2 of my conversation with David Allen, the GTD guy,
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The 2019 GTD Summit Website
Getting Things Done book
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2019 Edition of Your Digital Life 2.0
Life And Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe. UK.
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Podcast 75
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I talk with the GTD guy himself, David Allen. We had a great conversation about applying the principles of GTD as well as overcoming some of the difficulties people often face with applying a GTD process.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The 2019 GTD Summit Website
Getting Things Done book
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2019 Edition of Your Digital Life 2.0
Life And Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe. UK.
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
Podcast 74
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about getting your to-do list under control and making it more inspiring.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The March Madness Sale Website
Life And Time Mastery Workshop, Scunthorpe. UK.
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2019 Edition of Your Digital Life 2.0
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 74 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a wonderful question about cleaning up an out-of-control to-do list and how to make it more inspiring—something I don’t think we think very much about when we create our to-do lists.
Before we dive into the answer, I’d just like to let you all know—in case you missed it—My learning centre is currently having a huge March Madness Sale. In this sale, you can get yourself a 35% discount on ALL my courses AND coaching programmes.
As we are rapidly approaching the end of the first quarter on 2019, if you are finding yourself a little out of motivation or need a big boost to kick start your year, this would be a great time to get yourself a great deal on a course or a coaching programme. Details of the sale are available in the show notes.
Oh and if you are in the UK on the 20th April and have some free time, I will be doing a workshop in Scunthorpe with Kevin Blackburn—The Life Success Engineer— called Life and Time Mastery. This is a FREE workshop and we’d love to see you there. Our goal is to help you to create your life’s goals and then show you how you can turn those goals into action steps you can take every day to make them happen. A link to the registration page is in the show notes.
Okay, let’s get into the question and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Helena. Helena asks; Hi Carl, my to-do list is a mess and I don't find it inspiring at all. I hate going in there. Is there anything I can do to get it under control and make it more inspiring?
That’s a fantastic question, Helena! And I know a lot of people struggle with this one. In our excitement of getting ourselves more organised and productive we throw everything into our shiny new to-do lists and create a lot of projects—and I mean a lot. On top of that, the way we write out tasks can often be confusing. This means we end up with a to-do list manager that may have felt nice for a few days but now leaves us feeling confused and uninspired to do anything about.
One of the things I find is, as time goes by we learn the best way to write tasks but in the initial stages of playing around with our new to-do list manager we are less focused on how we write our tasks and more focused on what our to-do list app can do. This is often the reason why we end up with a very complicated hierarchy of projects and sub-projects. We create sub-projects because we can rather than because we need to.
But the biggest problem we experience is when we go out into the world and begin our new lives as organised and productive people. When we set up our to-do list manager we imagine walking into work, opening up our today list and start doing the tasks from the top. Completing our tasks by the end of our work day and coming home in a relaxed, happy state, ready to do it all again the next day.
Sadly, the real world introduces email, instant messages, phone calls, bosses and colleagues who think nothing of interrupting you to give you more work. If we are sharp we collect that stuff and add it to our inboxes, if not, we slip back in to old habits and leave it in our heads hoping we will remember to do it later—which we often don't. Pretty soon we are back where we started—a disorganised mess.
So, what can we do to keep things organised, inspiring and moving forward?
Well, first take a look at your to-do list manager. How many projects do you have in there? Are they really projects or just stuff you hope to get round to one day? How are those projects written? Do you feel excited when you look at those projects? Writing out your summer holiday project as simply “summer holiday” is not exciting. Writing it out as “ Our summer holiday to Prague” is much more likely to initiate a more positive feeling. A feeling that you would like to do something about it.
The same applies to how you write your tasks. I know this might sound a bit simplistic but if you write something like “buy dog food” that task does not really have any emotional value. Now, if you own a dog, You really care about him or her, I know I do. So if I have to buy anything for my dog, I would always write the task out as “buy Barney some more snacks”. Now when I see that task on my list I also see my little boy in my mind. Much more emotional and it is less likely I will postpone the task to another day.
Little things like this might seem simplistic and silly, but they can have a very big impact on the way you feel about your tasks when you see them on a list. “Prepare curriculum outline for Jenny” sounds much better than just “prepare curriculum outline” or “pick up prescription for Steve” is better than “pick up prescription”
When you use a person’s name in the task it gives it more meaning. It’s more human, more intimate than a cold uninspiring task written like “get sales reports”.
While on the subject of tasks, writing tasks out so they are more clear is important. For example, I often see people writing tasks out like “call Sarah”. Now the problem with writing tasks like this is that “call Sarah” might make sense when you write the task initially, but five days later when the task comes up on your today list “call Sarah” probably won’t mean anything and you have to waste valuable time thinking about why you need to call Sarah. It is far better to write “call Sarah about SWX Conference next year” Now you have the purpose of the call written within the task and you will know immediately why you need to call Sarah.
Moving on to your projects. It’s a good idea to go through all your projects periodically to ask the question “why am I doing this project?” Often I find I created a project and three months later the project is still there with the exact same tasks I had when I first created that project. The project is stuck. It hasn’t moved anywhere. Now after three months if a project has not moved there is something wrong. That’s the time to ask the question “Why am I doing this project”. If it hasn’t moved for three months it’s obviously not important. If the project was meaningful in some way it would have moved somewhere in three months. To me, a project that hasn’t moved for three months needs to be removed. Either I will archive it (knowing, if it is meaningful, I can always re-create it) or I will move the project to my someday | maybe list until I am ready to make it active again.
Seriously, be honest with yourself. If a project has not moved in three months, will it ever move or is it there just in case you decide to do something with it later?
You can also do this with your work projects. I frequently find a boss will tell her team about a new project they are going to be involved with, and as good organised and productive people we create the project in our work project list and then we wait. And we wait and we wait. Six months later that project is still in our projects list but nothing has happened. Guys… Let me tell you something…. It is never going to move. Your boss has already forgotten about it and it’s off the radar. Remove it. If by some miracle your boss suddenly remembers it, you can always recreate the project later.
Now if you are in the areas of focus world—that is organising your projects by areas of focus rather than individual projects—you should go through each area asking are they really areas you want to put your focus on? You may have thought a few months ago that you’d like to focus on maintaining a clean working environment, but several months later your enthusiasm for keeping your workspace clean, tidy and organised has wained a little and you are no longer doing anything about it. Either keeping a clean workspace is important to you or it isn’t. If it is, put some life back into that area of focus or if it isn’t, delete the area. Again, you can always recreate it later if you decide you would like to focus on it after all.
To maintain a functioning to-do list manager, you need to keep it maintained and functioning. Filling up your to-do list manager with “hope to” or “wish to” projects is never going to work well. It will become overwhelming and uninspiring because you will have a lot of dormant projects and tasks in there. Purge and purge again. Never be afraid to purge. You can always recreate your projects anytime if they become active in the future.
Your to-do list manager needs to be a power-plant of activity. Tasks coming in and tasks getting completed. When there’s a lot of activity going on in there it will be naturally inspiring. When there’s little to no activity, and your projects list rarely changes it becomes boring and uninspiring. That’s when you get that feeling you are just going round and round in circles.
Finally, stop overcomplicating your lists. This really is an inspiration killer. Sure it might be cool to be able to create six levels of child hierarchy, but having a deep level of child projects just makes things complicated. When your brain sees complexity it will resist. Try to keep things as simple as you can and have some hard edges between the different types of inputs you get. A task goes into your task list manager, a note goes into your notes app and an event goes on your calendar. Almost all modern apps will allow you to cross-link these different inputs. For example, you can add a link to a note to a task in your task list manager which will then allow you to click the link and be immediately taken to the relevant note. Or you can add the note link to the calendar event so you can quickly access the note when you see the event on your calendar.
So there you go, Helena. I hope that has helped to breath new life into your to-do list manager. You are going to need to spend a little time doing some to-do list manager CPR over the next few days, but it will be worth it. Be very clear about why you are doing a project and if you really don’t want to do it just delete it. If a project has been dormant for more than three months either delete it or move it to a someday | maybe file. Don’t leave it hanging around taking up space. And make your tasks more human. Use people’s names and be very clear about what it is you want to do when you do that task. Don’t rely on your memory to remember… It won’t.
Thank you for the question and thank you to you all for listening to this show. If you have a question you would like answering on this show, then please email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 73
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about how to organise all you digital files.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
From Disorganised To Productivity Mastery in 3 Days
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 73 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a question from many people about how to name and manage your digital files. A dangerous topic as I know a few people have some very strong views on filing and how to organise their digital data. But, I’m not one for running away from difficult topics and so in this episode, I will share with you how I organise my own files and let you decide if my system is worth trying.
Don’t forget, if you have enrolled in my From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 days course you now have a nice update waiting for you. I have updated a few of the existing parts but more excitingly I have added an extra day. This one is Day 4 and Beyond and it gives you a number of strategies to help you to maintain your system once you have it up and running and it comes face to face with the world.
Just head over to your dashboard on my learning centre and you will find everything you need right there.
Any of you haven’t enrolled yet, then you can enrol in this fantastic beginners course and get yourself an early-bird discount. All the details are in the show notes.
Okay, onto the question and that means it’s time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Emile, Dennis and Sally. They ask: How do you manage your files on your computer, Carl?
Thank you all for your question.
Now, this is apparently a controversial subject. Many people have their own filing methodology and best practices that they swear by and anything else is wrong, wrong, wrong.
The truth is, of course, is a little more complex than that. Each of us thinks differently. We organise our things differently and our brains are wired differently. This means the only right way to organise your files and folders is the way that works for you.
Now I organise my folders by year. I’m told this is a stupid way of organising files, but I’ve been organising by year since 1997 and I have never had a problem finding files I want even if the last time I looked at a file was 10 years ago.
The reason I organise by year is that the older a file is, the less likely I am going to need it. As the years go by the likelihood I will need the file decreases. For example, if I did a workshop for a client 5 years ago, the materials for that workshop would now be out of date. However, if there were some parts of the workshop I would like to reuse. I would then go to my 2014 folder (which is now on an external hard drive labelled 2012 - 2015) find the clients name and retrieve the workshop folder. I can then review the materials, select the parts I want to update and reuse and copy those into my 2019 client’s folder.
I copy the contents because by the time I have finished updating the materials they will be different. That scenario is very rare though.
On a day to basis, I use my computer’s build in search functionality. I work in the Apple environment. My computer’s a Mac and I also use an iPhone and iPad. So rather than reinventing the wheel I simply use Apple’s search and filing options. This means I use Spotlight to find files and iCloud to store my current files.
By “current files” I mean files I am using at the moment or have been working on for the two or three months.
What this means is Keynote files I am working at this moment are in my iCloud Keynote folder and tagged by company or personal. I only use 3 tags on my computer. CPP which I use for files related to my online course and coaching business, FES for files related to my language business and Personal for all my personal files. And the only reason I do use my computer’s built-in tagging system is so when I do have a lot of files in my iCloud Drive, I can find what I am looking for very easily. I don’t have that many Keynote files in my Keynote iCloud folder, but I do have a lot of files in my Number’s iCloud folder. I use Numbers for my daily admin records. Things such as income and expenditure as well as student attendance records and my social media campaigns. As I use these files almost every day, I want to be able to access them quickly.
For all other documents, they will be filed in folders related to topic. For example, I have a folder in iCloud called “Online Courses” and inside that are all my online courses organised by folder for each course. I keep all the course thumbnails, outlines (which are done in Numbers) and other related documents. As most of my online courses are updated every year, this folder stays where it is.
I also keep a folder with all the images I create for my blog posts, campaigns and other stuff. These are organised by month so they are easy to access if I want to modify and reuse them at a later date. I keep the Jpeg and original Photoshop file in this folder.
So how do I name files? I use dates again. And follow the standard format of year, month, day then the file type and finally the name of the file. Between each part, I use a dash. Being in the Apple environment dashes are compatible so I don't use underscores.
This naming system works perfectly for me. When I do a coaching call with a client I use Spotlight to search the client's name and in the list of results, I will get a list, in date order, of all the previous call’s feedback. I can click on the last feedback document and I have what I need in front of me.
To speed up the process of file naming, I use TextExpander and have a simple ‘snippet’ —as TextExpander calls them— of “fdate” this then gives me the current date in my filing format plus a dash.
Now I don't go in for all this added complexity of updated dates or created or opened date. For me, the date I use is the date I created the file. With version history on almost all operating systems now I just don't need any of that added complexity. If I need to go back to a previous version I just use version history.
What it comes down to is to create a filing system that works for you. Although many may criticise the way I organise my files, what matters is it works for me. All the files I am working on right now are easy to find and when they are finished with they are archived by the year and month I worked on them.
Almost all operating systems have search functions that are fast and all you need to think about is the name of the file you are looking for.
That means what you name a file is important. If you use a last name first name structure for example, would you really search for the music of Bob Dylan using the term “Dylan, Bob” probably not? Using the “Dylan, Bob” structure might work with a school attendance record, but it is not a natural way of thinking for us.
Funnily enough, when I tested this using Spotlight on my computer, I got almost the same results whichever way I wrote Bob Dylan.
So when it comes to organising your files and folders I would always recommend simplicity. The search function on your computers is so good now, you only need to be clear and consistent with your file naming. Folders could easily be optional today. A simple work and personal folder would pretty much allow you to keep things well organised. That, of course, does bring with it a number of problems though.
As it is so easy to find files now, it is also easy to leave files hanging around filling up your computer’s hard drive space. This is why I have a 2 terabyte external hard drive attached to my computer and when I finish a project I move that project’s folder to the 2019 folder I have created on that hard drive. I have a 2018 MacBook Pro with a 256 GB hard drive which means hard drive space is limited. If I am not currently working on a particular project it is archived onto the external hard drive. Anything I am working on regularly is stored in iCloud for access whenever I need it.
That is why your file naming convention is more important than the way you manage your folders. With all this cloud storage available to us at a relatively low cost, and the fantastic search functionality of these cloud drives, you could very easily just have a long list of files and as long as you know what you are looking for, you will be able to very quickly find what you are looking for.
I would always recommend you have some form of archival system in place though. Going by year is the easiest and most logical way, but you may prefer to archive using a clients name or type of file. That choice is yours. Whichever way you choose be consistent. As I have been using the same archival system for nearly twenty years, I don’t have a lot to think about if I want to find something I create a few years ago. I only need an approximate year as my archived hard-drives run between 3 and 4 years. Once I attach the hard drive to my computer I can perform a search for what I am looking for and as I have used the same naming system for many years I can use my computer’s search to find what I am looking for.
A lot of the problems people face when it comes to organising files is really consistency or lack of consistency. If you keep changing the way you name files then it will become very complicated. Find a naming format that works best for the way you think and stick with it. Don’t try and be too clever, keep it as simple and logical as possible and you will be fine.
You should also get to know your computer’s search abilities. I’m relatively new to using Apple’s Spotlight before I used an app called Alfred. While Alfred is excellent, I have found Spotlight gives me better search results and has speeded up my searches tremendously. And that saves a lot of time.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thank you to Emile, Dennis and Sally for your questions and thank you for listening. If you have a question you would like answering, then you can email me - carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 72
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about how to manage your energy levels through the day.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
From Disorganised To Productivity Mastery in 3 Days
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 72 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, it’s all about energy and how to maximise your energy for the day as well as managing your energy throughout the day so you stay fully energised all day.
Before we get into this week’s question and answer, I’d like to let all of you enrolled in my From Disorganised To Productivity Mastery in 3 Days course that the course has been updated for 2019. Now you have a completely new section called Day 4 And Beyond where I have added lessons to help you stay organised and productive once you have everything in place. All you have to do is go and log in to your dashboard and all the new classes are right there.
This is an excellent course for anyone who wants to get themselves better organised and more productive as it starts from the very beginning and after three days you will have everything in place to supercharge your productivity and reduce your stress, feelings of overwhelm and, more importantly, free up time so you can do the things that are truly important to you.
If you are not enrolled yet, then check out the course. An early-bird discount is on right now. This course will change your life forever!
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Sergio. Sergio asks: When I have the energy to do the important thing (let’s say in the morning), I don’t have the time to do it. When I have time (let’s say at the end of the workday) I don’t have the energy. Is there anything I can do to better manage my energy levels?
Thank you ... for your question Sergio.
Managing your energy levels really starts with your preparation. If you are not getting enough sleep, you are not going to have enough energy to get you through the day. Likewise, if you are not taking enough breaks, eating the right foods and getting enough exercise, all these things will compound and reduce your daily energy levels.
So what can you do to maintain your energy throughout the day?
Well, let’s start with sleep. Okay, I know a lot of experts say you need between 8 and 10 hours sleep a day, but in reality, everybody is going to be different. Margaret Thatcher, the former British Prime Minister, famously got by on 4 hours a night. Yet, many people claim they need at least 8 hours. Personally, I need around 6 hours.
When it comes to sleep you need to discover what amount you need. If you are not sure, experiment for a week or two. You will soon find the amount you need. Once you know, make sure you get that sleep each night. This is a priority you cannot neglect.
A lack of enough quality sleep is the biggest reason you will feel a lack of energy towards the end of the day, Sergio. And I emphasise the word quality. Quality sleep is far more important than the total number of hours you sleep. Make sure you go to bed at the right time, your phone and digital devices are on silent and are not lighting up every few minutes and your room is cool and quiet.
Another thing that would really help, but not everyone can do it is to take power naps. I take around 20 to 30 mins mid-morning and that always helps me. If I am working on a new course or an update, I will often take two or three power naps per day. It’s two or three hours of intense work, followed by a 20-minute nap. That always helps and keeps my creativity high as well as my energy. Winston Churchill swore by his naps claiming that they enabled him to do a day and a half’s worth of work every day.
Exercise. Okay, I know a lot of people shrink from the thought of having to do exercise, but exercise does not have to be hours in a gym or pounding the streets in your running shoes. Effective exercise could be just taking a 30 minute walk at lunchtime and in the evenings. It does not have to be strenuous. Not only will regular exercise boost your energy levels it will also improve your overall health. That’s a win win in anybody’s book.
You are going to have a lot more energy if you are doing three or four sessions of hard physical activity each week. But it does not have to be that way. Just spending some time each day walking is going to lift your energy levels enough to get you through the day.
Now during the day if you find yourself feeling tired get up from your desk and find a reasonably sized flight of stairs and walk (or run) up them a couple of times. That act, of getting your blood racing through your veins, will lift your energy levels significantly. Over the years I have been exercising regularly, I would have to say that my regular exercise habit is the one thing that allows me to stay energised all day. Now, I am lucky, I get to schedule my own day as I work from home and I schedule my exercise sessions at 2pm. Doing exercise at that time nicely breaks up my day and gives me an energy boost mid-afternoon so I can continue to work with exceptionally high levels of energy well in to the evening.
Diet
What you eat also has an impact on your energy levels. If you eat a carbohydrate rich lunch your energy levels are going to suffer in the afternoon. When your body starts processing all that carbohydrate you will experience a sugar dump and your energy levels will drop.
I often joke that the worst time to do a presentation is between 2 and 4 pm. This is when your audience will be dropping off into sleep. And there’s a good tip for any presenters out there. If you are doing a presentation between 2 and 4 pm make sure your put a lot of energy into your presentation. Slides packed with data and text is a guaranteed way to put your audience to sleep. Just don’t do that… EVER! Anyway.
If you want higher energy levels then you need to eat better, energy giving food. Plenty of fruit and vegetables, clean proteins such as chicken, fish and other lean meats and go very easy on the sugary snacks. I’ve found having a bag of almonds around is a great source of energy giving food if you get those hunger pangs throughout the day. Bananas are also a wonderful source of slow release energy giving foods.
And of course, make sure you are drinking plenty of water. It’s surprising how energy sapping a lack of water is. Make sure you have a bottle of water with you at all times. Keep sipping it throughout the day and you will find those periods of low levels of energy will reduce.
Have a purpose when you are working on a task.
Now I don't mean a life purpose here, what I mean is when you are working on a task you have a clear purpose and end in mind. Knowing what you are doing and why helps to keep your levels of enthusiasm for doing the task up. This mental boost keeps your brain engaged in the task. For many of things we do we think of them as a drudge. We don't know why we are doing them or they are things we feel we just have to do and so we do them without any enthusiasm. That always leads to lower levels of energy.
Instead, think of all tasks as having a purpose. Even if it is you allow yourself to finish work a little earlier if you get the job done by a certain time.
For me, whether I am writing, recording this podcast or my YouTube videos or creating videos for my online courses, the thought of being able to help people become better organised and productive gives me huge energy. That purpose motivates me and always helps me to push through when my energy is wilting.
Find the reason you are doing the work you are doing. Who are you going to help, or who will benefit. Imagine their faces when you produce work on time and with a high degree of quality. That’s guaranteed to pull you out of your energy slump.
Your energy levels are directly linked to your state of mind. Tony Robbins talks a lot of about this and it is true. If you are feeling down and a bit gloomy, your energy will also be down. If you are up and excited about what you are doing your energy levels will also be up. To get your state of mind up, make sure you are taking enough breaks and when I say “breaks” I don’t mean just sitting staring at a computer screen, I mean get away from your desk and move. Move as fast as you can. You need to get your heart rate up. That will boost your energy levels. You can try this experiment at work this week. Towards the end of the day as you are about to move in to you last working hour of the day, go and do a ten minute brisk walk - outside is best, but if you cannot get outside, then find a stairwell and run up and down them for a few minutes. I can guarantee when you get back to your desk your energy will be bursting out of you. The final hour will not drag. It will fly by and you’ll soon be on your way home with the knowledge that you’ve had a fantastic day.
Well, I hope that helps, Sergio. Thank you for your wonderful question and thank you to all of you who are listening. Remember, if you have a question you would like me to answer, just send me a quick email (carl@carlpullein.com) or DM me on Twitter or Facebook. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 71
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about procrastination and more importantly, how to over-come it.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2019 Edition of Your Digital Life 2.0
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 71 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Procrastination. We all suffer from it to some degree or another and it can be a huge drag on our overall productivity. In this week’s episode, I go into depth on what causes it and how to fix it.
And before we get into this week’s question and answer, if you are struggling to get the important things in your life done and find you have no time for the work you have to do, then take a look at my recently updated Your Digital Life 2.0 Online course.
This course has everything you need to learn how to get yourself better organised and more productive. It shows you how to create the best productivity system for you and will give you the know-how and framework to reduce your stress, overwhelm and put you in control of your time. All the links to the course and more details are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Annabel. Annabel asks:
Hi Carl, I really struggle with procrastination. Even when I have a deadline, I still do anything but what I should be doing. Do you have any ideas on how to stop myself?
Thank you, Annabel, for your question. I think a lot of listeners will also thank you because procrastination affects us all at times.
Before we go into how to stop procrastinating I think we should try to understand why we procrastinate in the first place.
Procrastination is usually caused because the task or thing we should be doing is either too big or unclear. What I mean by this is most people write tasks out like “do presentation” and with a task such as creating a presentation, there are multiple parts. There are the slides to create, a story to weave into the presentation, a script—well a script is not a good idea— notes I should say.
Of course, there’s likely to be a bit of research and quite a lot more.
So if you have a task that says “do presentation” your mind is going to recoil and say “I’m not doing that, what can I do instead?” And that “instead” is going to be something like checking email, responding to tweets or reading the news.
However easy you think the presentation is going to be, you need to break it down into clear, concrete steps. Now I don't mean micro breaking it down, what I mean is break it down into manageable chunks. For example, “Create introduction slides” or “Get last year’s sales figures from Simon” these tasks are manageable and could easily be completed in 20 to 30 minutes.
Other reasons why we procrastinate is because we are not sure what we need to do. I recently was given a writing assignment on a subject I wasn't too familiar with. I found myself postponing starting the task and seeking excuses not to start doing it. As the deadline approached I knew I had to get it started and I had to step back and ask myself why I was procrastinating over it.
Once I looked again at the title of the article I knew exactly why I wasn't sitting down and starting it—Unfamiliarity with the subject—So I asked the very next question. “What do I need to do to get familiar with the subject?” So I did a 15 minute Google search, found some good articles on the subject and was able to then formulate some ideas on how I could craft that into an article linked to my area of expertise.
Unblocking the block—in this case, unfamiliarity with the subject—soon got me on track and I was able to write the article.
If you do find yourself putting off what you should be doing, take a step back and ask yourself why. You will most likely find it caused by a lack of clarity about what needs doing or, as in my case, unfamiliarity with the subject matter.
And that’s another thing you should be aware of. What are you doing when you find yourself procrastinating? Knowing you are procrastinating is a key step towards stopping yourself from procrastinating. These are the triggers that will help you to avoid them in the future.
I find I procrastinate when I am tired. If I have a very creative morning, afternoons become an ocean of procrastination for me. Because I know between 2 and 4pm I am not going to be at my creative best, I schedule my exercise and news reading at that time. I am lucky because I can schedule my own work. I don't work in an office environment. However, even if you do work in an office, you still have some flexibility over the work you do and when. If you find you procrastinate during the afternoon slump, then work on something that does not involve a lot of mental energy. Better yet, go for a walk somewhere.
One of my best strategies for avoiding procrastination is when I feel tired, I will take a 20-minute nap. I’ve found if I try to push through the tiredness I rarely do anything of quality anyway. Instead, by taking a 20-minute nap, when I come back to the work, my energy and focus are restored and I get a lot more quality work done. AND… It gets done faster than if I tried to push through.
Being aware of your state when you procrastinate is the best way to reduce the amount of procrastination you do. We all procrastinate and sometimes procrastination is your brain telling you it needs some “down-time” to think through a problem or come up with a solution to something you have been thinking about. It’s your sub-conscious part of your brain asking for some extra energy to do the work it is supposed to do.
Have you ever gone to bed with something on your mind and when you wake up in the morning the solution to whatever was on your mind is the first thing you think about when you wake up? That’s your sub-conscious brain doing it’s job. So you do not want to eradicate procrastination completely. Your sub-conscious brain needs some time to do it’s work too. What we need to do is control the procrastination so we get the work that matters done when it needs to be done without becoming stressed and worried about deadlines.
How do we do that?
One thing you can do is keep a note-pad and pen on your desk. Every time you feel the ‘need’ to do something you know you should not be doing, write down what it is you want to do and then return to your work. As I was writing my blog post earlier today, I had an urge to check out the prices of a new keyboard for my old iPad Pro. Instead of breaking off from my writing zone, I just wrote down “iPad Pro keyboard price” and returned to my writing. I never left the screen I was writing in. It took ten seconds to write it down and I was back on to my writing. The urge to find the price of the keyboard disappeared instantly. When I finished writing, I then went over to my web-browser and got the price. It was like a reward for not doing it in the middle of a writing session.
Funnily enough, that thought about the keyboard came to me when I was coming towards the end of the writing task. The thought came to me because my brain was getting tired and it needed a break. Our brains are amazing things, while our brain does not say directly “I need a break” it does so in a more subtle way. So if you do find your mind wandering and you get an urge to do something else instead of what you should be doing, it might just be your brain telling you to get up and take a break. Take that break. You will produce better work if you do and procrastinate less.
Another thing you can do is reduce the amount you have on your daily to-do list. Most people have way too many tasks on their daily to-do list. When you start the day with twenty to thirty tasks on your to-do list you are pushing your brain to say “urgh! I don’t want to do that” and it will go into spasms of procrastination. Realistically you are only going to get ten to fifteen tasks done per day and have more than say 25 tasks will result in you having to reschedule tasks for another day.
So, get strategic and prioritise. Ask yourself “what ten tasks must be done today?” Then only allow those ten to be on your list for the day. Anything else you would like to do can be placed onto an “if I get time” list. When you see just ten tasks on your list for the day you are much less likely to start procrastinating. You will feel more positive and will have more energy to get started so you can finish those ten tasks as quickly as possible. It’s a simple trick that works and all you need to do is give yourself ten to fifteen minutes at the end of the day to plan out what ten tasks you want to accomplish tomorrow.
So there you go, Annabel. I hope these suggestions help you to get a little more focused on your work and reduces the amount of time you procrastinate. Thank you for your question.
If you have a question you would like answering on this show, then please email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. I’ll always be very happy to answer your questions.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about how to use productivity apps for group working.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2019 Edition of Your Digital Life 2.0
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 70 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I am answering a question about how to use the productivity tools we all love with our team so that everyone knows what needs doing and when.
Before I get to the answer, I’d like to thank everyone who has enrolled in the 2019 edition of Your Digital Life. I am so honoured and blessed to be able to help so many people with their productivity and time management (and goals). I do this for you, and I want you to know I am always willing to help in whatever way I can to remove stress, overwhelm and help you all become better organised and more productive.
If you haven’t enrolled in the course yet, now’s a great time to do so. There’s updated videos, a brand new workbook and of course you get a FREE copy of Your Digital Life 2.0, the book. More details about the course are in the show notes. So check it out, if you really want to become better at managing all your work and commitments, this is certainly the course for you.
Okay, on to this week’s question and that means handing you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Daniel. Daniel asks; I work in a small team with three core people. We share a calendar for events, Todoist for tasks and Evernote for project notes. Do you have any tips for getting better collaboration with these tools?
Hi Daniel, thank you for your question.
This is one of those areas of productivity I find a lot of small teams miss out on. I know most companies now use a company and department-wide calendar either through Microsoft Exchange or Google, but other tools we all love and use every day for our personal lives have built-in collaboration features too and when used with our calendar tools can help keep teams on track and also allows managers to know instantly what is happening without having to distract an employee with questions. Of course, these tools work exceptionally well when you are working with remote teams.
Let’s look at a to-do list manager first. Now I am very familiar with Todoist, and I do use Asana for my Kanban project view—both of which have excellent collaboration features. I know many other to-do list managers out there, including Trello, allow for collaboration. When set up, this feature allows you to allocate tasks to your team. This means there is some accountability within your team and you can all see a project develop. Often there is a shared inbox so team members can take ownership of a new task that comes in.
From a managerial perspective, this has obvious benefits. At any moment in time, you can review a project to see how it is developing and be alerted to any bottlenecks or issues. This does depend on how you set it up though. One tip I give companies I work with is to create an area or sub-project within the main project called “issues”. This area is where team members can add issues that come up and if necessary assign the issue to the person who can best deal with it. We have to be realistic here, it would be a very rare project that had no issues at all. Issues and problems are just a part of life and need dealing with. Having a place within a project where everyone involved can review these issues generally leads to them be solved much quicker than if they were hanging around in someone’s head.
Using a notes app such as Microsoft’s OneNote or Evernote is also a great way to collaborate. Both these note-taking apps have fantastic abilities to collaborate with team members and one of the best ways to use it is to keep meeting notes that can be added to by all the people involved in the project. Keeping meeting notes and planning steps in there creates a kind of Wiki area where existing and new team members can get up to speed very quickly with a project.
One of the greatest advantages of using tools such as these is there is less need to go around disturbing people with unnecessary questions so they can get on with their work in a much more focused way.
However, while all these tools are great to have, the difficulty is getting everyone on board with them. In my experience within teams, you have a mix of people. Some love technology and will enthusiastically adopt new technologies, particularly if they can see the benefit of using them. Others are less enthusiastic and need a bit of encouragement to get them onboard. And of course, these tools only work if team members are using them properly and updating the information regularly. So how do you do that?
The most important thing is to make sure all members of your team are fully trained to use these tools. I’ve found when working with companies that these collaboration efforts fail not because people resist using them, but because team leaders do not invest enough time to train their colleagues. When a team leader introduces a new tool to help with collaboration that they have been using for many years they are afflicted with the “curse of knowledge”. They know the tools too deeply and so when they explain how to use them to their team members they explain it in such an advanced way the team members are left confused. When that happens the tools do not get used.
A few tips here:
Firstly, create a shared note that can be used as an onboarding tool. You can put in there all the instructions on how to use the apps and, more importantly, why you are using them. Leaders should also invest enough time with their team showing them what they expect to see and how to do it.
The important thing is your team understand the clear benefit to them for using these tools. If you do not ‘sell’ the benefits and explain why these tools will make their lives much easier, they will resist using them.
I should point out that if your company does not allow third-party apps on company computers you can still create the same functionality using Microsoft Office or Google Docs. You can use spreadsheets for tasks and Word or Docs for notes. It’s not ideal, but when done well, can still give the same benefits to the team as a whole.
Another tip for team leaders is when you do adopt these collaboration tools, you must stop checking with your team if they have done their assigned tasks. I have found that when leaders do not trust the tools, that trickles down into the team. Remember, the biggest benefit to using these tools is everyone is clear about what needs doing, by when and who is responsible for each task. If leaders are still calling, emailing and interrupting their team members with requests for updates then the whole system falls apart. Success with implementing these tools starts at the top. Without the leaders fully engaging with them, then it just is not going to work.
Other tools such as Slack and Twist can also be a big help here, but I do have a word of warning. There are a lot of collaboration tools available and if you adopt too many of them things will go wrong and miscommunication will happen. This all comes back to keeping things simple. If you are thinking about beginning a system like this then keep it as simple as possible. By that I mean to restrict the number of tools you are using for collaboration. For example, use only one tool for notes and one tool for tasks. Better yet, find an application where everything is kept in one place. While I do not recommend that for personal productivity, within a team, with many different technology abilities between members, it is far better to go with the “less is more” philosophy.
The most important part of this is you get everyone on your team involved and committed. If just one team member is not fully committed to using these tools it will not work effectively. I’ve worked with teams where the leader hides behind their lack of technology awareness and abilities by continuing to pick up the phone and ask their team for status updates. This has to stop if the leader wants it to work. In reality, the team leader needs to be the most knowledgable about the apps. When leaders adopt these tools completely, it is not long before the whole team does and when that happens you achieve that seamless collaboration system where everyone knows what needs doing, what is being done and at a glance can see exactly where a project is.
We are rapidly moving towards a remote working world. Where people all over the world can work together as if they were all working in the same office. Because of time differences between continents, these tools make the whole process easy and effective. A great example of this working is Doist, the company behind great apps like Todoist and Twist. They are a fully remote company with people all over the world. From Asia to Europe and North and South America, their teams work together across multiple time zones and when one team member is at work, their colleague is fast asleep in a completely different time zone. This kind of working allows managers and leaders to employ the best people in the world, no matter where they are based, and they know the work is getting done with a quick view of a project in a to-do list manager.
So to sum up, Daniel, if you want this way of work to work effectively, you need to make sure that team leaders are fully onboard with the tools and that every team member is properly trained to use the tools you want to use. Managers and leaders need to understand that if they want an update on a project they must not fall into old habits and pick up the phone, they need to go into the project in the to-do list or notes app and get the answer to their query from there.
When your team see that the leadership are using these tools, it does not take long for everyone to fall into line and use them too.
Thank you, Daniel, for your question and that you to all of you who have listened. I hope this episode has given you some food for thought about how you can work better within your team. Now it’s up to you to “sell” the benefits to your leaders and see if you can become a leader in the new world of collaboration.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 69
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about finding time for yourself.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2019 Edition of Your Digital Life 2.0
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 69 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I have a question about finding some time for yourself when your work (and life) seem to fill up all your waking hours.
But before we get into this week’s question and answer, I’s just like to let you know that if you are enrolled in my Your Digital Life 2.0 Online course, I have updated it for 2019 and it now includes a downloadable workbook which gives you a file you can save to any of your devices so you always have a guide with you to help you keep on track on stay organised. All you need to do is go to your student dashboard and you will find all the new stuff, as well as your new free courses, right there.
If you haven’t enrolled in this course yet, then take a look at the course. I believe this course is the best time management and productivity course there is and once you have completed the course, you will have everything you need to get yourself better organised and more productive.
Also this week, I updated my coaching programmes. My coaching programmes now start at $99 for a single session plus a follow-up call. I want to be able to help more people and I know coaching can be very expensive. But I realise if you complete the questionnaire you give me enough information before the call for me to help you turn where ever you are today into building a system that works for you using the tools you want to work with. So take look at how I can personally help you by visiting my coaching programme’s page.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alex. Alex asks, I work in a very busy real estate office where my bosses and clients are always asking me to do work. It’s never-ending and when I finish at the end of the day, I have to spend all my free time replying to emails and catching up with the work I did not have time to do during the day. Do you have any tips on finding time to relax?
Thank you, Alex, for your question.
Okay, this kind of problem happens to a lot of people. It usually comes about because of working in a traditionally reactive industry such as real estate where everyone expects you to deal with their issue now and are not prepared to wait an hour or so or even a day or two to get the answer they want.
The problem here is when you are constantly working in a reactive state, mistakes are going to happen. When mistakes happen you have to allow additional time to rectify those mistakes every day. Sometimes those mistakes are simple typos on a property’s prospectus, other times it could be a much bigger mistake that takes a lot longer to rectify. So slowing down will free up more time because by doing things in a more focused manner will reduce the number of mistakes.
So how do you find time to relax when your work never lets up and it’s a constant stream of requests and urgencies all day?
Well, the first thing to understand is by blocking some time off every day to focus on your work you are going to be in a much better place to deal with customer and colleagues requests. To do that you need to manage expectations.
The number one reason why we end up in a situation where we are having to drop everything to deal with our customers and colleagues issues is that we trained them to expect immediate attention. I see this all the time. When we are trying to win the business or get the sale we will do almost anything for the potential client (or impress our boss) and that sets a precedent. Once the precedent is set, your client and boss will always expect you to drop everything for them. When you try to slow things down after you have won the business, the client complains or if you don’t reply to their email immediately, pick up the phone and asks you to deal with their “urgent” problem.
The trick is to retrain your colleagues, bosses and clients. And this is much easier than you think. With your clients, all you need to do is to tell them that you are not usually available at certain times of the day. For example, if you block 10 am to 11 am every day for doing quiet work, then tell your client that you are not available between those times to answer calls or emails. In my experience, when you tell clients, colleagues and customers that you are unavailable during certain periods of time during the day they will understand. I have never had a student, client or colleague who has ever got upset because I have taken an hour or two of my day to get on and do some focused work.
Now, according to many studies, include one done by Harvard University, people are only actually doing work for four hours a day. The rest of the time they are refilling their water bottles, chatting with colleagues, getting coffee or having their lunch or afternoon break. So, if you block 90 minutes in the morning and 90 minutes in the afternoon for quiet, undisturbed work, you are actually doing about the same amount of work a typical worker does each day.
Another reason for not being available 24/7 for your colleagues and customers is by making is a little more difficult to get in touch with you, you train them to find their own solutions. When you are always there for people, they begin to rely on you to solve all their problems. You make it far too easy for them to just ask you to do the work instead of doing the work for themselves. In the past, I’ve had students ask me to write their emails for them because I made if far too easy and was far too quick to reply.
When I started intentionally delaying my response times by two hours, the number of requests reduced. I never lost a student or customer. If I am being honest, I still did the work almost immediately, I just did not send it immediately. I delayed sending it. This actually gave me peace of mind knowing if my student called or messaged me asking me where the work was, I knew I was ready to send it immediately. The thing is, I never did get a call or message asking me where the work was. Because I was sending it within two hours.
Over time I extended my response times. Now I usually tell people I will get it to them within 24 hours. This means I rarely have anything that can disrupt my daily plan and I can add in any additional work at the end of the day after I have finished my planned work.
A good way to manage your time for this is to dedicate an hour at the end of your day for dealing with customer and colleague requests. When you send your replies later in the day, it is unlikely you will be asked for changes the same day. Remember, you are not the only busy person. Everyone thinks they are busy.
Another way to manage your client’s expectations is to tell people right from the beginning when you stop work for the day. Now I love doing the work I do so my cut off time is 10 pm. After that time I do not respond to new emails, messages or calls. My phone automatically goes on do not disturb at 10 pm and does not come out of do not disturb until 7 am. I have told all my students and clients if they want me to do anything for them they need to get it to me by 10pm if they want a response the same day. Again, when you put some restrictions on your available time, the people you work with respect that time.
I know it is hard to set restrictions on your time, Alex. It was very hard for me to do it when I began doing it. But in the ten years or so I have been much more restrictive about my available time, I have never had a boss, client or student complain and I have always kept my promise about when I will deliver the work they want me to do.
People do not get angry because you protect your time and give yourself set periods of focused time each day. People get angry when you do not deliver on your promises. If you keep telling your clients “I’ll do it right away” and you then get side-tracked by another request, you are not keeping your promises to your clients. It is that that will damage your relationships with your customers. It is far better to manage expectations by telling your customers, clients and colleagues you will get it done by tomorrow or the end of the day. You can then see where you have your next period of focused work and add that task to that period.
The final part of this answer, Alex is again to take your calendar and find at least one hour each day you can dedicate for yourself. That can either be the morning or the evening—it depends on whether you prefer mornings or evenings. That hour is for you. It is not for catching up or finishing off client work. It is an hour dedicated to you for doing the things you want to do. That could be exercise, quiet meditation or just taking a walk. We all need that alone time each day to reflect on where our life is, where we want it to go and how to get there. Without that quiet reflection time, we end up drifting and before long we have no idea where we are or even where we want to go. Our lives become a daily cycle of customer and boss requests and we end up living our life on someone else’s agenda. That is never going to lead to a fulfilled, happy life.
So, Alex, from today, begin dedicating an hour in the morning and an hour in the afternoon for focused work. Tell your clients and colleagues that you are not available at that time and instead focus on doing work that is important to you. I would also suggest you pick a time each day for yourself to do with whatever you want to do. That’s just 3 hours out of 24. It is not much, it’s just 12% of your day.
Begin telling clients when you will deliver the work. Be less specific about how much time it will take you to do the work. So for example, if you have always told clients you will get whatever it is they want you to do back to them within the hour, tell then you will get it back to them later that day. If they complain, then say”okay, I think I can get it done by the early afternoon” - you will be very surprised by how accepting your clients will be.
The thing we all have to remember is we only have a limited time on this earth and when we give up time for other people at the expense of time for ourselves we are wasting a very scarce and valuable resource… Our time. It is far better to put restrictions on our time available for clients and customers so we can spend more time with the people we love and care about.
Good luck, Alex and I hope this answer has helped.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about getting overloaded email under control .
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
The 2019 Edition of Your Digital Life 2.0
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 68 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
I can’t believe it has taken 68 episodes to finally get to one of the biggest problems people face when it comes to productivity and time management and that is email. We all have it, and for most people, it is out of control and inboxes just get bigger and bigger every day. So, this week we are going to tackle the issue and hopefully help you to finally get email under control and, more importantly, make it so it is easily manageable and it never gets out of control again.
But first, I am excited to tell you all that the 2019 edition of my most popular, complete productivity and time management course has just been released. Your Digital Life 2.0 Online, the 2019 edition is now available and this year I have added a brand new workbook you can download and keep so you have a ready reference guide for when things slip. Also, I have added a number of new classes around the Golden 10 and the 2+8 Prioritisation systems AND… I have updated the freebies so now you have access to two of my most recent courses for FREE!
So go on and check it out. The link to the course details is in the show notes. This course WILL give you everything you need to become super productive and much better at time management.
Okay onto this week’s question and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Greg. Greg asks, Do you have any tips to help me get my email under control. I have over 4,000 emails in my inbox and I just do not know where to start to get this mess under control. Any help would be much appreciated.
Thank you, Greg, for this excellent question.
Okay, first up. Email is just another task input we have to make a decision about. Whenever a new email comes in, we need to decide what it is and what we need to do with it. Email is unique in many ways though. Unlike regular tasks, where you add it to your inbox, with email someone else is adding it to your inbox. You don’t have much control over what and how much comes in each day. Or do you?
You see, part of the problem is we sign up for all sorts of newsletters, promotions and other services and each day those services and newsletters come in. Day after day. Because we have no control over when these newsletters and promotions come in we just let them pile up. They invade our inboxes and just sit there waiting to be dealt with. But of course these emails are not important and so we just leave them, hoping that we will have time soon to go through them and read them. Which we don’t do.
So, here’s my first tip. Get them out of your inbox. Instead, create a webmail account. You could create a Gmail or Hotmail account for instance and only have that account available to you through the internet. Do not put this account into your email app. Only allow yourself access to it through the internet.
Other things you can use this account for is online shopping. Every time you order something use this email address. The companies you buy from will use your email address to send you offers and other promotional emails after you have ordered something, some of which you may be interested in. So having this extra email address just for your shopping and newsletters is a great way to get a lot of the email you receive each day out of your mail email accounts.
All you need to do then is create a recurring task in your to-do list manager to remind you to check this account from time to time.
Okay, for most of you, that will probably get rid of 50% or more of the email you receive each day. It puts you back in control of what email you see each day.
Now, onto the management of your email. All you really need today is four folders. An inbox, an Action Today folder, a waiting for folder and an archive. That’s it. All the popular email apps today have excellent search. Gmail for Android and iOS has excellent search and so does Apple’s Mail app. This means even if you have thousands of emails in your archive, you will still be able to easily find what you are looking for whether you are searching for it by date, person or title. Learn to trust the search. It works and archiving email is not deleting email. It still going to be there if you need it.
Right, so you now have the four folders set up, how do you manage email? Well, when an email comes in you need to make a decision about what it is and what you need to do with it. Let’s say you get an email from a customer asking you to do something for them. It could be to send a copy of a receipt or confirm when an order will arrive. So to answer the question what is it we have an email from a customer, the next question to ask is what do I have to do with it? In this case that would reply and send the copy invoice or confirm an expected delivery date. If you can do that within two minutes or so just do it now. There’s no need to have that hanging around when all it would take is two minutes of your time.
However, if you need to find the invoice, or talk to your delivery agent first, that is going to take more than two minutes and you do not have time right now, then move the email to your Action Today folder.
Now the thing about the Action Today folder is you need to make sure you deal with any email in there within 24 hours. If you do not have such a rule, then this folder will just end being a dumping ground for emails you have to do something about, but tell yourself you do not have time. Rules are a must here. So, apply a rule that any email in your Action Today folder must be dealt with within 24 hours. This will mean you will need to create a routine to check your Action Today folder every day. I have a recurring task in my to-do list manager that tells me to clear my Action Today folder every day and for the most part I manage to do that.
You waiting for folder does exactly what it says. Any email you are waiting for a reply on goes in there. Now you will have to go into your sent folder and move any email you are waiting for a reply on into this folder, but that just takes a second or two so should not be too inconvenient for you. Once you receive the reply, as long as you haven’t change the title, the reply will be added to your sent email and you can then archive it straight from your inbox without having to move anything from your waiting for folder.
Okay, so there’s some structure to your email processing system, what do you do with those 4,000 emails in your inbox? Well, here you have a choice. You can either do a hard email bankruptcy or a soft one. The choice is yours. A hard email bankruptcy means you select all the emails in your inbox and just hit the delete key. It’s the fastest way to get to inbox zero. For those of you who are a bit squeamish about this don’t worry. If an email was important, the person who sent it to you will soon send it again. If the thought of deleting all your emails scares you, you can create a new folder and call it “old inbox” and again select all your email in your inbox and move them to this new folder. Then, as and when you have time you can go through it and delete emails that mean nothing to you or move them to your archive if you want to keep them.
Now here are a few tips to help keep your email numbers down.
The first tip I can give you is send less email. Instead, use instant messaging or just pick up the phone. Too often we take the easy route and send an email to ask a simple question that could be done in less than a minute if you picked up the phone. When you send that kind of email inevitably you are going to get an email in reply. My rule here is only send an email if it is absolutely necessary. The less email you send, the less email you get in return. Before sending an email, just ask yourself if there is a faster way to get the outcome you want. You’d be surprised how often you find a better, faster way.
Another tip is to protect your email address like you would your telephone number. Only give it out to people you trust. One of the worst things you can do is to put your business card into one of those collection boxes you find in bars and restaurants promising you-you could win a prize. True, you might win a prize, but you are also compromising the integrity of your email system too. To me, that price is far too high to risk having my email address added to yet another mailing list.
Finally, I see a lot of people sending actionable emails over to their to-do list manager. Don’t do this! All this is going to do is fill up your to-do list inbox and you will be going from one app to another app and back again. That is such a waste of time. Emails that need you to take action should be in your Action Today folder in your email app. All you need is a simple task telling you to clear your action today folder. As I said earlier, I have such a daily recurring task and I see that around 4 or 5pm. I will then spend thirty minutes or so dealing with those important emails.
Well, Greg, I hope that has given you some tips you can implement. I find the tip that has the biggest impact on your email is to create that Action Today folder and make sure you clear it every day. Seeing a list of ten or so emails that need action is far easier to manage than a list of 4,000 emails you are not sure whether they need replies or not., and if they do it takes you so much time to actually find the email you want to reply to.
Thank you for your question, Greg, and thank you for listening to this podcast. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering then email me(hahaha) at carl@carlpullein.com… Don’t worry my email is completely under control and you WILL get a reply within 24 hours… I promise. Or you can DM me on Twitter or Facebook.
It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about Getting GTD to work for you.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Carl's YouTube Channel
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 67 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week we are visiting the various systems that many of us follow and how to overcome problems when we cannot get it to stick.
But before we delve into the question and answer, I’d like to point you in the direction of my YouTube channel. Recently I have posted a few videos that could really help you get clarity and focus on your work and the things you want to get done. In particular my recent videos on creating a daily workflow in Todoist. Although it is focused on Todoist, the principles of building a workflow in whatever to-do list manager you are using will still apply. And last week’s Productivity Mastery video on discovering your North Star is certainly a must watch. Without finding your purpose—your North Star—you will find yourself running round and round in circles are living your life on other people’s agendas and that is never going to result in a good outcome for you. So check them out. I know they will really help you to get better organised and more productive.
Okay onto this week’s question and that means in now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jane. Jane asks: Hi Carl, I’ve read all the usual productivity books from Getting Things Done to your book, Your Digital Life and I understand the ideas in all the books I’ve read. My problem is I just can’t get anything to stick and I end up either not doing what I should be doing or just writing things down on random bits of paper. Do you have any advice to help me get something to stick?
Ooh that’s a good question Jane and thank you for sending it in. Now, I have come across this kind of problem before and it is more common than people might think. There’s a lot of great books on productivity and time management out there with some very sound advice. The difficulty people often find is getting the principles and methods in the books to stick.
The first thing to understand is that the ideas and principles in these books are a set of guiding principles that have worked for the author. In the case of Getting Things Done, for example, creating lists based on contexts (people, places and things) works for David Allen. And for a lot of people organising their to-do lists based on where they are, what tools they have with them and who they are with doesmakes sense. But for other people, myself included, they have never been able to get the context based to-do list to work effectively.
When Getting Things Done was first written in 2001, the smartphone as we know and love it today did not exist. If you wanted to do any kind of email work you needed to be at a computer. Likewis,e if you needed to write a report or essay, you also needed to be at a computer. Today, however, I reply to a lot of my email and often start writing my weekly blog on the bus from my iPhone. I do not need to be at a computer or sat in my office. I can do all those things anywhere at any time.
Whenever I visit a client’s office or meet up with a student of mine, I always have my bag with me and in there I have my iPad. I can create presentations, build spreadsheets and do video conference calls from that device. Again, I no longer have to be in a specific location to do any of those things. If I were to follow the context based list it would be very difficult to allocate specific tasks to specific lists and I would waste a lot of valuable time and energy trying to figure out where tasks should go.
So contexts do not really work for me. However, the principles of collecting everything in to an inbox and processing my inboxes every 24 - 48 hours does work. Ever since I first read GTD back in 2009, that is something I have religiously stuck to and it works 100% of the time for me. In fact, it works so well, I also adopted the same principles for managing my email. My email is zeroed out every 24 hours.
In the end, after fighting to get contexts to work for me I gave up on them. Instead, I created lists based on what I felt needed to be done on specific days. The funny thing is I still add contexts to my tasks, in the hope they will one day work, but after ten years I guess I have to accept they are not going to work for me.
Last year I decided to begin doing Robin Sharma’s 5AM Club. What this is is waking up at 5AM every morning and following a system of three 20 minute parts. In those sessions, you begin with 20 minutes of exercise, then 20 minutes planning and to finish you do 20 minutes of self-learning. The problem I had here was I prefer doing my exercise in the afternoons and I always do my planning in the evening but I did want to do the learning part. In addition, I also wanted to have some time each day for quiet reflection and meditation. So, I created my own “hour of power” as Robin Sharma likes to call it and do 45 minutes of studying (in my case Korean) and 15 minutes of meditation. I never check email or do anything else—no matter how busy I am—that one hour between 5AM and 6AM is my special, personal time.
All these systems and ideas by amazing people like David Allen and Robin Sharma work, but they work for them. What we need to do is to find a way to make the principles they advocate fit in to our lives. I am not David Allen or Robin Sharma. I am me. I work in a different industry, I live in a different country and I work in a different way. And when it comes to the 5AM Club, I will have different biorhythms to Robin Sharma. But that does not mean their ideas do not work at all for other people. They do work. They are build on sound principles and have been tried and tested.
What you need to do, Jane, is find a way to implement these principles in a way that works better for you.
Let’s take Getting Things Done. The basic principle of getting everything off your mind and into a trusted place is an absolute. If you are not doing that, then you are going to forget something and things will get lost. So creating an inbox either a digital one or a physical one or both, I use both, is a must. I have a metal inbox next to my desk for random bits of paper and regular mail. But for the most part, my Todoist inbox is my trusted place. Anything and everything that comes in to my mind that I want to do something with will begin it’s journey there. I also use my Evernote inbox for articles I want to read or reference materials I collect throughout the day.
Next, processing. Now David Allen recommend this is done every 24 to 48 hours. I do this every evening when I do my Golden 10. I go through what I collected and make a decision about what something is and what I want to do with it. A lot of what I collect gets done straight from my inbox. They are often quick messages or sending an invoice. I do not need to put them into a project first. It will take a very small amount of time, so I just get it done (the two minute principle at work here—if it can be done in 2 minutes or less do it now) I then move in to my 2+8 Prioritisation system. This is where I plan tomorrow by selecting two tasks as my objectives for the day—the two things I will get done no matter what…well except for extreme emergencies, and the 8 other tasks I would like to focus on.
Now, the Golden 10 and the 2+8 Prioritisation system are not part of the GTD book. They are things I created to focus me in on what I decide is important to me.
Now throughout the day, I do not work from different contexts, like home or office or computer etc. I work from my Today’s Focus list. This is a list that contain the ten things (2+8) I want to get done that day.
What I have done is created a system that works for me, that was built on the foundations of GTD, but modified so it fits better for the way I work. What I am doing is collecting, organising at the end of the day and the rest of the time I am doing (my COD system—collect, organise, do) and that is what you should do too, Jane. Find a system amongst all the ideas you have read about that work better for you.
Now, some people have challenged me and said that because I am not following GTD exactly as it is written in the book, or because I do not follow the 20/20/20 principle of the 5AM Club (exercise, plan and study) then I cannot say I am a GTDer or a member of the 5AM Club. Okay, then I accept that. But what I see is I get the same benefit and the same outcome as I would if I were to follow the principles exactly as they are set out in the books, but I am doing it my way. A way the works better for me and fits better into my way of life. I still plan my day, I still exercise (actually I exercise for more than 20 minutes per day) and I still study. I also still capture everything that comes across my mind, I still process and organise those thoughts and tasks and I still do a weekly review every week.
So, Jane, and for all of you listeners out there. Whenever you learn a new system or a new way of doing something from a book or a video or a course, remember always to adapt it for the way you live. How you do something is less important than the outcome you get. If you prefer collecting your ideas into a little pocket notebook and transferring them over to a digital system every three days or so, then great. As long as it works for you. Likewise, if you don’t like waking up at 5AM and prefer to wake up at 6AM and do your planning and self-development study then exercise in the evenings, then great. Do that. If it works for you, you are still planning, exercising and developing yourself. You still experience the same benefits in the long-term.
I have always been inspired by Stephen Covey’s quote “begin with the end in mind” - meaning begin with the outcome you desire and work backwards. If you want to be healthier, wiser and better focused on what you want, then giving yourself enough time each day for exercise, planning and learning is what matters. Waking up at 5AM is just one way of doing it. Likewise, if you want to get yourself better organised and more productive, then collecting everything on your mind, organising what you collected regularly and spending the majority of your time doing the work is how you will get there. You don’t have have contexts attached to every item in your list. How you collect and organise your ideas, events and tasks is up to you. Find a way that works.
I hope that answers your question, Jane and thank you.
Thank you also to you for listening and I do hope you got a lot out of this episode. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like answering, you can email (carl@carlpullein.com) or DM me on Twitter or Facebook.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about managing an overwhelming to-do list.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 66 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week it’s all about regaining control of your day and the tasks you have to complete so you get your important work done and can actually have some time to yourself each day.
Before I get into this week’s question though, I’d just like to remind you to enrol in my FREE beginners guide to creating your own COD system. This course will give you the framework to develop a simple system that is easy to maintain and will boost your productivity by keeping you focused on the things that are important and will help you to eliminate the unimportant things—the things that do not take you closer to your North Star—ie, your purpose. So get yourself enrolled. It’s free and will only take you around 40 minutes to complete.
Okay, onto this week’s question and that means handing you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks: Hi Carl, I have so many tasks every day on my to-do list that I do not know where to start. Is there anything I can do that will help me to make better decisions?
Thank you, Michael, for your question. Now I know this problem is a very common problem indeed. Often we rush to collect everything that comes across our mind whether that is an event, a task or an idea and we dump them all into our to-do list’s inbox. To be honest, that’s actually a very good place to start. Collecting everything is a good thing—after all, it is the first step of COD (collect, organise and do). Now if we are not organising those items at least every day or two, things are going to mount up, and when we look at an overflowing inbox our minds begin to dread looking there and then the whole system begins to fall apart.
So it is important you organise the stuff you collect every day. But, when you do organise you need to be thinking strategically. If you just randomly date things just to get them out of your inbox and so you know they will pop up in your today list one day in the future you are going to have a few problems. The first problem of course is you will have a list of to-dos in your today view that don’t really need doing that day. When that happens we tend to stop prioritising our today list. The purpose of your today list is that anything on there really does need your attention that day. It could be a simple reminder task to review a project that after seeing it, you decide to put off for another week. That’s okay, the important thing is when a task appears on your today list it has to appear there because you want to see it on that specific day. If you do not need to see it that day, then it should not be on your today list.
And that brings me to another problem I often see. That is one of trust. If you do not trust you will see a task when you need to see a task you will date everything—randomly— and that causes a long list of tasks on a today list you do not need to see. It’s a trust issue.
Now not trusting your system can be because you have just started with a productivity system and it will take time to trust it. It could be caused by constantly switching to-do list managers so you are not sure if everything migrated across properly from your previous to-do list manager or it could be because you are not doing a full weekly review—which is the most common reason.
Now there are two types of weekly reviews. There’s a normal, take it slowly with a nice cup of tea and some great music weekly review and then there’s the secret weekly review that people like me who coach people to become better organised and more productive don’t like to tell you about. But, because I am feeling VERY generous today, and will tell you… But only this once so listen carefully…
The secret weekly review is called the “skimmed weekly review”. The skimmed weekly review only takes around fifteen to twenty minutes, as opposed to the full forty-five to sixty minutes a normal weekly review takes, and what you do is go through all your projects and areas of focus quickly just checking that the tasks you have there are still relevant and have the correct dates on them. With a full weekly review, you go through each project and area of focus carefully and compare your tasks with your calendar to make sure your dated to-dos fall on the right days and at the right times.
I don’t recommend you do the skimmed weekly review often, but sometimes if you are on a business trip or you are particularly busy then it can be useful just to keep yourself up to date and moving forward.
If you do worry about not seeing your tasks when you need to see them then review how you do your weekly review. Make sure you have your calendar open when you do it and compare your daily task lists for each day against your calendar. If one day next week you have back to back meetings all day, then you need to reduce the number of tasks on your list for that day. If you have a very quiet day where you can focus on your work for a long period of time, then you can allocate a few more to-dos for that day.
So, hopefully, if you have a good weekly review behind you, you should find that your daily tasks list for each day reflects how busy you are for each day next week.
Next step to reducing your daily to-do list and to help make better decisions on what you should be working on is to use the 2+8 Prioritisation system. I’ve covered this many time before so I won’t go into details here. I will put a link in the show notes to a video I did on it a few months ago.
Now basically the 2+8 Prioritisation system asks you to choose two tasks that you really must get done that day. And that barring an emergency you WILL make sure you get them done.
Then you have 8 other tasks you have chosen the night before that would have the biggest positive impact on your work or goals if you complete them the next day. That’s it.
This means when you start the day you already know what exactly you want to accomplish that day. And you will put all your focus and attention on those ten tasks and in particular, the two objective tasks that you have chosen MUST get done that day.
Now the reason why you do this the night before instead of on the morning of the day itself is so when you start the day you already know exactly what it is you should be doing. There’s no chance you will waste any time thinking about what to do, or get yourself lost in a sea of tasks you might like to get done. You have ten tasks and you will do everything you can to get them completed by the end of the day.
Of course there will be interruptions and more tasks coming in throughout the day, that’s normal day to day life. As they come in you need to assess their urgency and decide if you need to do them that day or not. But your focus for the day is the 2+8 tasks you have already chosen to complete that day. The whole point is if you get those ten tasks complete you will feel you have had a productive day.
I should point out here that your 2+8 tasks do not include any routine housekeeping tasks you have to do every day. For example, I do not include my daily admin tasks in my 2+8 Prioritisation system. My daily routines take around 30 minutes each day and I have those 30 minutes scheduled on my calendar at 9:30 pm every day to complete. I do not need to see those tasks until 9:30 pm and so they are out of view until that time. How you do that will depend on the to-do list manager you are using, but it is worth figuring out because when your list only shows two tasks when you look at it in the morning you will feel a lot less overwhelmed and stressed.
Another bit of advice I can give you Michael is to get into the habit of asking yourself a simple question when you sit down to organise your day. That question is one I have already alluded to and that is:
What tasks can I complete tomorrow that will have the biggest positive impact on my projects and goals?
It’s a powerful question and will lead you to make the right decisions about what you should be working on. Make sure you include your goals in there somewhere. If you are not including your goals you will not make any progress on your goals. So make sure somewhere in those ten tasks you have at least one goal task.
Having your goals on your daily priorities list is the best way to make sure you are always heading towards your North Star. The place you want to be in ten or twenty-five years time. Of course, this will change as you travel towards it, it always does. Some things we want to achieve today become less important as time goes by, and that’s perfectly okay. The important thing is you are always travelling towards the destination you want to go, not the destinations others would like to drag you.
The biggest problem today is not the work we have to do, with all the technology and automation available to us that can easily be dealt with. It’s the expectations we place on ourselves. Our perceived capacity for work is bigger than the time we have available each day. So we either rush to get work done and end up with a lower standard of work than we are capable of, or we spend far too much time doing work and not enough time getting the valuable rest we need to be able to perform at our best every day. This causes a super-stressed state which does not do us any good physically or mentally. You need to get more realistic about what you can do in a day.
One way to do this is to monitor how long it takes you to do a piece of work you regularly have to do. For example, I know to write my weekly blog post takes around 90 minutes and to edit it takes roughly 30 to 40 minutes. To record my weekly YouTube videos takes about 2 hours and the editing takes about a further 2 hours. This means I can schedule blocks of time to do this work each week. Once these blocks are on my calendar, I can relax knowing I have the time available to do the work. And remember, the golden rule of calendars… What goes on your calendar gets done.
Well, I hope that answers your question for you, Michael. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like me to answer on this show, then get in touch either by email (carl@carlpullein.com) or via Twitter or Facebook.
Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about finding focus and concentration.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Above and Beyond Group Therapy Podcast
Anjunabeats Worldwide Podcast
Anjunadeep Podcast
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 65 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week it’s all about getting your life under control when everything goes crazy and the workload mounts up. A situation that can happen to any of us at any time.
Before I do get into this week’s question though I would like to thank you all for listening and to remind you that if you have a question you would like answering on this show, then all you have to do is to either email me carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook.
And for those of you who feel their ‘system’ is not working, then be sure to check out my FREE online course, The Beginners Guide to Building You Own COD system. This course could change your life because the simplicity, and easy maintenance of the COD system, when implemented has the power to dramatically boost your productivity.
Okay on with the show and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Nonica. Nonica asks: Hello Carl, really I'm struggling with lack of focus and concentration. I have many pending writing projects and I have been missing deadlines I feel extremely distracted. I would be very grateful for your advice, suggestions and guidance.
Hi Nonica, thank you very much for your question.
Now I know at times it can be very hard to know what to focus on when you have so many things coming at you at once. This can be particularly so when you have an ever-increasing workload and family and personal commitments to attend to. When things become overwhelming in this way, our brain becomes our worst enemy because it starts screaming at you and reminding you all the time about the work you have to get done and does so at the most inconvenient of times. It will remind you-you have to finish off writing an article just as you are drifting off to sleep at the end of the day. It will remind you of the meeting preparation you have to do as you are trying to enjoy a romantic dinner with your partner and it will remind you-you have to call someone at 3AM in the morning—the worst time to call someone.
Now when you feel completely overwhelmed and you don’t know where to start you need to take some timeout and stop. I know, when you feel you a lot to do, the very thought of stopping doing what you need to do seems a stupid idea, but if all you are doing is running around in a state of indecision and inactivity then stopping that for an hour or so is not going to have any impact on your current productivity or ability to get work done because you aren’t actually getting any work done anyway.
Okay, the first thing you need to do is to calm your brain and the best way to do that is to get everything you have on your mind out of your mind and into an external place. That could be a piece of paper or a digital list. Where you write it doesn’t really matter. What matters is you get everything out of your head. Your mind is a terrible place to hold all your commitments and work because your mind doesn’t really know when you need reminding of things and so it reminds you of everything all at once and that’s why you end up feeling overwhelmed.
Once you have everything written down you need to start organising and prioritising. This is why it is often better to get all this into a digital to-do list. A task list manager such as Todoist (which has a free version) would be a great way to do this because you can drag and move around items in a list. What you do is list out all the things you wrote down into categories and priorities. So for example, if you have six writing projects you would group those together and then prioritise them by when they are due to be completed. If you have a list of errands that need completing you would group those errands together and again prioritise which ones are the most important ones. Keep doing this until you have everything on your list categorised and prioritised.
If you give yourself two hours to do the brain dump and the organising you should be able to get most things into some kind of logical order in that time.
Okay, so great you now have a long, organised, list of things to do, How does that help me get things done? I hear you ask.
Good question. Here’s the answer: open up your calendar. Now hopefully, you have all your events already on your calendar. This should include your professional and personal commitments. If you don’t, do it now. You need to see where you have blocks of time. For most people, you will have a mix of meetings (onsite and offsite) as well as your personal commitments such as spending time with your family and friends, dental and medical appointments etc.
Now the reason you use your calendar is that your calendar is a list of the 24 hours you have each day. It is a visual representation of the time you have available each day and it never lies… Well unless you put stuff on there you never do. And you should not be doing that with your calendar.
Before we go any further you need to implement a golden rule. That is: “what goes on your calendar gets done.” No excuses! The only reason an event on your calendar does not get done is either because the appointment was cancelled or for an absolute emergency. Your calendar, from now on, is your one productivity tool that will never ever lie. This has to be the one commitment you make to yourself that you stick to whatever happens.
Okay, so you have your calendar open and your professional and personal commitments are on there. What do you do next?
Right, now look at tomorrow. Where are the blank time slots? You may have a time slot between 8am and 10am where you have nothing on. Block that off right now. Choose one of the categories you have on your list of things to do and write that in that block. So in your case, Nonica, you could write in that block “Writing Time”. So now you have made a commitment to yourself to spend two hours writing tomorrow between 8AM and 10AM. And it is a commitment. Now it is on your calendar and remember, “what’s on your calendar gets done” so you are committed.
Now, it’s a good idea to bring in the principles of the Golden 10 here—That is spending ten minutes at the end of the day to plan the next day—What you do here is look at your calendar and see you have a writing commitment between 8AM and 10AM tomorrow morning. Make a decision the night before in your ten-minute planning session on what you will write in that two hours. You do not want to be deciding that at 8AM tomorrow morning. You need to make that decision well before you sit down to write so you do not start wasting time procrastinating.
Now let’s say you have a regularly recurring event that you know you must do or you feel obligated to do. This could be something like having to take care of elderly parents or grandparents. This again is a commitment and something you should get on your calendar. To me, family is far more important than work and so comes in at number 1 on my priorities list. As I fill out my calendar with time slots for the work I have to do, my family commitments would be put on there first. If a family member is in a hospital for example, then I would be scheduling visiting times every day. If the hospital visiting times are in the early evenings, then block that time off. Doing this means you get to see the available times you have for getting your work done.
Now, if you do have an unusually high amount of work to do, you may want to schedule more time in the evenings for additional work time. This often happens to me when I am developing a course or editing a book. I would schedule additional work time between 9pm and 11pm for doing that work. This is only temporary and so I do not worry too much about my work-life balance in those times. The work has to be done, and once it has been done I can relax.
Now over the next two to three weeks, you schedule your time slots to take care of all the work that is on your list. How you and what your schedule, of course, will be up to you and the deadlines you have coming up. You have to decide what gets done first.
Okay, so that takes care of the list you created when you did your mind dump. But there is another issue here. Life does not stop just because you have emptied your head of all the things you have to do. Life has a bad habit of creating more work for us every day so you are going to be picking up more work after you have completed your list. In this case, depending on how much work you have to do right now, you may need to put a temporary stop to new work coming in. In these situations, you need to talk to your work generators (as I like to call them) and ask then to freeze new work for a couple weeks so you can catch up. In my experience, people are very reasonable and will accommodate your request. It’s only a temporary freeze and it will allow you to catch up and get everything in perspective.
If your work generators are not willing to freeze new work, you are going to have to allow sufficient time on your calendar for the new work coming in. This means keeping an hour or so each day free for such situations. The good news here is if you do not need that time for new work you can allocate other work to that time.
The final piece to this is to make sure you are not writing out your tasks so they feel overwhelming. If you write your task out as “write end of year report” and you know the end of year report is a 10,000 word report, you are not going to be motivated to do anything and you will feel overwhelmed. Instead, write “write 500 or 1,000 words of the end of year report” or you could write, as I do, “continue writing end of year report” That is a much more manageable chunk and you are much more likely to be motivated to get it done. By using the words “continue writing” I write as much as I can and I don’t get that mental panic of thinking I have to write the full 10,000 words.
Other things you should be doing during your blocked out time is to switch off your distractions. That means your phone, your email and the people around you. Use headphones if you can and listen to great music. The Anjunabeats Worldwide and Above And Beyond’s Group Therapy podcasts are great to work to, and if you prefer something a little slower try the Anjunadeep podcast. I will put links to these fantastic podcasts in the show notes.
And that’s really all you can do, Nonica. You need to first get everything on your mind off your mind and into an external place—paper or digital—then you need to categorise what those things are. Once you have that done use your calendar to block the time off you need to get them done. The only way the work will get done is if you do the work and to do the work you need to make time to do it. You calendar can be your best friend there.
I hope that has helped and and thank you so much for your question, Nonica.
Thank you to you also for listening. I do this for you guys and I want to help as many of you as I can to become better organised and more productive. So if you know anyone that could benefit from subscribing to this podcast please share it with them.
It just just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about managing multiple roles in your life.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 64 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Well, I hope your year has started well and you are making significant progress on your goals. This week, I have a great question about managing multiple roles in your life and I know many of you out there are not just doing a job, you are also a parent, a friend, a teacher and perhaps a church or community leader. These are roles that create specific tasks and projects that you need to be managing.
Before we get into this week’s question, if you haven’t already enrolled in my FREE Beginners Guide To Creating Your Own COD system, then now is a great time to do so. The course packed full of ideas for you to create your own productivity system around the basic principle of Collecting, Organising and Doing (See C.O.D) the foundations of any great productivity system is simplicity and you can’t get any simpler than COD.
So, if you do struggle with productivity, then this course will only take you around forty minutes to complete and once you complete it you will have the basics to create your own system and a system that will grow and work for you whatever your roles are now and into the future. So go on, get yourself enrolled now and begin a whole new productive life.
Okay, onto this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jim. Jim asks: What are some strategies to manage a personal and professional life that is composed of many, multiple roles?
Thank you, Jim, for the wonderful question.
What Jim has done here is just a few simple words has described what most people face. That is a life with multiple roles. So the question becomes, how do I manage all those roles?
Now, the first thing I am going to assume is that most of you listening to this podcast use some form of to-do list manager. Either that is a full Digital system such as Todoist, Trello or Omnifocus or a simple notebook and pen. When you have many roles it is important to have a place where you can manage all the tasks you need to do to maintain those roles.
So the first thing I am going to suggest is you create an areas of focus area in your to-do list manager. This needs to be quite separate from your projects list. Now for most of you using a task management system, you are likely to have an area where you list out your various projects. These projects are deadline specific and you complete set of defined tasks that will lead you to a completed project by the deadline date. Once the project is complete you can archive the project.
Areas of focus are quite different because they have no deadline date, or at least no fixed deadline date. An example of this would say if you run a blog. Each week there will be tasks you need to complete to write and publish a blog post, but the blog itself has no deadline date because you are writing and publishing every week. So you have an area of focus called “blog” and inside that will be your recurring writing tasks and maybe some maintenance tasks you need to perform from time to time.
Now, the changes come when you have a specific project related to your blog. Let’s say for example you decide to redesign your blog. Now you have a project because the redesign of your blog will have a deadline—a date you want to complete the redesign by. When this happens you can create a project for the redesign in your active projects list for the redesign.
So hopefully that gives you a basic definition of what a project is an what an area of focus is.
So let’s look at Jim’s specific question. If you have multiple roles such as a parent, a community leader you are going to have regular recurring tasks related to those roles. If you don’t that’s great, but you should still create the area of focus—I’ll explain in a moment.
For those regular recurring tasks related to your roles, you can put them into your area of focus. For example, if you spend Saturday afternoon doing activities with your kids, then you may have a recurring task to talk with your kids about what they would like to do each week. Or if you are a community leader you may have to prepare an agenda for a monthly meeting. All these tasks can go into your area of focus related to your role. Weekly activities with your kids and preparing the monthly agenda recur, individually you could argue they have deadlines, but as they recur regularly I would not consider them as individual projects. That would just make your active projects list overly long and unnecessary.
Other areas of focus that you can use are for things like professional development, or side projects such as a part-time business you are building. Way back in the late 1990s I had a part-time business as a mobile Djay. Most weekends I was doing a disco somewhere and each event I did was different. Sometimes it was a wedding and in the UK it is the tradition for the bride and groom to start off the dancing with their favourite song. That meant for each wedding we did I needed to find out from the bride and groom what their first dance song was to be. If I did not have it—and in those days we used CDs, not MP3s—I had to go out and buy it. Other things I needed to find out each week was what kind of event we were doing, was it a birthday? A company event or something else. I also needed to know the age group of the people attending as that affected the kind of music I played. All these questions needed answering before the event, so I used a checklist in my Franklin Planner that contained all the questions I needed to ask our agent. I would have a recurring call every Wednesday with our agent to get the answers to these questions. Today I would be using my digital to-do list and it would be much simpler as I would create a recurring task in my Djay area of focus to call my agent each week and have the questions I needed to ask in a templated checklist for each event in Evernote.
If you have multiple professional roles such as I do, I am an English teacher and a have my productivity business. I separate these out in my areas of Focus. I have my English teaching business as an area of focus and single action tasks such as doing something for a student can be placed in there. Likewise, if I need to do something for my coaching clients, I would place that task in my productivity business’s area of focus.
When you have multiple roles, and I think most of us have if we really sat down to think about it, having a separate place for your areas of focus can help to keep you on top of everything going on in your life. Now we have to remember there are only 24 hours in each day and we can’t change that. Mondays for me, for example, I have a lot of English classes and so on Sunday when I plan my day, I know to look exclusively in my teaching areas of focus folder because that is where my focus for the day is going to be. Likewise, on Friday afternoons I do all my video recording, so on a Thursday I look at my YouTube Channel area of focus as well as my content scheduling board to see if there is anything I need to focus on when I do my recordings. When I check my calendar I know if I have a coaching call the next day and who with, so I can review my notes and client feedback and do some preparation for the call before the call itself.
Another great reason to use areas of focus is you can decide if you want to spend a month focused on a particular area of your life. The end of the year holiday season has just ended and for many of 'sus we may have eaten and drunk a little too much. So it's get back in to shape season. So, if you have an area of focus for your health and fitness you may decide that this month you will put a lot more focus on that area and do a lot more activities related to losing weight and getting fit.
One more thing and I know this is specific to you, Jim, is if you want to build a professional speaking career. This again would be an area of focus. Each new speaking engagement may become an active project, but to build the career there are going to be a number of activities you will need to do each week. You will need to be developing your expertise in your chosen area, you will need to be communicating with agencies and conference organisers etc. These will be ongoing tasks and so should be an area of focus. So if you decide to send out five to ten profiles to event organisers and agencies each week you will have a task to do that either on a specific day or spread out over a few days each week.
So, if you do have multiple roles, and I am sure you do as we all do in some form or another, I would spend some time thinking about the different roles you have and decide which ones you want to focus on. Then create an area of focus for each one. Do not worry if some have nothing in them at the moment. It could be that you decide that some of those areas you do not want to focus on right now. When you do have the list put together though make sure you review them each week when you do your weekly review. That way nothing is being forgotten and you can decide if you want to put some focus on those areas during the following week.
Remember, an area of focus does not have a deadline date, a project does. You may have projects that come from an area of focus from time to time and you can create that project in your active projects list. As soon as the project is complete you can archive it and put the management of the project in your areas of focus if it needs managing.
I hope that has answered your question, Jim and thank you for sending it in.
Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast get in touch either by email (carl@carlpullein.com) or by DMing me on Twitter or Facebook.
Thank you so much for listening and it just remains for me to wish you all very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about managing your work and family life to create better balance.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 63 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Happy New Year and welcome to the first podcast of 2019. I hope you all had a wonderful new year celebration and are ready to hit 2019 with all your energy and enthusiasm to make it the best year you’ve ever had.
Before we get started I want to tell you about my new coaching programme. I’ve recently redesigned my coaching/mentoring programmes to better fit those of you who feel you need that little extra help. I know mentoring and coaching isn’t for everyone, but for those of you who want a more personalised approach, to get some help developing your own system and help in setting and achieving your goals, then take a look at my new programmes. There’s a programme for everyone ranging from a single session to a whole year of sessions.
The results you can gain from having a coach—someone to guide you and help you to develop your goals, productivity system and to keep you accountable for the things you have set yourself to achieve is an investment in yourself that will give you an incredible return. So check out my programmes. It would be an honour to be able to help and guide you to your best year yet.
Okay, onto this week’s question which means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Netanel. Netanel asks:
I don't have much time in my day-to-day, I take a subway to work and vice versa (100-120 minutes each way) working in Hi-tech (9-10 hours a day), I'm married and also a father to 2 kids so I want to invest in my family some quality time. How can I achieve my personal tasks?
A wonderful question, Netanel, and a very difficult question to answer to kick off 2019.
This question is really about creating a balanced work and personal life. Now, I am not a great believer in what is commonly called “work/life balance”—in today’s world with us being connected pretty much 24 hours a day, it’s almost impossible to build strict barriers between our working lives and our personal lives. To me, the stress involved in trying to maintain strict barriers between our work and our personal lives is just not worth it. It’s far better to accept that sometimes our work is going to encroach into our personal time and likewise our personal lives will encroach occasionally into our work time. Have you ever had to take time away from your work to visit your dentist or have to pick your kids up from school early? I’m sure you have.
Now in your case, Netanel, you have a number of unique challenges. The first is your travel time. You are commuting 3 to 4 hours a day! That’s a tremendous amount of time to be travelling to and from work. Tie that to working up to 10 hours a day, you are leaving yourself with very little time for your family. In fact, if you are getting six hours of sleep, then you have pretty much no time for your family. Something is going to have to give.
There are two options here. The first and the better one of the two is to have a conversation with your boss. Ask your boss if you could work from home two days a week.
Working in hi-tech presumably means most of your work is done by computer and therefore having to be in the office every day of the working week is unlikely. It might be a convention to be in the office every day, but if you were to be honest with yourself, do you really need to be in the office for 5 or 6 days a week? Of course, you may have to attend meetings, but you could arrange it so your meetings were only on certain days of the week. And if there was a situation where you were required for a meeting, you could always attend digitally via tele or video conference.
Now I do understand that between countries there are different cultures at play. I live and work in South Korea and only in the last year or so has the idea of flexible working arrangements come here. But more and more of the people I work with are now enjoying more flexible working arrangements. Coming in to work a little later in the morning so parents can take care of their children. Being able to work from home a couple of days a week etc. This is, after all, the twenty-first century.
The thing is in your situation, Netanel, if you want to spend a little more time with your family, then you are going to have to have the conversation with your boss. The great thing here is what’s the worst that could happen? Your boss saying no. So that leads me on to the second and third options for you.
Either you are going to have to move closer to your workplace or you are going to have to find another job closer to your home.
You see the biggest problem here is your commuting time. If you could reduce your travel time by two hours a day, you would get those two extra hours a day to spend with your family. Now, finding a home closer to work may be your best option, but in today’s working environment where a job is not necessarily for life—we tend to change jobs more frequently than our parents did—that might not necessarily be a practical solution.
Another question to ask is is there a faster way to get to and from work? In my case for many of the clients I visit each week, there are a number of ways I could get there. I could drive—often the longest way because of the traffic in Seoul, I could take a bus, not usually the fastest way really or I could take the subway. Usually, the subway is the fastest but not always. One of the clients I visit each week is just a ten-minute taxi ride away from my home, yet if I took the subway (the cheaper option) it would take me at least 45 minutes. Sure, the taxi is more expensive than the subway, but if I look at the time cost involved, then, in reality, the taxi is the cheapest option. So research your travel options. See if there is a faster way to get to your workplace and then do a time/cost analysis. How much is your desire to spend more time with your family worth to you? A good company would support the extra travel cost be giving you a travel allowance—another possibility for your boss to help you.
Finally, you could begin the process of finding another job either closer to your home or one that will allow you more flexible working arrangements. The truth is, if I had a conversation with my boss about being able to work from home a couple of days a week and my boss gave a flat no, then that would be an indication to me to change my job for a more modern, out looking company. A company that respects family time and the need to allow employees to work in an environment that works for them.
Like I said at the beginning, your question is unique, Natanel because it does not involve changing the way that you work, it involves changing the way your company works. Working 9 to 10 hours a day is not unreasonable—a little excessive, but not unreasonable—but travelling 3 to 4 hours a day just to get to your work each day is unreasonable. That is where I would focus my attention. Find ways to change that.
To me, your best option is to have that conversation with your boss. That will be the least disruptive and offers the best solution all around. Being able to work from home a couple of times a week would allow you more quality time with your family.
The next best option would be to review your travelling arrangements. Is there a faster way to get to your office? If so, how much more will it cost you? If it is a lot more, then perhaps your company would be willing to pay you an allowance to cover the extra cost. Again, you will need to have the conversation with your boss on that one.
Finally, the two most disruptive options. Either you move closer to your work, or you change your job. Again, this is something only you can decide.
Reducing your commuting time needs to be your priority. That is where you can save time that can be better spent with your family. Review all your options, how you travel, moving house or moving jobs.
Jobs come and go, families do not. Prioritising your family over your company is always the right thing to do. Of course, we do have to make compromises. Part of our family arrangements is we need to provide an income, but that income should not be provided at the expense of your family, and the quality time you have to watch your children grow and quality time spent with your wife. That is why I would always advise you to put family first, not your company and if your company is not going to allow you to spend more time with your family, then it’s time to change your company.
I hope that has helped, Natanel. I know the choices you are going to have to make are not easy, but your family is worth it. Go talk to your boss, see if you can find a way to work from home a few days a week and failing that, see if you can find a faster way to get to your office.
Best of luck.
Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like me to answer, then please email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter.
It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, once again I delve into my Productivity Mastery series to bring you a special episode.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
The original video
Subscribe to my YouTube Channel
Using Evernote To Manage A Project
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 62 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I bring you another episode from my YouTube channel’s Productivity Mastery series and give you 6 ways to supercharge your productivity.
Normal service will resume next week and please don’t forget if you have a question about productivity, time management or goal planning, then just get in touch with me by email (carl@carlpullein.com) or by DMing me on Facebook or Twitter.
Okay, let’s take you in to the world of Productivity Mastery with this episode on supercharging your productivity. Enjoy.
This week, the main podcast takes a rest and instead, I have produced a podcast from a video I did way back in June explaining why I joined the 5 AM Club and what I intended to do with the time between 5 AM and 6 AM.
So, sit back and enjoy this slightly shorter episode.
LINKS:
Robin Sharma's 5 AM Club
Brian Tracy's Presentation
The Original Video
Subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I don’t answer a question and instead I give you some tips about achieving your goals in 2019.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 60 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week there’s no question to answer, instead, I have a slightly different format for you to help you go into the new year armed with the right strategy and motivation to make 2019 your best year ever!
Don’t forget if you are looking for more help and advise on anything related to productivity, time management and goal planning and achievement, then just head over to my website, carlpullein.com, for videos, articles, online courses and of course coaching and mentoring. Everything you need in one handy place.
Okay, let’s get started…
The new year brings hope, it gives us an opportunity to make a fresh start, do a reset and to take stock of our lives and has us thinking about where we can improve our lives and become better at what we do. But…
Statistically, most people will fail to make any changes or achieve any of their goals. When our good intentions meet the expressway of everyday reality our good intentions are usually the first things to break down.
However, with a little application and focus, we can make those changes and begin growing and developing a life we want without breaking our intentions.
So how do you do that?
Well, the first thing is to get really specific about what it is you want to change or achieve. It’s no good just saying I want to earn more money - earning more money is easy. Doing a shift in your local pub on a Friday night will earn you more money. You need to get specific. How much more money do you want to earn? 5,000? 10,000? - Be specific.
I want to lose weight is not specific enough to be either motivating or measurable. Just go to bed without eating your dinner and you will lose weight. You need to be specific about how much weight you want to lose and more importantly, by when?
Once you have the specific details and you have a set timeline, then you have a workable goal.
Now another mistake I see people making is having too many goals. You have plenty of time to achieve everything. You don't have to achieve everything in the first month. This is why so many fail in the new year resolutions. They have far too many and so their focus becomes diluted. I’ve always recommended focusing on no more than five or six goals for the year. Two or three are even better and remember if you do get on a roll and start accomplishing your goals quickly, you can always modify your outcome or target or add new goals to achieve later in the year.
In fact, doing a quarterly review of your goals allows you to add in some flexibility, see how you are progressing and maintain your momentum and motivation. It also means if you are falling behind you can devise plans to get back on track. Keeping things fluid and flexible allows you to adjust and refine as the year goes by. Sometimes when we set our goals for the year we are just a little bit too optimistic. Instead of giving up either extend your timeline or adjust the outcome. You don’t have to give up. Just refine and keep going. The hardest part of usually getting started, so once you start, don’t give up. Just adjust and keep going.
Now one of the secrets to successfully achieving goals is developing the right habits. Let’s say you have decided to do a power hour between 6am and 7am every morning. You want to create an hour for yourself - to exercise, study something or meditate - there's a habit in there to develop. That is to wake up at 6am. If you’re not used to waking up at 6am your focus will need to be more on developing the habit and discipline to get yourself out of bed at 6am every day. What you do during that hour, can be developed later. You can experiment in the first month, you will soon find a routine you like. A routine you find motivating and more importantly, enjoyable. When I began doing meditation in the mornings I didn’t really know how I wanted to do it. I researched some articles and videos and found a 15-minute meditation session I could follow. After a couple of weeks I modified it to better suit my needs and now my morning meditation is something I would never miss. I love it, it’s so relaxing and it sets me up for an outstanding day.
You see, goals are achieved through regular, daily practice of habits. Waking up early requires you to be in the habit of getting out of bed early. Losing weight requires the habit of watching what you eat, beginning an exercise programme requires you to go out and do exercise regularly. All of these changes and goals mean you have to build habits.
Other types of goals also need good habit development. Getting your masters degree needs the habit of regular study, being promoted at work, needs the habit of doing great work every day. Achieving goals is nothing more than developing the right habits and consistently performing those habits.
Which nicely brings me onto the next point and that is when you have written your goals out, can you identify what habits you will need to acquire to be able to achieve your goals? That’s really the secret of achieving goals. Building the right habits that will take you a little bit closer towards achieving your goal.
Let’s say your goal is to become a director in your company by the end of the year. Now, while we are in 2018, would be a good time to discuss with your boss or HR about what you would be required to do to achieve that goal. Once you have that advice you can then build a plan to develop your skills and your behaviours so you can demonstrate to the people that matter that you have both the skills and the ability to become a director.
Sketch out your ideas on paper or in a notes app and then look for the habits you can develop to make sure you are doing something every day to take you towards the goal. To become a director may require you to change your behaviour at work. Maybe you hang out with the gossip crowd at lunchtimes or perhaps you stand a little too long around the water cooler chatting. These are habits you will need to change. Change them. Find different people to go and have lunch with—people who can help you to develop your leadership skills.—Buy yourself a larger water bottle so you don’t have to go to the water cooler as often—that’s great advice if you ask me—just look for things you can turn into habits.
Changing your behaviour is difficult. It’s easy to behave differently for a day or two, but our behaviour is baked in, and if you want to or need to change yours, then you are going to have consciously change the way you behave by changing your daily habits. That is the only way you will make the lasting change you will need to make to be considered for the promotion you desire.
Another good trick is to look for links between the goals you have set yourself. If the majority of your goals fall under the category of your professional development, or personal development, then you may find there are some goals that naturally work together. This year I had three separate goals on my list that naturally linked. I wanted to begin waking up at 5 AM, to become fluent in Korean and to begin daily meditation. When I saw these written down I saw that I could wake up at 5 AM, do 45 minutes of Korean study and then finish the hour off with 15 minutes of meditation. I linked three goals together and that meant although I was achieving three goals, I only had to organise myself to do one thing—wake up at 5 AM—Once I was out of bed, I could move naturally onto my next one.
If you have lose weight and begin exercising on your list of things you would like to do in 2019, then these two obviously link together. All you need to do is to decide when and how often you will exercise. The simple act of exercising regularly will start the weight loss. Your daily calorific output will go up and as long as you daily calorific input doesn’t go up as well, you will lose weight. You’ve linked two goals together.
Finally, if you are attempting to achieve a goal you have previously failed at, spend a little time looking in to the reasons why you failed before. Sometimes we fail at goals because the reason for achieving that goal is not strong enough. Imagine you are a little overweight, but you feel happy with the way you are. But you still have lose weight on your list of goals for next year. Now the problem here is your motivation is weak. If you have lose weight on your list because of what someone else told you to do, then the “why” is not your “why” it is someone else’s why you will struggle to achieve that goal.
Other reasons could be the goal is too big for one year. Earning $1 million, for example, may need five or ten years to achieve that. Instead of going after $1 million, break it down to say $250,000 next year. If you find yourself at $500,000 by July, then you can always extend the goal to $1 million then.
So there you go, a few final tips to achieve your goals as we head into the new year. During these final days of December get yourself motivated, visualise what a great year would be like and create a plan to make it happen. You have the ability and the know-how to do it, you just have to decide how you are going to do it and make a determined effort to make it happen. Your year is in your hands. You have the power and all you need now is the right plan, the right motivation and of course to develop the right habits to make it happen.
Good luck and thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Working with Podcast. If you found this episode inspiring, please share it will as many people you know. Sharing and helping other people to have a fantastic year is a gift only you can give, so give as much as you can.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about how to handle a paper-based work environment when you are a digitally minded person.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
How to Plan Your Year (VIDEO)
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 59 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a question about handling multiple types of inputs. Not just the usual digital inputs such as email, PDF and Word files, but also paper-based applications, memos and even letters. Again, something I think many of you will have to deal with, particularly if you work in a more conservative industry.
Before we get into the specifics of this question, I would like to point you in the direction of a video I made last month about planning for 2019. We are now just three weeks away from 2019 and I want you all to have the best year you have ever had, not just in terms of completing your projects and goals, but to be able to be better organised and more productive so you can spend more time with the people you really care about doing the things you want to do. I’ve put a link to that video in the show notes and I will be posting a follow-up video this week on how to turn your ideas into actual achievable goals and projects. The best way to make sure you get that video is to subscribe to my channel—which is full of tips, tricks and know-hows—so you never miss a thing.
Okay, so on to this week’s question and that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tiago. Tiago asks: I really enjoy the beginners guide to creating your own COD System, it was very useful for my productivity, but I work in an environment that I need to process paper documents from clients, colleagues and process many emails every day. I try to have some hours to process my inboxes, digital and physical, but it’s hard to lead with everything. Do you have some tips for this type of work environment?
Thank you, Tiago for your wonderful question. It’s actually a question about something I think we all forget about sometimes and that is how to deal with not just the digital stuff we receive each day, but also the physical stuff that comes across our desks every day.
You see whether you have read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and applied the principles or you have taken my COD productivity course, both of those resources focus on the digital side and less on the physical side. If you can get a copy of the original Getting Things Done book, that is more focused on the physical stuff because when the book was published in 2001, we were in the middle of the transition from a largely paper-based office environment to a more digital environment.
Up until last year, I kept a shelve of physical folders next to my desk which contained client contracts, regular mail and my domestic bills I had paid amongst other things. It was a way for me to manage the paper I still received. From January this year, I transitioned to a 100% paperless environment and have found it much less cumbersome. How I handle that is when something physical comes in, whether it is a contract or a bill or something else, I will scan in immediately using my phone and an app called Scanbot. What Scanbot does is send anything I scan to a folder in iCloud where I will then process whatever I received into its correct digital place. Now the problem, of course, is that this creates another inbox that needs processing. As I am not scanning every day it would be very inefficient to check that ‘inbox’ on a daily basis, so after I scan the document I add a task to my to-do list manager’s inbox to tell me to process the folder.
That worked for me, but it may not work for you. The kind and type of physical documents you receive may be quite varied in their nature so the first thing you will need to do is to review what kind of paper-based documents you receive regularly. When you do this you will find that they will fall into certain categories. For example, if you deal with client contracts, these naturally will fall under the category of contracts and will be associated with a specific client. If your accounts department insists on you providing physical receipts for your expenses report then that is another type of paper document you will need to retain.
To do this I would recommend you keep a note of what types of paper-documents you receive over a typical week. Then at the end of the week go through your list and see what you have collected.
Next, go out and buy yourself some folders from your local stationary store. If you really want to, you can also buy yourself a labeller machine too (that’s pure GTD for those of you who have read the book) and label (or write) the type of document you will store in each folder. So you may end up with folders labelled with “receipts”, “New client contracts”, “Invoices to pay”, “Invoices paid” “Applications” etc. The way you label these folders will be based on your review and the types of documents you receive each week.
Of course, if you have specific client contracts you will probably have a file related to that client already, but at this stage, I am assuming you will need to process the details digitally first before the paper-based contract is moved to its final resting place in the clients or customer’s file.
Now, in my pre-paperless days, I also had a folder I called “Inbox”. I used this for those random paper documents that did not have a specific place to go but needed some form of attention before being trashed or filed. An example of this would be invitations to an event or payslips for the various academies I worked with.
Okay, so now what do you do with the paper that comes in. Here, the best way to deal with it is to get yourself two or three in-trays. I recently visited a stationary store and I noticed these are disappearing. A few years ago there was a whole aisle dedicated to inboxes and trays. Now there was a tiny section at the back of the store for them—A worrying development if you ask me—SO if you do not already have a set of these excellent collection tools, go out and buy yourself some. While paper-based stuff is declining, it still exists and so these trays are valuable. I have three metal based in-trays next to my desk and I use them every day.
The top tray is my inbox. The middle tray is my ‘pending’ or “waiting for” tray—which I must confess gets little input these days as anything I am waiting for is likely to be a digital input.—And my bottom tray is where I keep my journal and notebooks when they are not open on my desk.
Okay, so now you have everything set up, how do you use this setup on a daily basis?
Okay, so, when a paper-based document comes in you can drop it in your in-tray. Treat this as you would treat your digital inbox. Just drop the document into your tray. Now, here’s the crucial part. If you are going to process the document that day, then there’s nothing else for you to do until you process the document. However, if there is no urgency, the document just needs some action at some point in the near future, add a digital reminder into your digital to-do list. Seriously this is going to save more times than you know. As the paper comes in, stuff you put into your in-tray yesterday or the day before is going to sink to the bottom and can quite easily get missed. Your digital to-do list manager is with you everywhere you go, so you know you will have that reminder there as a trigger to do something with the document. I know some of you will argue that that is duplicating, but adding a digital to-do task has saved me so many times.
But… As with all inboxes, whether they are digital or physical, they need to be processed regularly. I process all my task related inboxes daily, including my physical inbox, but this is really up to you. My Evernote inbox, for example, gets processed once a week, but I don’t put tasks in there, just notes.
As an aside, I do have another use for my bottom in-tray. in addition to my journal and notebook, I also keep some cables in there. When I am doing a coaching call, I use my iPad and I keep my iPad’s charging cable in there. Often these calls will be around an hour in length and I don’t want my battery to go flat on me during the call. Before the call, I just pull out the cable and plug in my iPad. The worst thing that could happen is when I am about to start a call, I have to go looking for the charging cable. I can avoid this by having my cable in its rightful place—the bottom tray of my in-trays.
When you think about it, handling paper-based documents should be a much easier task than handling digital documents. There are hundreds of years of practice and experience to draw on. In a way, I am very lucky to have begun my working life just as we were transitioning away from a paper-based office to a digital one. I was lucky enough to learn how to file manually using those big old-fashioned filing cabinets. A lot of how we manage our digital files these days is based on that tried and tested physical filing system. It worked then, it still works today.
The difficulty these days is keeping on top of everything that needs doing. But sticking to basic principles of having an inbox to collect everything, spending some time at the end of the day organising everything you collected and spending the better part of your time focused on doing is the only way to manage these various inputs. Working in an environment that has to deal with paper means you need an additional inbox and that means you have an additional inbox to process at the end of the day.
BUT… What you choose to work on can still be managed digitally. If you have a client’s contract to review and process, then you would add a task into your to-do list manager “Review and process Client A’s contract” and when that task comes due, you would pull the contract from where you filed it and begin the work. The key is to not over complicate things and certainly not have two or three to-do lists. You only need one to-do list and that will tell you what you need to work on next.
An example is last night I had a call with a client and during that call, I took paper-based notes. After the call, as it was quite late, I tore off the notes sheet with my notes and put it in my inbox. I added a task in my to-do list manager’s inbox to process those notes and at some point today I will do that. Once those notes have been processed into Evernote, that sheet with the notes will be thrown away. I don’t need a duplicate of my notes. Once they are in Evernote they are where they need to be. Of course, I could just scan the sheet and add it to my Evernote, but I like my Evernote notes to be in a digital format so I can copy and paste text if I need to. To process those notes will take around ten to fifteen minutes, but that time is well spent as it will save a lot of time later when I need to find those notes.
So there you go, Tiago. Hopefully, that has answered your question and given you some food for thought on how best to manage your paper-based stuff. The way to look at it is any paper-based documents that need some work doing, treat is as you would a digital-based document. Add it to your inbox and process it as you would normally do. If necessary, add a task to your to-do list manager and move on to your next piece of work.
Thank you for the wonderful question, Tiago and thank you all for listening to this podcast. Next week, I will be dealing with how to plan out the new year so you have the best year ever, so if you haven’t created a list of all the things you would like to achieve next year, now’s the time to give some serious thought to that so you are ready to start building your plan for next year.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about how to Change old habits and develop new ones.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 58 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I have a great question about habit development and how to use your productivity tools to create new, positive habits and stop old, negative habits.
But, before we get into this week’s question, please allow me a few seconds to say a big thank you to all of you who participated in my Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale last week. The response was fantastic and I feel so blessed to have such wonderful people supporting me so I can help more people to become better organised and more productive. We know stress is one of the world’s biggest killers these days and by becoming more productive you can reduce the amount of stress you are exposed to and that is why I want to help more people discover the benefits of a more organised and productive life. So thank you. I am looking forward to the new year and helping more and more people. Without out your support, I would not be able to do half of what I do today.
Okay, on to this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Pippa. Pippa asks, do you have any tips on developing more positive habits? I have always struggled to change my habits and I was wondering if there was a way to help keep myself focused on my habits.
Thank you, Pippa, for your excellent question.
Recently I have been asked a lot about this. How to develop and stay focused on new habits and I know from my own personal experience this can be a tough thing to do. But, over the years I have discovered a few ways that can help to keep myself focused on new habits until they become automatic and I will share those ways with you here.
Firstly, let’s look at the problem. Changing habits is difficult because to change a habit we have to move outside of our natural comfort zones. An example of this would be if you decided to start waking up an hour earlier than usual and doing some form of exercise. Now depending on how fit you are when you start this new habit, starting an exercise programme at the best of times can be very challenging. Exercise, particularly in the beginning, can be very painful and there are no immediate noticeable benefits. It’s just a lot of pain, sweat and, the next day, very sore muscles.
Over time, as you get fitter, it gets easier and the natural benefits of excising regularly begin to show. You feel stronger, have more energy and of course, you begin to look a lot better. But that is not what you get at the beginning. The beginning is usually characterised by pain and muscle soreness, a flushed face and difficulty getting up out of your seat after you have been sat down for a while. That’s not a very good way to keep you inspired to exercise every morning. You have to have almost super-human discipline to keep going in that situation.
So how do you overcome this?
The biggest mistake I see is people trying to do too much at once. Take the exercise habit, for example. I often see people make the decision to start an exercise programme and on day one they rush out the house at 6AM, and run for three or four miles. Now, if you have not got out running for a long time, the next day when you wake up to repeat the process, your leg muscles are going to be screaming at you to stop. If you tie that in with cold, wet weather outside, it is understandable that your dry, warm bed is going to win that particular battle.
Instead, it is far better to start slowly and break down the habit you are trying to develop. In the exercise example, there are actually two habits there. Waking up early and exercising. If you try to do both at the same time you are going to make things very difficult for yourself. It is far better to develop one at a time over a period of time.
As the new year is around the corner, let’s say that from January you decide that you want to wake up early and spend the first hour of the day doing exercise. Now the better way to do this is to decide that January will be when you develop the habit of waking up early. Let’s say you wake up at 7:30am now, struggle to get out of bed and then find yourself rushing to get yourself out the door and to the bus-stop by 8:00am. So, from the 2nd of January—not the first, that’s usually a holiday for most people—you wake up at 6:30am and get yourself out of bed. Go make yourself a cup of your favourite morning drink, or drink some water, and after a few minutes do some light stretching exercises. Nothing too difficult. Spend 20 to 30 minutes doing that and then go take a shower. Do the same the next day and the next. Just focus on getting into the habit of waking up an hour earlier.
By the end of January, you will find waking up early has become natural. You will feel disappointed if you don’t wake up early. That’s what you want. You want that emotional response when you don’t do it.
Now, in February you introduce some more strenuous exercise. Again, the advice here is don’t go crazy. If you have been doing some gentle stretching exercises in January, then add some push-ups and non-weights squats. Do two or three sets of these. Try to find 3 exercises you can do as a set and do three sets of three. You could do planks, push-ups and squats as a set and repeat that three times. Those three exercises will exercise almost all the muscle groups in your body.
Now if you do that Monday, Wednesday and Friday and on Tuesday and Thursday you go our for a power walk, that means you will be exercising five times a week. Do that for a month and by the end of February, you will be feeling fantastic. There will be no more muscle soreness and waking up that hour earlier will just feel right.
If you tried to do that all in the first week, the chances of you being able to maintain it would be almost zero. Staging your changed habits over a couple of months and you increase the chances of success a hundred times.
Okay, so exercise and waking up earlier is an easy example to give. What about some more subtle changes to your habits. Imagine you find yourself being negative about things and you want to become a more positive person. How would you go about changing that?
Now, this one is a more behavioural habit and so needs a slightly different approach. Humans are not naturally negative. Being negative is a taught skill ( I say that because there are so many amazingly positive things in this world yet some people seem to have PhDs in finding the negatives in life). Changing the way you look at the world is a lot easier than you may think.
The way to do this is to make full use of your calendar or to-do list manager. At the top of your to-do list or calendar write down two or three things you will be positive about today. I would write “Be positive” at the top of my to-do list and highlight it or bold it so it stands out. Every time I look at my to-do list I would see those two words. Likewise, if you do this on your calendar, create a new event and in bold capitalised letters write “BE POSITIVE!” What this does is remind you every time you look at your to-do list or calendar (or both) to be positive.
This is about changing the way you see the world. If it’s raining - look at the rain and say to yourself that the air is being cleaned and nature is getting its drinking water. If it’s snowing, instead of thinking about how difficult it will be to get to work, think about all the children who are going to be so excited about the snow. Imagine how you felt about the snow when you were a child. That will soon put a positive smile on your face.
Another quick tip about becoming more positive is don’t read the news first thing in the morning. The news is full of negativity because for some reason bad news sells. Stay well away from the news. I use a news reader app called Reeder that only shows me articles from blogs and magazines I choose. So my morning news is full of productivity tips, self-help advice and technology news. I have no idea about Brexit or the latest antics of President Trump.
What you need to do is to remove the triggers that led to your old habit and replace them with triggers that encourage the new habit. Replace negative news with blog posts about your favourite hobby. Replace negative thoughts by challenging yourself to find the positives—there are always positives.
Far and away the best way to develop positive habits is to start small. Don’t try and change everything at once. Create a 12-month timeline and map out the habits you want to develop over that twelve month period. Start with the easy ones as this will allow your confidence to grow. As your confidence grows, so too will your self-discipline so when you get to the harder habits, you will have a lot more confidence and a lot more self-discipline.
One tip that always works for me is to schedule a specific time to do whatever it is you want to do. For me, I exercise between 2 and 2:45pm every day. Most days I will exercise quite hard. But some days I can feel a little soreness and so I will just do gentle stretching and non-weight bearing exercises. That time is scheduled on my calendar five times a week and as the rule goes - “What’s on my calendar gets done” I make sure it happens, no matter what mood I am in. My calendar is sacred territory. If you work a regular 9 til’ 5 office job, then schedule 6pm to 7pm to do whatever new habit you want to develop. It could be spend more time with your kids, write a journal or clean your house. Whatever it is, schedule it and make sure you do it.
Changing old habits and developing new ones is really all about creating routines. When you turn the new habit into a routine you just do it without thinking. For me, when 2pm arrives, I stop whatever it is I am doing and begin my usual warmup routines. I also change into my exercise gear and just begin. Although I have previously planned what exercise I will do, when 2pm arrives, I just start. There’s no thinking, no opportunity to talk myself out of doing it, it’s 2pm and I start… It’s on my calendar.
So there you go, Pippa. I hope that has given you a few ideas about starting new habits and I wish you all the best of luck with your new habits. I know it is not easy, but with time and by starting small, you will be amazed at what you can accomplish.
Thank you all for listening to this episode of the Working With Podcast. If you have a question you would like answering, please send me an email - calr@carlpullein.com or you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about how to stop procrastinating and get the work done.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
My 2018 Black Friday / Cyber Monday offers
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 57 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, the question is all about procrastination and how to overcome this real productivity conundrum. It affects us all and it can do a lot of damage to our careers, relationships and goals.
But before we get into this week’s question, I want to tell you all about my fantastic Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale. There are some fantastic offers available for you and I would love you to get yourself a bargain while you can. I have bundles of courses, including the brilliant Pathway To Productivity, AND… I am also offering 12 Months of weekly one on one coaching with me personally at half price. Those places are very limited, so if you want to get yourself in, you need to go to my website right now and book yourself a place and save yourself $600!
Okay, on to this week’s question and that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Tim. Tim asks, Carl, I really struggle to get things done. Whenever I sit down to do some work I find myself procrastinating by flicking through Instagram or watching your videos on YouTube. Do you have any advice on stopping this?
Thank you, Tim, Not sure I want to stop you watching my videos though! Anyway, to answer your question this is something I know many people have difficulties with. I too, from time to time, find myself procrastinating and it can really hinder the work I want to do for the day. The good news is there are a few strategies you can use to stop you from flicking through Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.
The first one is to have a plan for the day. We often find ourselves procrastinating when we have unclear plans for the day. If you turn up to work with no plan you will spend the first part of the day thinking about what to do and that is when social media and unimportant work shouts the loudest. It’s human nature to turn away from the hardest work and move towards the easier work. If you have no plan, the unimportant will be shouting at you and you will not do the important. This is one of the many reasons why I recommend you do the Golden Ten at the end of the day and not in the morning. When you wake up in the morning with a clear idea of what you want to accomplish that day you are much more likely to get it done.
And that leads me on to the second tip. Don’t set yourself too much to do. Another reason why we get drawn to procrastination is because when we look at our to-do list for the day it is too long. It becomes overwhelming and overwhelm often leads to procrastination. I have been recommending that you do not have more than ten things on your daily to-do list each day for a long time. Now that might not seem very much, but every day you are going to have crises, demands from bosses and customers and you are going to have to deal with them. If you only have ten or fewer items on your to-do list you will have time to deal with the crises as well as get your planned work done. That creates a circle of success. The more days you complete your planned tasks, the more focused you will become on completing those tasks. It’s a case of you not wanting to break the chain and you become determined to get your work done.
How you write out your tasks is also a way to prevent procrastination. If you write tasks out that are unclear, such as, “Shopping”, “dog food” or “Wife’s birthday”, you will procrastinate. Sometimes you will remember what it was you meant when you wrote that task, other times you will not. If the task is something like “write report” that will guarantee you will procrastinate because although it is just two words, the work involved is unclear and you will resist. Far better to write tasks such as “Buy dog food for Barney” or “research gift ideas for wife’s birthday” for the report break it down. You could create three of four tasks such as:
- Write introduction to report
- Prepare charts for report
- Ask Jane for report template
These tasks are easy, clear and manageable. You are much more likely to get them done rather than waste time thinking about what to do next.
Another way to help stop you from procrastinating is to make good use of labels or contexts in Getting Things Done terminology. What this means is you label each task according to the tool, place or person required to do the task. For example, if you need to be at your computer to do a task, you would label it @computer. Likewise, if you need to be with your colleague to find something out, then you would label the task @colleague’s name. Shopping tasks can be labelled @supermarket and so on. This way, when you find yourself in front of your computer you pull up the list of tasks you need your computer for and get started. Now of course if you are using my Golden Ten system you would move on to your labels AFTER you have completed your ten tasks for the day.
Another trick I’ve used in the past that works well is to schedule breaks between the work I am doing. For example, I know in a morning I am good for around two hours. So, every two hours I will get up and walk around. Refill my water bottle or check my email. I limit these break times to ten minutes and if you are a serial procrastinator I would suggest you set yourself a ten-minute alarm. You can check your email from your phone, so you can walk around and check email via your phone. If you want to scroll through your Facebook, Twitter or Instagram feed during these times then do so. It’s a break remember. BUT… After ten minutes get back to work. In the afternoons, I find my attention span reduces so I take breaks every hour or so. This really works, particularly if you are following your plan for the day. When you have a plan you know exactly what you will get to work on once your break is over.
Having all your information organised is another way to avoid procrastination. When the information you need to do your work is scattered all over the place you go in search of it. This will take you down avenues you do not want to go down looking for files. I group reference materials and files in project-specific folders (or notebooks in Evernote) I also copy and paste website links into the project note for the project in Evernote so I don’t have to open up my web browser blind. All I need to do is click on a saved link and it will take me to the page I need to reference. Not only does this save a lot of time it also keeps me focused on the task at hand.
Turn off your notifications and silence your email when you are doing your important work. This one is a biggie. If you are working on a report, presentation or design and you keep getting pop-ups telling you-you have new email, or a new Twist or Slack message you are going to be tempted to look at it. STOP! No, No No! - This is going to cause you a lot of pain AND you WILL procrastinate. Turn them off and focus on the work. You can check your messages and emails between your work sessions. Seriously, no one is ever going to get upset with you if you don’t reply for an hour. If something was very urgent, they would call you. So there’s no excuse at all not to turn off your notifications. Do it… Just do it. No excuses.
There’s a couple of other ways to stop procrastinating. The first is to gamify your work. Give yourself a reward for focusing on your work for an hour (or ninety minutes if you prefer) Allow yourself ten minutes on Instagram if you complete a piece of work or spend two hours on focused work. Gamification is fun and you not only get to check your social media feeds you also get a lot of work done. After all, work doesn’t have to bring and serious all the time.
Finally, if you are in the habit of checking shopping sites randomly while you are working then set up your to-do list manager to collect from a keyboard shortcut. Recently I have been redesigning my home office and I have been looking at office chairs, hard drive storage solutions and plants for my desk. Often as I am writing or planning I get an idea to check Ikea or a furniture store’s site. To avoid me going off on a shopping expedition, I will use my quick capture keyboard shortcut to Todoist to collect what it is I want to look at and carry on my work. I write and plan in full-screen mode on my computer, so I never leave the screen I am working in. It’s just SHIFT+CMD+A and I type “look up office chairs at Ikea” and hit return. Done. My thought was captured and I can carry on planning or writing. I can then look up whatever it is I wanted to look up when I take my next break.
Well, I hope that has answered your question, Tim and I hope it will help you to overcome your procrastination.
I know procrastination is a problem for many people, but if you adopt these strategies you will soon find yourself getting more important work done and procrastinating less. Be clear about what you want to get done, schedule regular breaks and turn off your notifications when you are doing focused work. These three strategies alone will help you. But the biggest one of all is to discipline yourself. Procrastination is really a sign you have a lack of discipline. Work on your discipline, and to do that start small, and you will go a very long way to stopping procrastination from rearing its ugly head.
Good luck and thank you, Tim, for your excellent question. And thank you all for listening
Don’t forget to check out my Holiday season offers, I am sure there will be something there for you all.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about how to stay focused on the important things.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
The Annual Planning Worksheet can be downloaded here
Where’s Your Anchor? Blog Post
Productivity Mastery Series | Where’s Your Anchor?
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 56 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a question about focus and how to stay focused on the important things without allowing yourself to be distracted by all the unimportant things that go on around us every day.
Before we dive in to this week’s question, though, I just like to tell you I have been preparing a number of fantastic offers for this coming weekend’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday. The first of which will be an exclusive “secret sale” launching on Thursday for all of you who are enrolled in my Learning Centre. If you are not already enrolled, then get yourself enrolled in my FREE Beginners Guide to Creating Your Own COD system so you can be involved in this very special secret sale.
Okay, on to this week’s question and that means handing you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Amanda. Amanda asks: Carl, how do you stay focused on your goals and plans on a daily basis. I really struggle with this.
Thank you Amanda for your question. I think this is another question many of you will also be wondering about.
Well, the first thing is you need to have identified what exactly is important to you. If you do not know what is important you will always be feeling you are not moving forward with your life. You will feel you are just going through the motions and not getting anything important done. Establishing what is important to you, and what is not, is the first step. Of course it is not an easy step. There is so much going on in our lives and there is so much going on at work that it is very hard to know what is important and what is not. One thing I can tell you is that other people’s urgencies are definitely not your important tasks. Important tasks for you need to come from you. Not your boss, your family or your friends. They must come from you.
One way to discover what is important to you is to ask a very simple question and spend a few minutes thinking about your answer. That question is:
If I had complete control over what I will do tomorrow, what would I do?
Now there are two different times you should ask this question. When you are at work and when you are at home. Ask this question before you finish at workplace everyday and write out what you would do, and again, ask this question on a Friday night and write down you answer.
The answers you come up with may not necessarily be what you can work on, but somewhere in the list of things you write down you will see a theme developing. That theme is where you should be spending your time.
Let me give you an example. Let’s say on a Sunday night you sit down and ask the question. You write down things like:
- Finish presentation for Thursday’s symposium
- Prepare for Wednesday’s conference call
- Ask HR about how many holiday days I have left this year
Once you have a list like this, get them into your to-do list manager and flag them. These are your priorities for tomorrow.
Now if your list contains more than three or four things, you are going to have to slim down the list. This is where you will have to become a bit ruthless. This is quite hard to do at first, but our brains have a very bad habit of convincing us we can do more than we can in any period of twenty-four hours. And we also have to accept there is going to be some form of a crisis that will require our attention. We do not work in a bubble.
If you want to get really good at this you should go into full ruthless mode and restrict these things to just two. When you do that, you start making sure that the two things you choose as your objectives are truly important to you. And being only two important things you are much more likely to get them done.
Doing this process on a Friday evening also helps you to not waste your weekends too. Of course yo do not want to be writing down things related to your work because we all need a break from that. So, you want to looking at doing things with your family, your friends or perhaps some home improvements or even more important something related to your personal improvement. One thing that is always on my weekend list is to watch a TED talk or go through some Robin Sharma, Mel Robbins or Brian Tracy videos. I usually spend around an hour each weekend doing this and find in incredibly inspiring and educational and I feel no matter what I have done—or not done—that day, I have done something important.
If you are not taking some time each day to think about what you want to do, and then writing them down and making them priorities, you are going end up doing what someone else wants you to do and that usually does not end well for you. You feel exhausted and worn out and yet you have done nothing to improve your life or make progress on your work. You will have it all to do again tomorrow. It becomes a never-ending cycle and it’s a cycle you need to get off as quickly as possible.
Some areas you should be prioritising and focusing on every day are:
- Your own self-development
- Your health and fitness
- Your own work - work you are responsible for
- Your friends and family
- Planning and preparation for upcoming projects
- Completing your projects - because I know a lot of people who are fantastic at planning their projects and creating beautiful to-do lists in their productivity tools and never actually get round to doing the work that matters.
Distractions are an inevitability, you are not going to be able to completely remove them from your life. When we are tired we find our Facebook or Instagram feed irresistible and our boss, partner or co-worker can have very loud voices. All these distractions happen to everyone. We are not always wide awake, we don’t all have wonderfully quiet co-workers and understanding partners. We have to deal with them. You need to create systems and processes so you can focus on what is important to you so that these get done every day. You have to be disciplined. And I’m afraid there is no getting around that.
One final thing I should mention is I have what like to call my “anchor”. My anchor is a place where I can go to refocus. Now, when I say “anchor”, I don’t mean a physical place, what I mean is a place where you have your goals and priorities written down. This could be a note in your notes app, or a page in your journal. It really doesn’t matter where you have this list or note. What matters is that it is accessible to you every day. We cannot control what happens to us or around us, but we can control our response to what happens. Our days can take some very unexpected turns. A colleague does not come in to work one day and you start getting calls from their customers asking about things you have no idea about. Or your boss dumps a huge project on your desk and asks you to complete by the end of tomorrow. When these things happen you have no choice but to deal with them.
This is where your anchor comes in to play. You can deal with the immediate crisis and then when you get a few moments you can go to your anchor, read through it and remind yourself of your priorities and your objectives. It can bring you peace and calm when everything around you is in chaos.
My anchor is my journal. It is always on my desk and is open at today’s page. I’ve talked about my journal in a previous episode, but having my journal next to me whenever I am working is a fantastic way to give me peace of mind and to make sure I am focused on the work that matters. At anytime I feel I am being dragged off to do work I am not happy about doing, I can take a couple of minutes and review my goals, or review my objectives for the day and this can give me the necessary boost to refocus on what’s important and to decide when or even if I want to do a piece of work.
If you are interested in learning more about my anchor, I wrote a blog post about it last week and I also talked about it in last week’s episode of the Productivity Mastery series.
So there you go, Amanda. Hopefully that has given you some tips and ideas about what you can do you get yourself focused on what is important to you. Remember, your priorities should always be your priorities and not the priorities of someone else. Create an anchor for yourself so you can be reminded of what is important to you whenever you feel chaos is around you.
Thank you for your question, Amanda and thank you all for listening to this episode. If you have a question you would like answering, please get in touch either by email or Dming me on Twitter or Facebook. All the details are in the show notes.
It just remains for me to me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this second part of my chat with Kev Blackburn of Life Success Engineer, we continue discussing goal planning and 2019.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
The Ultimate Goal Planning Course
Life Success Engineer Website
Life Success Engineer YouTube Channel
The Annual Planning Worksheet can be downloaded here
Hello and welcome to episode 55 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this second part of my special goal planning and 2019 episode, Kev Blackburn, THE Life Success Engineer and I discuss a few goal planning tips and tricks that will help you make 2019 your best year yet.
So, sit back, enjoy, be inspired and we continue where we left off.
In this week’s episode, I chat with Kev Blackburn of Life Success Engineer about goal planning and making 2019 your best year yet.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
The Ultimate Goal Planning Course
Life Success Engineer Website
Life Success Engineer YouTube Channel
The Annual Planning Worksheet can be downloaded here
Hello and welcome to episode 54 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this first part of a very special goal planning and 2019 episode, Kev Blackburn, THE Life Success Engineer and I discuss how we plan the new year, what tools we use and why this time of the year is one of the most exciting times for us.
So, sit back, enjoy, be inspired.
Part two of this talk will be posted on Friday so, listen out for that episode.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about how I plan my new year goals.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
NEW! From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days!
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Time And Life Mastery Online Course
The Ultimate Goal Planning Course
The Annual Planning Worksheet can be downloaded here
Hello and welcome to episode 53 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this week’s episode, I finally answer a question I received during the summer, but I thought it would be better to answer the question now as the year draws to a close. And that is how do I plan my year. I should also point out that I will be doing another episode on this in the coming weeks with my good friend and super amazing positive guy, Kevin Blackburn, so keep your eyes (or ears) open for that episode, I know it’s going to be a very special episode.
And if you really want to learn how to set and achieve your goals I have a couple of courses on my Learning Centre that will not only show you how to create achievable goals but also take you through the steps on discovering what you really want to achieve in life. I’ve linked to both courses in the show notes and I would highly recommend you have a look at them. Those courses could really change your life.
Okay, let’s get on with this week’s show and that means it’s time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question:
This week’s question comes from Michael. Michael asks, Carl could you tell us how you go about setting goals. I know you’ve written a lot about it, but hearing it in your own words would be very helpful.
Okay, Michael, you asked for it so here it is.
I begin my planning season around the middle of October when I create a note in my Evernote with 6 headings. These headings are:
- Ideas - this where I dump anything that comes into my mind
- What would I like to change about myself? - This question allows me to think about my character, habits and interactions and see if there is anything I am not happy about. If I find anything I will add it here.
- What would I like to change about my lifestyle? - This question is all about the way I live. Am I active enough? is there anything about my home I would like to change? Anything like that.
- What would I like to change about the way I work? This question obviously is about my work. Is there anything about my work routines I would like to change. This year, for example, I focused more on making sure I did any creative work in the mornings and did admin and editing work in the evenings.
- What can I do to challenge myself? Challenging myself helps to stop me from stagnating. I like to have at least one thing each year that is going to be incredibly difficult. This always gives me a huge buzz because often the challenge seems impossible at first.
- Goals - Finally, I have a place to add in the goals I want to achieve next year. These can come from anything I have written to the questions I have in the list and it’s a good way to help me build the final list of goals for the year as I am developing my ideas.
I’ve put a link in the show notes so you can download this worksheet and use it for yourself.
So how do I take all these answers and turn them into goals for the following year? Well, the first step is to empty my head of ideas and I have found over the years that trying to write a full list in one sitting is pretty much impossible. Instead, I treat most of October and all of November as an open planning session. By that I mean this note in Evernote is with me everywhere I go, so wherever I am I can add to the list anytime. And ideas can pop up at any time. Often I can be on the subway minding my own business and something I see or hear will spark an idea and I will immediately collect it on my phone. If I have time I will put it under the right question, if not, I just add it to the bottom of the list and move it to the right place later.
I’ve found if I allow myself 4 to 6 weeks of this I will have a wonderfully long list of ideas. The “collection” phase of my planning stops on the 1st of December. By then I know I will have collected everything I would like to achieve.
Now, there is one final step in this process I do. On the first of December, I will take a look at last years list—and this is one of the many reasons why it’s a good idea to stick with one app for each area of your productivity system. Because I have been using Evernote for over nine years now, I know exactly where last year’s note is and can pull it up with a very simple search. Switching notes apps all the time means there’s a good chance you will lose stuff like this in the switchover—What I am looking for are the ideas I had last year that I decided at the time was not the right time to do. Often I find there are one or two items on that list that will I transfer over to this year’s list.
Now, the 1 December is the cut off time. I will not be adding anything else to the list. What I have on the list now is everything. So, the next step is to slim the list down to two things for each question and to have five goals for the year.
I will go through each part of the list and use Evernote’s highlighting tool to highlight three things from each question. Then every day for that two weeks I will spend a few minutes looking at the list and checking that I am still happy with my selection. I find almost every day I will change something. Often I will change the highlight to another item and then change it back a few days later. It’s all good fun, but by doing this you will have evaluated everything thoroughly and when the 15th of December comes around that is your final selection.
Why two things and 5 goals? Well, if you try and do everything you will fail at most things. Experience has taught me that if I am focused on only a few things there is a much better chance of accomplishing those few things. It also means that the things I do choose to focus on next year will be things that are really important to me. Forcing myself to prioritise this way means my choices are important and the desire to accomplish them will be very strong.
Why only 5 goals? Again this is so I am not trying to do too much. As the year goes, other things will come up, there could be family emergencies, your employment situation may suddenly change in a way you did not anticipate. All sorts of things could happen. So a limited number of goals allows me to stay focused on what is truly important to me.
Okay, so now it’s the 15th December and I have my final selection, what happens next? Well, now it’s time to create the necessary action steps and timelines for these changes and goals to happen. Let me give you an example from this year:
On my lifestyle changes list, I had the goal of beginning Robin Sharma’s 5 am Club. This is where you wake up at 5 am, do 20 minutes of exercise, 20 minutes of planning and 20 minutes studying. Now, I prefer to exercise in the afternoon as it breaks up my day nicely, and I do my planning in the evening before I go to bed. That works for me and I didn’t want to change it. However, I also had on my goals list to learn Korean to fluency and I saw the chance to merge the two goals together. So, I developed a plan to wake up at 5 am and study Korean for an hour.
For timing, I decided the best time to do this was when my wife went off to China for a few months to study. This meant I did not have to worry about waking her up and with the change in my home life, it would be a good time to change my routine. So, my wife left for China on a Friday in early June and the following Monday I began my 5 am club. It was tough for the first few days, but by the end of the week I was getting into it and after a month it was easy.
Next up on my list of things to do was begin meditation. The question here for me was at what time of the day would I do it. I decided the best time would be early morning, so in September, I added 15 minutes meditation to my 5 AM Club routine. So, now I study for 45 minutes and finish off with 15 minutes of meditation. And I should say, I really look forward to my 5 AM starts now.
I knew at the beginning of the year I needed to first get into the routine of waking up early and studying. So I gave myself 3 months to get into that habit before starting the meditation habit. There was no rush and this slow development has meant that as I acquire a new habit I can then move on to developing that habit into what the final goal was to be. Wake up at 5 AM study and meditate for an hour. Now we are into November I can confidently say I have acquired both habits and it has become one of the highlights of my day!
So there you have it, the way I plan the year. It’s a fun way to do it, it allows you plenty of time to really evaluate what you want to accomplish and more importantly anticipate difficulties so you can develop strategies for overcoming those difficulties when they do happen.
It may seem like a lot of work, but the whole process is done in a relaxed fun way. It should not feel like a burden you and there will be days when you don’t think of anything just like there will be days when your brain goes into overdrive and you add a tonne of stuff to your list. Just enjoy the process. The real hard work begins after the 15th December when you start developing your action steps and timelines.
The key is to remember that 2019 is 12 months, not 12 days. So spread out your goals and tasks. Use the full year to have something new to start every two or three months. You’ll get a lot more enjoyment out of the experience and you will enhance your chances of succeeding at achieving your goals.
Don’t forget to download my FREE Annual Planning worksheet so you can start this process and then spend the rest of November gathering all your ideas. Have fun, make sure you are challenged and more importantly look at 2019 as an opportunity to really achieve something special.
Good luck and thank you so much for listening to this episode. Thank you to you, Michael for your wonderful question and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about how to make sure you work on the things that matter.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
NEW! From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days!
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
PRODUCTIVITY MASTERY | Time To Start Planning 2019
SCRIPT
Hello and welcome to episode 52 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this week’s episode we will be discussing what matters most and to make sure you are staying focused on those things and not getting caught on a conveyor belt of meaningless tasks that take you nowhere.
But before we dive into this week’s question, I’d like to point you all to a video I did on my YouTube channel about starting your 2019 plan. In that video I take you through the annual planning process I go through each year and it always starts in October. So, now’s a great time to watch that video and to download my annual planning sheet to help you get the most out of 2019. I’ve put a link in the show notes for you.
Okay, so let’s get to this week’s question and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Patricia. Patricia asks “I work for an import/export company and every day the workload is huge. I never have time to do work that I want to do because I always find myself having to deal with other people’s emergencies. Do you have any tips that will help me to do more of my own work and less of other people’s?
Excellent question, Patricia and another question I think many people have. How do you focus on your own work and priorities when customers, colleagues and bosses want you to work their priorities?
And really that’s the problem here. All that work we get dumped with is often work for other people and in many ways, the simple solution is to set some boundaries to prevent it from happening. Of course, simple solutions are not always easy solutions. So let’s see what can be done.
Sometimes we are our own worst enemies. When we start a new job or we gain a new client we are all too eager to please, so we say yes to everything. The problem with that is once you start saying yes to doing ‘extra’ work that ‘extra’ work becomes the norm and soon your colleagues, boss and customers just expect you to do it. In essence, that extra work has now become your regular work. We can blame other people, but the reality is we accepted that work before and now it going to be much harder to say no.
The way I have handled this in the past is to give the person asking me to do the extra work a timeline. What I mean by this is I will accept the work, but I will also tell the person asking when I will do it. So if a colleague asks me to help them prepare a presentation for them, I will enthusiastically accept with something like “sure! I’ll be happy to help. What would you like me to do?” They will then say something like, “well, you are so good at designing slides I wonder if you would improve the design of the presentation I have to do later this week?” To which you reply “okay, I can do it for you, but I’m a bit busy at the moment. Could I send it to you on Friday?”They are then going to tell you that’s too late. Now you can say “Oh, sorry I don’t think I will be able to do any sooner. I have a lot of work to get finished first”
Now your colleague is going to walk away and ask someone else to do their work for them. What you are doing here is showing you are willing to help, but at the same time making it clear your work takes priority. You colleague will get the message.
Bosses are a bit more difficult because they have seniority. But the same strategy can be used. If a boss insists, what you can do is ask them which work can be delayed so you can work on their slides. This has two effects, it causes the boss the stop and thinks about what they are asking you to do (work outside your scope) and now if the boss insists they will have to reprioritise your work, this giving you extended deadlines on your own work. Either that or, like you colleague they will do their own work themselves.
Handling customers is the most difficult, but here I have found that what we tell a customer at the beginning is very important. If a customer begins calling you after your working hours for example, no matter how tempting it may be to answer your phone or reply to their email late at night this is something you must not do… Ever! When you answer your phone, reply to a text message or email after your working hours you have told your customer you are willing to work extra hours for free for them and they will take full advantage of that. The best way to handle this is to call them back at 7 AM or send your reply at 6AM—I often use my email scheduling feature and reply to the email before I go to bed and then schedule it to go out at 6:10 am. This tells your customer you are diligent, but it also tells them, you will not be replying to their email late at night.
I’ve found sending my replies very early in the morning sends a very powerful message. I can promise you they will not be expecting you to reply after hours again AND… They will not be calling you late at night because they don't want to be woken up at 7AM the next day.
It’s really all about setting boundaries and expectations. If you make yourself available at all times, then your colleagues, boss and customers are going to expect that always. Not a good place to be in if you want to make time to prioritise your own work.
Now how to manage an overwhelming workload. Here you are going to have again set yourself some boundaries. The first I would suggest you do is to learn when you in your peak working state. Everyone will be different here. For some of you, early morning will be when you can focus deeply on your work and get a lot done, others of you may find the afternoons are better.
I always believed I was a night owl and so I used to do my focused work late afternoon or early evenings. But after I took some time to experiment doing my work at different times of the day I discovered I worked in a much better mental state between 6AM and 9AM. So now that is the time I turn off all my devices except for the ones I am using to do my work and I get on with my work.
Now it is important to plan what you will work on the day before if you do not plan what you will work on you will find you spend the first 30 mins or so trying decide what to work on. That’s not a good way to start. Before you finish for the day, make a decision on what work is your priority and needs pushing forward and write that down at the top of your to-do list for the next day. That way when you start your focused work time, you can get straight into it.
Its also important you put your phone, tablets and computers into a “do not disturb” mode for this period of time. Don’t worry, nothing bad will happen… I promise you. I’m not sure if this is possible with Android devices, but on iPhones when you turn on do not disturb, you can allow those people on your favourites list to get through. I do use this function, but the only people on my favourites list are my wife and mother. If anything bad was happening, my wife and mother would be the first to tell me.
For me, I can do 3 hours of focused work before my brain is tired and I need a break. During that break, I will get up and move, but afterwards, I will do things like check email, basic admin tasks and other less mental tasks.
The key to all of this is to decide the day before what it is you want to get done the next day. If you don’t do that you will get caught up in the day’s crises. But, and this is a big but, do not be tempted to schedule too much. You are always going to get distracted and some those daily crises will involve you. If you try and plan out eight hours of priority work in one day you are never going to get it all done. There’s no flexibility. You should be aiming for two to three hours of focused work and make sure you are not disturbed during the time you have allocated to do that work.
Talking to your boss about your new focused time period will also help. When you explain to your boss you want to get more quality work done and you need two to three hours a day where you can work undisturbed, your boss will understand and be sympathetic. I’ve found that once you explain why you want this undisturbed time and you show your boss the amount of work you are getting done and the higher quality, your boss will very quickly give you more freedom to do more focused work.
I know it’s hard to say “no” to colleagues, customers and your boss. But you are not really saying “no”. You are still doing your work, but you are doing your work on your terms and on your timeline. These boundaries are important if you want to have a better working experience and want to feel less stressed and overwhelmed.
The bottom line is, nothing will change unless you change. And that means you need to take control of your time and your priorities. If you allow other people to control your time and your priorities you are always going to feel overwhelmed and stressed.
So, Patricia, start be setting some boundaries and make sure you are very clear about what you want to get accomplished tomorrow. Find out when you are in your peak working state and schedule some focused time to work on YOUR priorities during that period. By just working on those things, you will very quickly find you feel less stressed and overwhelmed.
Thank you for your question, Patricia and thank you to you all for listening to the Working With… Podcast. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like me to answer, just email me carl@carlpulein.com or DM me on Twitter or Facebook. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about what I put in my journal.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
NEW! From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days!
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Gallery Leather Large Leather Desk Journal
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 51 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I received a question about what I write in my journal. Now, my journal is something I really couldn’t live without and it is not digital! My journal is a paper-based journal and I absolutely love it because it gives me time away from a screen to write down things that are important to me. But we’ll get into that in just a moment.
Before that, I just want to remind you all of my latest online course—From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 days!—a course created to help you to develop the skills and habits needed to become a master of productivity so you can spend more time doing the things you want to do with the people you want to spend more time with. I would love you to join me in in this course — it’s a course that will change your life and help you to be in the moment and not stressed about whatever might be going on in your work. All the details and links are in the show the notes.
Okay, onto this week’s question so that means it is time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Scott. Scott asks: In one of your videos you mentioned your journal. It looked like a handwritten notebook, and you said you write something in there every day. You also said it has become very important to you. Would you share the kind of things you write there, and why you've found it to be a benefit to you?
Scott, you are correct, I do use a handwritten journal and I do write in it every day.
First things first, I use a Galaxy Leather large Desk Journal (I’ll put a link in the show notes for you all) which is a gorgeous leather bound lined journal that costs around $25.00. The paper works very well with my fountain pens, although it is not really designed for fountain pens.
So, what do I write in there?
When I finish my Golden Ten in the evening, I sit down with my journal and I set up my page for the next day. I begin at the top and write down four headings. The first is “Today’s Objectives”. Underneath that, I write the two things I want to accomplish tomorrow. Now, these could be anything from doing a minimum of 30 mins exercise, to writing my blog post. Whatever I want to accomplish, I will write it there. For those of you who follow my Todoist videos on YouTube, these are the same objectives I have there too. Yes, I know there’s duplication, but my journal stays on my desk in my home office, Todoist goes with me everywhere I go.
Next comes “Today’s Focus” and underneath that, I write the role I want to focus on for the day. This might be teaching, or content production or health and fitness or anything like that. This is where I can write down exactly what role I want to focus on. For example, I wrote in today’s focus “I teach my students in a way that motivates and inspires, educates and entertains so that my students will improve their communication skills and improve not just their professional lives but their personal lives too.”
Writing a short affirmation like this focuses my mind the next morning when I read through what wrote the evening before. It motivates me and sets me up for staying focused on what’s important.
Underneath my Today’s Focus, I write one or two things I am grateful for. Again, this helps to put my mind in a positive frame when I start the day. It’s a great way to start the day and leaves me feeling energised and positive.
Finally, underneath those, I have a title “what did I do today” and this is where I will write out the things I did as I do them. So, at the time of recording this podcast it is still quite early in the day and I have written “50 minutes Korean study” and “15 minutes meditation” — recording this podcast is the next item on my to-do list so once I have recorded this episode, I will write in “recorded next week’s podcast”. I do this because it allows me to analyse my week and see how productive I have been.
Now, other things I keep in my journal are notes I capture while watching videos on YouTube. If I have time at the end of the day I will watch a Brian Tracy, Robin Sharma, Mel Robbins or Tony Robbins seminar on YouTube. While watching these I collect notes and quotes straight into my journal. This helps to make my journals valuable sources of information. I watch other videos too of course. TED talks, and videos on Daoism or Buddhism anything like that. From these, I collect notes and quotes too.
As you can imagine, over time my journals are filling up with some amazing information and there’s nothing better than to read through my old journals on a lazy Sunday afternoon relearning forgotten notes and reminiscing some amazing events I have been to.
Another thing I keep in my journal are my goals for the year. Now I go through about three or four journals a year, so that gives me an opportunity to rewrite my goals for the year three or four times. It’s a great way to remind myself and to refocus myself on what’s important for the year. I also have my life’s mission statement written in the front and again I get to rewrite that three to four times a year. It’s a fantastic way to reaffirm myself that I am on the right path and moving in the right direction.
I should mention I also keep tickets and wristbands I have collected from the various music festivals I attend each year. A few weeks ago I went to Above And Beyond’s Group Therapy 300 concert in Hong Kong—it was one of the most amazing experiences in my life and my wristband and train tickets to the event are proudly glued into my journal on the day I attended. I know as the years go by and I look through that journal that page alone will bring back some amazing memories.
So why do I handwrite a journal rather use a digital journal such as Day One or Evernote? The truth is last year I did experiment keeping my journal in Evernote. There are some advantages to a digital journal such as being able to put in your digital photos, auto collect weather info and as your journal is on all your devices you can capture thoughts and moments wherever you are. But for me, taking some deliberate time away from a screen and going old-school with my favourite fountain pen and a gorgeous paper-based journal is a special moment in itself. My digital journal experiment never did create special moments like that. It began to feel like a burden rather than something I looked forward to doing at the end of the day. That’s why I went back to my old-school journal.
To answer your second question, Scott, Journaling for me is a special moment. It allows me to slow down, take a few moments at the end of the day to reflect and to think about what I want to accomplish tomorrow in a relaxed state. I can empty my mind of thoughts, and feelings in a way I have never been able to do digitally. I suppose digital devices feel cold, business-like. Handwriting thoughts, goals and mission statements feels more real, more human and for some reaso,n I find it reinforces my motivation better than a keyboard and a screen does.
And of course, over time you are collecting something physical that can be passed down to your children and grandchildren in future years. That’s something digital journals may not be able to do as file formats could change and the humble text file today could very easily become as obsolete as the VHS video or CD ROM. And that would be a sad loss of memories and experiences.
Journalling has become a big part of my life. My journal sits, open on my desk as I write, plan and record. It’s a constant companion full of my memories, feelings and experiences and that feels not only comforting, but also reassuring that my life is being documented and even if no one in the future is interested in my life, I will have a record of how I lived my life, the goals I achieved and failed at, and it will be an interesting read for myself as I travel further along life’s path. I would recommend it to all of you.
Life is short and you have no idea where your life path will take you. Some of you will become hugely successful, many of you won’t. But all you will live wonderfully interesting lives and it would be a shame if you don’t capture those special moments in a way that will live on long after you have passed. So start a journal today. Go out and buy yourself as beautiful notebook as you can afford and start writing. Write your goals for the year, your life’s mission statement and the things you have done during the day. Writing down the things you are grateful for is also a great way to fuel your happiness. This is something you will never ever regret.
Well, thank you for listening to this episode. Thank you also to you, Scott for the fabulous question and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about organising either by project or area of focus
LINKS
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
NEW! From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days!
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
SCRIPT
Hello and welcome to episode 50 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Yes indeed! We’ve reached number 50 in this podcast. I want to thank all you wonderful people for sending in your questions over the year we’ve been running and to thank you all for making this podcast such a success. So thank you very very much.
Before we get into this week’s question I’d just like to let you know that last Friday I launched a brand new course, From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days! It’s a course I have been planning for around six months now and came about because so many people have asked me about how to get themselves more productive. But more importantly, I created this course because life is not just about work, life is about having fun, experiencing amazing events, visiting fantastic places and spending quality time with the people you love and care about. Work is just one part of our lives and it should never be the dominating part of our lives. Check out the details of the course—there’s a link in the show notes—I’d love to see you in the course.
Okay, onto this week’s question and that means it’s time to hand you over the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question:
This week’s question comes from Daniel. Daniel asks Carl, I recently saw your Todoist YouTube episode on the difference between projects and areas of focus. Could you tell me how you distinguish between the two ways of organising your to-do list?
Thank you, Daniel, for the question and, Yes I would be delighted to share how I organise my to-dos between projects and areas of focus.
Firstly, I should explain the difference between projects and areas of focus. Traditionally, if you are following the GTD methodology for your productivity system, you would organise your tasks into projects. Projects act as a placeholder for your tasks—you group them together by their connecting project. For example, if you are planning a weekend trip with your family, the trip would become a project and the tasks you need to complete to organise the trip would be held in that project.
An area of focus is a way to organise your tasks by the different roles you have. For instance, you may have a role as a parent, so you would have an area of focus called “parent” and any task related to your children would be placed inside your “parent” area of focus. Likewise, if you are a manager at work, you would have an area of focus called “manager” or “Management” and any task related to your role as a manager would be placed inside that area of focus.
Now projects are quite simple to understand. However, projects can become a problem when you have too many. The problem I have found here is actually because of how the GTD book defines a project. According to David Allen (the author of Getting Things Done,) any task that requires more than one step is a project. This means that making an appointment to have your car serviced becomes a project—you need to decide where to take your car for the service (research) then find the number to make the appointment and then take the car in. That’s at least three tasks. That’s a project. But in our normal day to day life, booking our car in for a service really only needs our attention on one task - “book car in for service” — sure you still need to find the number, but that would only take a few minutes and calling the service centre is probably just a two minute task. The whole ‘project’ could very easily be completed in less than 5 minutes, outside the 2 minute rule (any task that would take two minutes or less to complete, do it now)
A project like that on it’s own is not really the problem. The problem is when you have fifty or sixty projects like that. That’s when your project list becomes overwhelming and you start to miss deadlines and miss doing important tasks when they are due to be done. Not a good situation for a productive person such as yourself.
Now, if you organised your tasks by areas of focus the same task—take the car in for service—would come under your area of focus, “maintenance”. Inside that area, you would just add the task “get car serviced” or “take car in for servicing”. You have a lot less decisions to make, and you will not be tempted to break down a simple task like getting your car serviced in to too many little steps.
Now, I will confess this year, when I have done my three monthly systems review—when I review my whole system every three months and ask the question “how can I do this better?”—I have returned to the question of whether to go all in on areas of focus or stick with my hybrid system of projects and areas. I am still using a hybrid system, but my projects list has reduced a lot this year. I have found that almost all the tasks I collect each day can fall under an area of focus. My writing assignments from Lifehack, for example, have three tasks associated with each one. Plan out article, write article and edit article. I follow the same set of three tasks for my own blog and any guest posts I write. Plan, write, edit. So, any article I write now are placed in my “writer” area of focus. All I do is write out three tasks: Plan Lifehack article, Write Lifehack article and edit Lifehack article and drop them in my writing area of focus. I don’t need to create a separate project now for these writing assignments and that saves a lot of time.
I suspect when I do my big review at the end of the year, I will move more of my projects into areas of focus.
There are a few exceptions to this though. Each year I write a book. For me writing a book is a big project that is going to take up much of the year. There’s research to do, there’s writing the first draft and of course, there’s the editing, cover design and publishing to take care of. There are a lot of individual tasks that would be very hard to remember and would clutter up my writing area of focus. So the book I am writing becomes a stand alone project.
Another task I would consider as a project is buying a car. I am planning on buying a new car in the near future. Now at the moment, my wife is studying her masters degree and we don’t need a car just yet. When she finishes her masters degree we will need a car, so I created an individual project for the purchasing of the car. Like writing a book, there are a lot of tasks associated with buying a car, there’s researching the kind of car we want to buy, type of engine, colour, where to buy from, insurance arrangements and so on. This to me is a genuine project and to put all those tasks inside an area of focus would likely cause a lot of confusion.
Let me give you a real life scenario I have used for the last two years on how I use a hybrid system of projects and areas of focus. I have an area of focus called “online courses” inside that area, I keep tasks associated with the maintenance of my learning centre (where I have all my courses) and any marketing campaign tasks. Each year I will launch a number of new courses as well as update some existing courses. The course I launched last week, From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days started life out as an idea in Evernote about eight months ago. Up until the end of August, that course remained in Evernote with a corresponding task in my online course areas of focus that said: “continue developing From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery”.
In Evernote, I added ideas, created a lesson list and an outline. At the end of August, the course became a stand alone project in Todoist. All the tasks I needed to complete in order to get the course recorded, edited and published were kept inside that project. Slides needed creating, the course description needed writing and the marketing campaign needed organising. There are a lot of individual tasks associated with creating such an online course. In total it takes around 80 hours of writing, recording, editing and publishing. Because of the work involved and the number of tasks required, something like creating and publishing an online course will always be a project.
Once the course is published, though, the maintenance of the course will be moved over to my online course area of focus. Publishing the course ends the project. When I hit the “publish” button and send out the emails to the people who asked for more information—that ends the project.
So in reality it is unlikely having a system organised solely on projects or areas of focus will work. A better way to organise your system is to use a hybrid system. Big, task intensive projects, are better set up as individual projects. It helps you to stay focused on the outcome and when you do your reviews you can monitor how you are progressing. Small, low task projects, you will find are better organised by area of focus. Making an appointment to see you dentist for a check up, that can be in your “health and fitness” area of focus. Organising a weekend trip with your kids can be placed inside you “family” are of focus etc.
So how do you create your areas of focus? Well, that really does depend on you and your lifestyle. Basic area of focus lists usually contain things like “family”, Health and Fitness”, “personal development”, “social” and “maintenance” for your domestic life. For you professional life an area of focus list may contain things like “manager”, “Professional development”, “staff issues”, “sales”, “marketing” etc. It will, of course, depend on the type of work you do.
One way to help you decide whether something is a project or an area of focus is through the deadline date. If something has a number of tasks and has what I would describe as a hard deadline, then I would consider that to be a project. If something has a vague deadline, ie the deadline is less important or is a bit vague, then I would consider that to be an area of focus. Of course, most areas of focus never end. Our car will always need an annual service, we will always need a medical or dental checkup every six months or so etc. But really, whether something is an area of focus or not will depend entirely on your way if life and the way your brain works.
Well, I hope that answers your question, Daniel and thank you for sending it in.
If you have a question you would like answering on this show, please send in your question either by email or by Dming on Facebook or Twitter and I will be very happy to answer your question. All the links are in the show notes.
Thank you very much for listening to this show. Don’t forget to check out my latest course, From Disorganised to Productivity Mastery in 3 Days! I am sure it will be a huge help to you and the way you live your life.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about making decisions.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
Build Your Own Apple Productivity System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Hello and welcome to episode 49 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I have a wonderful question about the choices we make each day and how to make better choices so we can become better organised and more productive.
But, before we get in to the question I would just like to let you all know that my 2018 edition of Build Your Own Apple Productivity system in now available and is on an early-bird discount of $29.99. This course is for those of you in the Apple ecosystem and who don’t want the expense of subscriptions and purchases of third-party apps or risk the possibility of an app closing down or being bought out. This course takes you through the steps to build your own COD (collect, organise and do) productivity system using just the Apple productivity apps—Reminders, Notes and Calendar. It’s a great course and one that can bullet proof your system and help you to become better organised and more productive.
Okay, onto this week’s question and that means it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast live for this week’s question:
This week’s question comes from Karen. Karen asks, I’ve been trying to implement GTD for a few years now, but I always have problems with all the decisions I have to make. Things like where does this task go? What do I do with this note? And is this a project or a single actions task? Do you have any advice on how to make better decisions?
Great question, Karen and a question many people have about getting started with GTD (that’s Getting Things Done, a book by David Allen).
GTD does often feel like one big decision making system and that can become overwhelming at times, particularly in the early days of setting up a GTD system. When you have collected all your stuff into your inbox and start processing it. The basic questions to ask about something in your inbox are “what is it?” and “what do I need to do with it to get it done?”. These questions might seem simple enough, but the “what do I need to with it to get it done?” can often lead to multiple decisions that need to be made. Decisions such as: what do I need to do next? And, where do I put this task? Which project does it belong to? or which folder do I put this note in? All these questions and decisions can lead to decision fatigue and that is not good if you want to be performing at your best every day.
So, what do you do?
Well, the best strategy I have with this is to restrict the decisions I have to make. For example, when I am processing my inbox at the end of the day, all I need to decide is if something is work related or personal. If it is work related then it can only be related to a piece of content I am working on or related to a client or student I am working with.
Now here is where the problem most commonly appears. If you have your productivity set up as a mix of active projects, someday/maybe projects and areas of focus you are essentially giving yourself far too many decisions to make. When you process everything you have collected you are going to be faced with too many questions. Questions such as “is this related to a project?” or “is this related to an area of focus”. Where can I do this task?, Do I need to talk to someone? If so, who? Etc.
A better way to reduce the number of decisions you need to make is to choose to go with a system focused on your areas of focus such as “manager”, family, hobbies and interests. What I have found is when we create organisation structures around our areas of focus it is far easier to make decisions about what something is related to. For example, if I need to do a student evaluation, that obviously comes under my roll as a teacher. If I need to talk to my wife about an upcoming trip, then that task comes under my area of family. It also means I never have to decide whether something is a project or a single action all I have to decide is what roll something is related to.
What I have found in the past is anything could be described as a project in GTD terms. In GTD a project is anything that requires two or more steps to complete. Sounds simple enough, but making an appointment to see the dentist could arguably be described as a project because there is more than one step required. Find a time to go to dentist, find dentist’s number, call dentist and make appointment, go to dentist for appointment. That’s three or four steps. So, that means in strict GTD terms, that’s a project. But in reality, how long would it take to make an appointment to see your dentist? Probably less than two minutes. So just get your phone, call your dentist and make the appointment. Job done. For me, I have a recurring date in my calendar set for every six months to make a dentist appointment. It’s not in my to-do list at all. I see the reminder on my calendar, “make appointment for dental checkup” I pick up my phone and call the dentist and make the appointment.
Decision fatigue is real. We are having to make decisions all the time. This is why often at the end of a day we find it difficult to decide what to eat for dinner. I must admit, I take this to an extreme. I eat the same thing for breakfast, lunch and dinner Sunday to Thursday and allow myself freedom to eat whatever I want on a Friday and Saturday. Not only do I find this is better for my health—I make sure I eat only healthy foods Sunday to Thursday—it also means I have no decisions to make about what to eat. (It helps that I am not a foodie) I also exercise at the same time each day, and I plan out my exercise schedule for the week when I do my weekly review. This means I do not have to make any decisions during the week about when i will exercise and what kind of exercise I will do.
Building routines and buying the same types of groceries is another way to help reduce the decisions you have to make too. I buy the same ground coffee from Starbucks each week (Kenyan) for my morning cup of coffee. I also buy the same English tea from the same company—Yorkshire Tea from the British Corner Shop (an online expats shopping service) I wake up at the same time each day and follow a set routine. Spend the first hour of the day studying Korean. As these are baked in routines, no decision has to be made. They just happen.
The key here is to find ways of reducing the decisions you have to make by building routines around your daily activities. If you follow my advice about doing a daily ten minute planning session at the end of the day, then fix that at a set time each day. For me, I do my Golden Ten between 10:30 and 10:45pm Sunday to Thursday. Again, I keep Friday and Saturday free to be able to go out with my friends and family or to just relax on the sofa and enjoy a good old British drama. Once something has become a routine, you no longer have to make decisions about it.
Creating routines and buying the same type of groceries each week may sound boring, but I have found it makes my life much simpler. I buy my jeans, sweaters and t-shirts from the same companies. This means when I decide I want to buy a new sweater, all I have to do is go to N Peal of London and make a decision on colour and style. If I did not have a favoured sweater supplier, I would have to search around for a company that makes the type of sweater I want, I would then have to decide which size to buy and check they deliver to Korea. To me that’s such a waste of time and decision making. Instead, I use the same company, I know my sizes there and the only decision I need to make really is what style. (I generally like navy blue and grey colours for sweaters)
The trick is to look for things that can be turned in to routines and habits and then turn them in to routines and habits. Once you have that achieved, you no longer need to make decisions about them. I can give you more examples where I use this method. If I go to a coffee shop, I always order a capucchno. If I go on a business trip abroad I always stay in the same hotel brand (Holiday Inn or Holiday Inn Express) I generally fly using the same airline (Korean Air) and all my electronic devices are Apple. This just means when I need to fly somewhere I only have to search one airline site, if I need a new phone or computer I only have to decide which Apple device to buy, and if I need to stay in another city, Holiday Inn is most likely to have a hotel in that city. It’s simple, easy and because I use the same companies like Korean Air and Holiday Inn, I get reward points and receive very good discounts.
All the decisions we have to make on a daily basis is a consequence of the wonderful world we live in today. We have a lot of choices and that is great. But as individuals it is up to us to reduce the decisions we make each day by building set routines and where possible using the same companies that offer the kind of services or products we like and trust. Doing this will help you reduce the decisions you need to make each day and it will prevent you from suffering from decision fatigue. I should point out you don’t have to take this to the extremes Steve Jobs did or Mark Zukerberg does today by wearing the same clothes each day. Although it is a good idea to decide what you will wear the next day the night before. That can really help reduce decision making, you don’t have to wear the same clothes every day… No really!
When I hope that answers your question, Karen and thank you for sending in your question. Don’t forget, it for have a question you would like answering, then please get in touch either by email (carl@carlpullein.com) or via Twitter or Facebook. All the links are in the show notes.
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Working With Podcast. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Hello and welcome to episode 48 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
Time And Life Mastery 2018 Edition
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Doist homepage
Todoist
In this show I have the Founder and CEO of my favourite todo list manager, Amir Salihefendic and in this second part we talked about the one billion completed tasks, motivating stories and the future of Todoist.
Sit back and enjoy the show with my special guest, Amir Salihefendic.
Podcast 47
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
Time And Life Mastery 2018 Edition
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Doist homepage
Todoist
Hello and welcome to episode 47 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Un this week’s show I have the Founder and CEO of my favourite todo list manager, Todoist. His name? Amir Salihefendic and in this interview we talked about working hours, doing deep work, the future of work and how Doist, the parent company of Todoist, selects it staff.
This is the first part of a two-part podcast. The second part will be out later this week. So sit back and enjoy the show with my special guest, Amir Salihefendic.
Podcast 46
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about keeping your system simple.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
Time And Life Mastery 2018 Edition
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Hello and welcome to episode 46 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week it’s all about simplicity and simplifying overwhelming and complex productivity systems. This is something that can happen and when it does it becomes a huge drain on your whole productivity.
Before we get into this week’s question, I’d like to say a big thank you to all of you whole got involved in last week’s coupon sale. It was a shame to let all those coupons go without finding a good home. It’s so nice to know that so many of you are determined to become better organised and more productive. So a big thank you and always remember I will be here to give you support whenever you need it.
Okay, on to this week’s question, so that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question
This week’s question comes from Darius. Darius asks: I know you write and talk a lot about keeping your system simple, so could you give us some tips on how to do so?
Thank you Darius for your question. Okay, let's start at the beginning. If you are new and are developing your own productivity system remember all you need is COD—that’s Collect, Organise and Do—as the base for your system. That means whatever system you develop it needs to be developed around quick and easy collection, simple organisation and a simple view of what you need to do. Think of that as your base. From there you can start building.
So what do I mean “quick and easy collection”? What I mean is that whenever you have an idea, make a commitment or have an event, you need to be able to collect it into a place you trust quickly and easily. Today, that would probably be on your phone. Our phone is the one device we are likely to be carrying with us everywhere we go so it makes sense for this to be your primary collection tool. Now whether you choose a separate app for your to-dos, notes and appointments or an all in one collection app is up to you. I personally use an app called Drafts that allows me to collect anything in one place and then I can distribute those items to my to-do list, notes app or calendar when I have time to distribute them. What this does is simplify my collection process to just one app. And Drafts is simple—open the app and start typing. I’ve found nothing comes close to the speed and ease for collecting that Drafts gives me.
Collecting could also be a simple pocket notebook you carry with you. Just write down everything you want to collect and organise it later. That’s actually the way I started building my productivity system years ago. Everything was collected into a little notebook and when I got back to my desk I used to tear off the notes I had collected and put them in my physical in-tray. It worked extremely well. But now with cloud-based computing and apps that sync between all my devices, I find collecting on my phone to be the easiest and most efficient way to collect.
Okay, so once you have everything collected, how do you organise all that stuff. That’s where you need to be focused on simplicity. I’ve seen people with hundreds of clients create project folders for each client. Now that can work, but if most of those clients need little to no work doing on them, then they are just cluttering up your projects list. That kind of situation would probably mean you need to use a dedicated CRM system. A to-do list manager is not going to do that job very well. A proper CRM system would manage your clients much better and allow you to monitor marketing and call activities better. Now there are many ways you can organise your projects, notes and events. But what you need to do is find a way that works for you. What I mean by that is when you need to find a note you know exactly where to look, or what search term to use. A simple structure I use is to have an active projects list—which usually has no more than six to ten projects—and an areas of focus list that I organise by my different roles. That could be “Family”, Teacher”, “Online course creator”, “Social Media Manager” etc.
What I find is that pretty much all the tasks I collect each day can be filed into one of those projects or areas of focus.
For my notes, I use a simple folder or notebook structure between work and personal and tag things pretty much in the same way an old-fashioned filing cabinet worked. That is alphabetically. Be careful with this. When you do set up your notes filing system you need to be thinking about how you will retrieve notes when you need them. I find a good way to think about this is watch how you naturally go to find something. For example, if I want to find a quote I saved from Jim Rohn, all I need to do is type “Jim Rohn Quotes” into my notes app and all the quotes I have collected from Jim Rohn will come up in the search. (I have a lot of quotes from Jim Rohn) Or I could be thinking about buying a new sweater and I remember seeing a sweater Daniel Craig wore in Spectre. All I need to do is type in my notes app search field “Spectre sweaters” and I will find the sweaters I am looking for and the company that made it. (N Peal of London for those of you interested—great company)
Now, I know that means I have to do a little extra work when I process my notes, but that little extra effort saves me time in the long run because I know how my brain works and I understand how I search for things. That’s why it is important to know how YOU search for things and not try and copy someone else’s way of searching. They will inevitably think differently from you.
Now the doing part needs to be as simple as possible. If you date everything you are going to end up with huge lists of uncompleted tasks each day. No matter how much you would like to get something done you are just not going to have the time to do twenty or thirty tasks. if everything is dated you are going to do the easy stuff first. It’s just human nature. It takes a lot of discipline to force yourself to do the unpleasant tasks first. A better way is to utilise the Golden Ten daily planning method—spend ten minutes at the end of the day and with your calendar open schedule no more than ten tasks to do the next day. Two of which should be what I call “Objective tasks” two tasks that if you do not do anything else that day, those two tasks will get done. These two tasks should be important, project or goal tasks, NOT regular routine tasks. You want to be moving forward each day on either your projects or your goals. Now I will be honest here, I have two daily lists. The first is my ten tasks, the second is my daily routine tasks. Things like updating my subscriber lists, take the garbage out etc. I don’t need to really think too much about these types of tasks, but I like to have a daily reminder of what routines I should be getting done that day—just simple maintenance tasks if you like. That list is a list I go to at the end of the day to make sure my routines for the day have been done.
And that’s really about it. All you really need to do is focus on the three parts of your productivity system. The collecting, make that as quick and easy as possible. Make sure how you organise your to-dos, documents and events make it easy to find what you need when you need it and spend the rest of your time doing the work.
Other tips I would give include not constantly switching apps. That’s going to do nothing for your productivity. Switching means you have to learn a new way of doing things which will only slow you down, and having to export all your to-dos, notes and events to another app is never easy, no matter what the developer claims. Things never transfer over neatly.
Regularly removing old, no longer needed stuff is another way to keep things simple. Emails particularly have a bad habit of hanging around If you no longer need it delete it. What you want to achieve is a fast, clean easily maintained system. Having old legacy files cluttering up your system is only going to slow things down and you will be ploughing through lists irrelevant, out of date stuff. Another area where time is wasted.
To keep things simple mean’s you should focus on what it is you want to achieve. Getting caught up in breaking things down into tiny little steps might seem like good advice, but what that does is cause you to lose focus on the outcome. Often you can achieve the outcome you desire by just getting yourself focused on doing the work in a distraction-free environment with the minimal of tools and apps. One of my most productive environments is a coffee shop, two hours, my iPad and Ulysses. The amount of work I get done in this environment is enormous. Simple tools, simple apps. And that’s really the secret of keeping things simple.
One final piece of advice though. Stop trying to hack apps to do things they were not designed to do. A good notes app is not a good to-do list manager and a good to-do list manager is not a good notes app. Sure, you might like the idea of having everything in one place, but whenever you get an app that tries to be all things, you end up with compromises that ultimately means things will break. Just don’t go there.
I hope that answers your question, Darius. Thank you for sending it in. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like answering, just get in touch via email (carl@carlpullein.con) or DM me on Twitter or Facebook. All the details are in the show notes.
Thank you all for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about waiting for and next actions.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
Time And Life Mastery 2018 Edition
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Working With Todoist Next actions
Working With Todoist - Waiting for
Working With Todoist - My dashboard view
Hello and welcome to episode 45 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this week’s episode I have a GTD specific question, so for those of you not familiar with GTD, GTD stands for Getting Things Done and is a concept from a book written by David Allen. A great concept and a concept that underpins my whole productivity system. If you haven’t read the book, I strongly recommend you do. It will set you up on an amazing journey.
Before we get started, in case you missed it, I published the 2018 version of my Email Productivity Mastery course last week. This course updates last years course with better audio quality, something that was really bothering me and I have also added a number of new lessons that include setup guides for Gmail and Outlook and a new folder called “reference” which I have included following feedback from students last year. It’s a great course and is currently on its early-bird discount. So, if you want to get your email under control and to start loving email, get yourself enrolled today. This is one course you will definitely not regret purchasing.
Okay, let’s get on with this week’s show, so that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Dimitris. Dimitris asks: “Hi Carl, how do you use the next actions and waiting for contexts or labels?”
Great question, Dimitris. Recently I have covered these in my Working With Todoist series of videos on YouTube, but I think a deeper explanation for those of you not using Todoist may help you get a better understanding of just how powerful these two contexts can be in your productivity system.
Let us look at the waiting for context first as I think this one is probably the easiest to understand. I use the waiting for label for anything I need reminding about in the future that is dependent on something or someone else. So for example, if I order a new pair of shoes from my favourite bookmaker in the U.K.—I’ve always wanted to say that—they will send me a confirmation email which will include my shipping number and the link to the site where I can track my delivery. That email will be saved to my waiting for folder in my email app and a copy will be forwarded to Todoist. Now, the thing is, I don’t have to send it to Todoist, I do so because in Todoist I have a daily dashboard view, which includes all the things I am waiting for. By forwarding the email to Todoist, I can include it in my daily dashboard.
Another example here would be if I send out an email to a group of people asking them all to send me a report on their weekly sales activity. Now this email could mean I will be waiting for ten or eleven people to reply. What I do here is the exact same thing. I add the email to my waiting for folder in my email app and I also send a copy of the email to Todoist. Now in Todoist, I have the ability to add notes and in there I can add the list of people I am waiting for a reply from and when someone replies I can cross off their names from the list.
Of course, I could use my original email and the replies to do the same thing, but for me seeing a simple list is much easier than reading through different emails looking to see who replied.
And that’s pretty much how I use the waiting for context every day. I should point out that the additional step of sending a copy to Todoist is not completely necessary. I only do so because I have my daily dashboard filter in Todoist that tells me what I have planned to do that day and what I am waiting for. I did a video on how I have my dashboard set up and I will put a link to that video in the show notes for those of you curious about it.
You can use the waiting for context for pretty much anything—things you bought online, things you have requested from colleagues or information you are waiting for. The only thing I would say though is remember to clear it out. I clean up my folders as part of my weekly review, trying to remember to clean things up every day can become a burden I don’t need. With email, it is easy because a reply to my original email will allow me to move the email to another place if I need to and in Todoist I can just complete the task.
Now on to the next actions context. This one seems to cause a lot of confusion for people because technically, any task that needs doing is a next action right? Well, yes and no. If the task can be completed now, then yes. But if the task is dependant on another task being completed first then no. For example, if I have two tasks inside a “repaint the living room” project, one task says “ask partner to decide on new colour” and another task says “buy paint”, then until you know what colour paint to buy you cannot go out and buy the paint. So the next action can only apply to “ask partner to decide on new colour”. In it’s simplest form that’s how the next action label works.
However, there are numerous difficulties if you apply the next action context to all tasks you could theoretically complete right now, one of which is the size of the list. It would likely become a huge list of tasks and whenever you have a huge list of tasks you become numb to it and overwhelmed. Once that happens the list becomes useless. You won’t look at it.
So, a better way to handle this list is to only add one task from each of your active projects as your next action. Once you complete that task you can either add the next actions label to the very next task you need to do, or you can do it when you do your weekly review. It would all depend on when the project needs completing by.
Now, you next actions context is only useful to you if you are reviewing it regularly. I review mine every day. There are two reasons for this. The first is because I frequently get all my objective and focus tasks completed early. That’s largely because I am an early riser. I usually have an hour or two at the end of my working day to work on other things. So I open up my next actions context and begin at the top and do as many tasks as I can. Usually, it’s only two or three, but that’s two or three project tasks that I would not have thought about doing had I not looked at my next actions context. The second reason is so I can see what projects are coming due. My projects are ordered in the deadline order. So the project at the top of my project list has the nearest deadline and the project at the bottom has the farthest away deadline. This means my next actions list orders my tasks by project order so the tasks at the top have the closest deadline. This is likely to be dependant on which to-do list manager you are using. But if you can try to make sure tasks are ordered by deadline.
When you start using your next actions context diligently, you will find you no longer need to date all your tasks. This has the benefit that only tasks that must be completed on a specific day will have a date attached to it. All other tasks, tasks you would like to complete, but it would not be a problem if you didn’t, don’t need a date. You will see them if you are reviewing your next actions list every day.
Another benefit of the next actions context is when you do your planning at the end of the day. You have a ready prepared list from which to select tasks to do the next day. These, of course, will be based on how busy your schedule is for the day. All you need to do is add the next day’s date to the tasks you want to complete and you can be safe in the knowledge that tasks that need doing are getting done when they need to be done.
So the final part of all this is when do you make sure the next action context is added to your tasks. Well, that really is up to you. I personally, do it on a Sunday when I do my weekly review. Because I review everything I know what projects need a lot of focus and I know what needs to be done the next week. I can, therefore, make sure I am working on the things that need to be worked on. As I complete tasks in individual projects, I can add the next actions context when I have finished working on that project for the day. For me, this has never been a problem. It takes less than 2 seconds to add the context. Seriously, that should never be a concern for you.
If you are doing your weekly reviews, are focused on what’s important and know where you are with your projects using the waiting for and next actions context can be a real boost for you. It allows you to relax and be less stressed because you know what needs doing next and by when. Your daily to-do lists are shorter and this prevents you from feeling overwhelmed and becoming numb to your list. But… It does mean you are going to have to trust your system and that means sticking with one app, one system and trusting yourself that you will spend the necessary time each day to plan and maintain things.
Good luck and thank you, Dimitris, for your question. I have to admit there have been a few questions similar to this recently and I hope this episode has helped you to better understand how waiting for and next actions work.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about why apps are not important to your productivity system.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
Time And Life Mastery 2018 Edition
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
SCRIPT
Hello and welcome to episode 44 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have an excellent question about apps and why I feel apps are not important if you want to become better organised and more productive. But, before we get into this weeks question I would just like to remind you all that if you want to learn how to build your own productivity system, my FREE online course, How To Build Your Very Own Productivity System will take you there. It focuses on the basics of COD (Collect, Organise and Do) and shows you how to build a system that works for you.
Details on how to get yourself enrolled are in the show notes.
Okay, let’s get into this week’s question, so that means it’s time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from David. David asks: Ho Carl, can you tell me how I can find the best app to help me get my stuff together and get better at time management?
Thank you, David, for your question. Now, this is a question I am asked frequently on Twitter, Facebook and in the groups, I am in and there really isn’t a simple answer. The truth is, the apps you use are less important than the system you have in place. It’s your productivity system that will help you to become better at time management, not the apps you use. Apps are just tools. But as any carpenter, stone mason or sculptor will tell you, what creates a great piece of furniture, stonework or sculpture is not the tool, but the skill of the person making it. It’s how you use the tools that matter not the tools themselves. So my advice would always be to develop your system and your skill at using your system first before you start considering the apps you would use.
Recently, I was playing around with Airtable, a great planning app that’s is loosely based on a spreadsheet with a lot of bells and whistles. Now I know if the guys who make Airtable are listening to this they would probably tell me Airtable is so much more than an Excel sheet and I would agree. But at its core, it is just a spreadsheet. Just like at its core Todoist is a database. After playing around with Airtable for a while I realised that what I would use Airtable for could just as easily be created using a Numbers sheet on my computer. The difference for me is that Numbers is free and Airtable is $20.00 per month for the features I want. All I needed to do was create a template in Numbers and I have the planning tool I want. Same function, same information.
I am pretty sure if you looked at any app, you could recreate its features in a simple spreadsheet or word processor. So really the tools are less important than how you use those tools.
Let’s get down to the basics and I know I have talked about this before but it’s always worth reminding you. Whatever tools you use, you only need to be doing three things. The first is collecting all your tasks, commitments and ideas into a central place. That doesn’t matter whether that is a simple $2.00 reporters notebook (as Richard Branson and Cheryl Sandberg use) or a more complex app such as OmniFocus. All that matters is you are collecting everything in a place you know you will look at again sometime in the very near future.
Next is you need to organise all those things you collected. Tasks go onto a task list, appointments go into your calendar and your ideas go into your notes. Now it does not matter whether you are completely digital, paper-based or a hybrid of the two. All that matters is you have a list of the tasks you must complete, a place where you can review your notes and a calendar that will tell you where you need to be and when.
Finally, you need to do the tasks, attend your appointments and develop your ideas (after all, you don’t know which one is going to be something special unless you take the time to develop it)
Now, how you organise your tasks, appointments and ideas is entirely up to you. And that is where it all comes down to personal taste. I like simplicity and beautiful design. Others like more complexity. It really is a personal choice. But the key is you get the collecting, organising and doing part solid first. This is why I would always recommend you begin developing your own productivity system on paper first and then try your system out on whatever apps you already have. If you have an Android phone then there’s Google Tasks, Keep and calendar. If you use Apple devices then you have Reminders, Notes and Calendar. If your system works using those freebuiltt in apps then your system will work with any kind of app.
Whatever apps you use in the end, the goal is to make sure you apps blend into the background so you do not notice them. They just do their job. When you do your planning for the next day, you need to be able to quickly see what tasks you have and be able to decide which ones you want to focus on getting done the next day. These choices are made with the full knowledge that your calendar is telling you where you are going to be and what meetings and appointments you have. When your calendar is full of meetings then you can reduce the number of tasks you plan to get done the next day. When your calendar has a lot of free space you can add more tasks for the day because you will have more time to do them.
Really your productivity apps, your task list manager, notes and calendar need to be boring. You don’t want to notice them or be tempted to play around with settings, colours or how you have things organised. If they are doing their job, then you are focused on what needs doing, where you need to be and developing your ideas. If an app is tempting you to play around with it’s organisation structures and lay out, then your app is not helping you it’s hindering you.
The only caveat I would add here is what ever apps you do choose, make sure the collecting part is fast and easy. There are a lot of apps on the market that take too long to load because they want to show off their animations, colours and logos and then you have to navigate to the add function using too many clicks. A great productivity app will allow you to collect your stuff with only one or two clicks. It’s click to open and click to add. That’s all it should take. Anything more than that and it’s too many clicks and too long. The lower the barrier to add a task, event or idea the better—this why pen and paper still wins here.
The point here is no matter how feature rich an app is, it is always going to be your responsibility to maintain your system. It’s your responsibility to collect everything, it’s your responsibility to organise what you collected and it is your responsibility to do your work. It’s never going to be the responsibility of the apps you use. The simpler, the faster and the easier it is to collect, organise and do the better you will be at being organised and the more productive you will be. The less time you spend in your productivity apps means you have more time to do your work. That should be your starting point when thinking about creating your productivity system. Fast, simple and easy to use.
I’ve seen some amazing productivity systems with elaborate structures, tagging and project hierarchies and I’ve seen these same systems fail the person who built them because they take too long to maintain and manage. Great personal productivity systems are always build on a foundation of simplicity and ease of use.
So, David, my advice is to look for the simplest apps you can find. Ones that have very few features and ones that allow you to collect, organise and do the right things at the right time without having to spend too much time finding that information.
One more thing before we finish. Once you have settle on a set of apps for your system, take the time necessary to really get to know those apps. Spend time playing and learning. You want those apps to become boring, to disappear in to the background and only be front and centre when you need them to be. To do that, you need to learn whatever apps you choose inside out. That was one ‘secret’ I learnt a long time ago. Once you know the apps you use inside out, you get incredibly fast at using them and can fix any problems quickly.
Thank you very much for listening to this episode and thank you, Davi,d for your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this second very special episode, I talk with Kevin Blackburn of Life Success Engineer about setting goals, productivity and the apps we use to build extraordinary lives.
LINKS:
Life Success Engineer:
Website
YouTube Channel
Podcast
Thank you to Kev for doing this.
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
Time And Life Mastery 2018 Edition
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
In this very special episode, I talk with Kevin Blackburn of Life Success Engineer about making the decision to change your life, your career and starting your own business.
LINKS:
Life Success Engineer:
Website
YouTube Channel
Podcast
Thank you to Kev for doing this. Listen out for part 2 where we talk about goal planning, productivity and the apps we use coming next on the Working With Podcast.
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
Time And Life Mastery 2018 Edition
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about getting your email under control.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
Time And Life Mastery 2018 Edition
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Merlin Mann's 43 Folders Website
Merlin Mann At Google Talks
SCRIPT:
Hello and welcome to episode 41 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a great question about managing email and in particular how to tame an out of control inbox.
Before we get into the question this week, I would like to just ask if you have any questions you would like answering on this podcast to get in touch. All you have to do is email me or DM me on Facebook or Twitter and I will be happy to add your question to the list.
Speaking of email, don’t forget you can get all of my weekly videos, blog posts and podcasts direct to your mailbox each week by subscribing to my weekly Working With... Newsletter. Straight to your inbox every Friday. Perfect for your weekend reading, viewing and listening.
Okay, let’s get into this week’s question so that means it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jackie. Jackie asks Hi Carl. I know you have done a few videos on managing email, but I still really struggle to keep on top of my email. Do you have any tips to get in control of an out of control inbox?
Thank you, Jackie, for the wonderful question. Now where to start? Email is a difficult one for many people. Even the most productive people seem to struggle with this one. I’ve seen so many people with perfectly organised to-do lists, files and notes, but their email organisation is a complete mess. I think this is due to people not being in control of what comes into our email inboxes whereas when we are working with our to-do list manager or notes app we control what goes into our inboxes.
So, how do we get our email under control? The first thing to understand is leaving all your incoming email in your inbox is not a smart way to manage email. Over time your inbox becomes a huge mess of read and unread email and then it just becomes very difficult to find exactly what you are looking for. It’s a bit like just dumping all your clothes on the floor of your room at the end of the day. Eventually, you are going to have to start looking for the clothes you want to wear and it would be a nightmare just looking for them.
Instead, we need to operate a four options system and there really are only four things you can do with an email when it comes in. Do it now, defer it to when you have time to do something with it, delete it (my favourite) or delegate it to someone else. The four “D’s” Do, defer, delete or delegate. I’d love to claim this idea as my own, but it came from the wonderful Merlin Mann who called this system “Inbox Zero”. Merlin put together a website with a ton of information about how to set up Inbox Zero and he also did a Google Talks presentation. Both of which are worth looking at. I will put a link to both these excellent resources in the show notes for you.
So how does this work? Well, when an email comes in you ask a simple question. “What is it?” Is it an email you need to reply to? Is it an email you don’t need to reply to but do need to keep it for future reference? Is it something that’s not important to you? You need to decide.
If it’s something you need to act upon the question then becomes what do you need to do with it? Reply? Do you have time to do it now? If not then move it to an action today folder.
Now I should explain a little about the folders. You really only need four folders. An inbox, an “Action This Day” folder, a “waiting for” and an archive folder. I would suggest you set these up immediately. Four folders - an inbox, an action this day, a waiting for and an archive. The chances are two of those folders/categories are already set up. You just need to create the waiting for and action this day folders.
The action this day folder is where you put emails you need to do something with, but don’t have time right now to do it. However, as the name of this folder suggests, you do need to do whatever needs doing this day. No excuses, EVER! When you stop treating this folder as your most important folder, it’s power will diminish and you may as well not bother.
For those of you wondering, the phrase “action this day” is a Winston Churchill phrase. During the war whenever he wanted something done urgently, he would label the direction with the words “Action this day” with a red sticker. Churchill’s staff new then what to do.
Your waiting for folder is for emails you are waiting for a reply on something. I also use this folder for items I have ordered and I am waiting for delivery. I don’t order very much, but the date stamp from the email confirmation tells me when the item was ordered so when I check my waiting for folder I have a clear view of what is outstanding. How often do I check my waiting for folder? Once a day. Usually in the evening. If something is getting close to becoming overdue, I will send out a little reminder to whoever I am waiting to hear from.
Your inbox and archive should be self-explanatory. Anything that needs no response from you, but you may need later for reference should be put in your archive. Your archive is searchable so you don’t need to worry about losing anything. Just make sure in your email settings you have your archive folder set to not delete emails older than 30 days. Gmail has this turned on by default. I would recommend you change that to 12 months.
So how does all this work? When you process your email—note I did not say “check” your email—checking email is probably the worst time sucks out there. Checking email means you are doing nothing just checking. What’s the point in that? Instead, process. Either start at the bottom or the top and ask the question “what is it” and “what’s the next action?” If you can reply now - do it now. If you need a little more time, time you do not have right now, then move it to your “Action this day folder". If you don’t need to reply or do anything, move it to your archive. And essentially that’s it.
Just for your reference, I can process around 70 emails, in this way, in about ten to fifteen minutes. And when I say “process” I mean I can go through all 70 emails, move them from my inbox and be left with an empty inbox. Sure, there will be around ten to fifteen emails in my Action This Day folder, but I will batch process (or chunk) those later when I have done at least one of my big objectives for the day.
When you start replying and dealing with actionable email consistently within 24 hours you not only feel in control of your email, you also find your colleagues and the people you interact with regularly, start to see how effective and timely you are and that is always a good thing. People will respect your time much more.
One bit of advice I would give is to become more adept at deleting. If you dump everything into your archive over time, you are going find you have an unmanageable folder of stuff you need, might need and never need. Delete the never need stuff. You don’t need it. If you find later you wanted it to keep, then someone somewhere will have a copy of it. Don’t stress yourself about it. The delete key is much faster than swiping or dragging and dropping. It was designed that way—use it.
The real trick with this system or method is to get really good at answering the question “what is it?” And, “what do I have to do with it?” When that becomes a deep habit, that’s when email will no longer be a place of stuff you don’t want to look at or clean up.
One final thing on this is the declaration of email bankruptcy. If your inbox has become a pit of read and unread emails dating back to the millennium, then it’s time to declare email bankruptcy. Now there are two ways to do this. A hard or soft email bankruptcy declaration. The hard one is to select all emails currently in your inbox—yes, every single one of them, then take a moment, breathe and count down from ten ... 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 then BANG! Hit the delete key! Now what you have just done is created a true “inbox zero moment. No emails in your inbox. Get used to it. This is going to be your life every day from now on.
Okay, so maybe your not that brave. If that’s the case you can do a soft email bankruptcy. This involves creating a folder and naming it “old inbox” and again selecting all emails in your inbox and moving them to this new folder. Again, you will have created an inbox zero moment — sit back and enjoy— this is the start of your new life! You can now process your old inbox as and when you have spare time.
One of the funniest things about doing a soft email bankruptcy is after a few weeks you begin to realise that 99% of the emails in your inbox were not that important after all and you end up hitting the delete button anyway. Doing things this way though means you miss out on all the fun of blindly hitting the delete key and the fear of the unknown washing over you. Love that feeling.
Well, I hope that answers your question, Jackie and I hope all of you got something out of this week. Please don’t forget if you have any questions you would like me to answer on this show, just email me with your question (or leave a message on Facebook or Twitter) and I will be very happy to answer your question for you.
Thank you very much for listening to this episode. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Managing a long list of projects.
In this week’s episode, I answer a question about managing a long list of projects.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
Time And Life Mastery 2018 Edition
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
SCRIPT
Hello and welcome to episode 40 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a question that may not affect everyone all the time, but I think it can become a problem from time to time. That is the problem of project overwhelm. Having a very long list of active projects. How do you manage them without missing something important?
But before we get into this week’s question I’d like to thank all of you who have enrolled in this year’s Time And Life Mastery Course. It’s so very exciting to see so many of you there and I am convinced this course is going to change your life for the better. If you haven’t enrolled, It’s not too late. Details are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s time for this week’s question, so that means it’s time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Denrael. Denrael asks: how do you organise when you can have literally hundreds of open projects. I run a Pro Service group, and at any time, we could be engaged in, planning or bidding up to 100 different engagements.
That’s a Juicy question, Denrael. Thank you.
Before we get into this question allow me to remind you all that we only have twenty-four hours a day. So it really doesn’t matter whether you have ten projects or 100. You will always be limited by the amount of time you have each day. This also means it doesn’t matter how many tasks you have on your daily task list, you are ultimately limited by the amount of time you have each day. So no matter how heroic you think you are, the powerful force of time will always stop you.
However, for anyone suffering from project overwhelm here are a few tips that might help you become less overwhelmed and more in control.
The first step is to go through your projects and see if they really are projects. A lot of projects have become projects by accident and a five-minute spell focused on the project could get it completed and archived.
As you go through your projects ask yourself a number of questions. Questions like “is this an active project?" Or "is this project really important to me?" What you are trying to do is reduce your active project list as much as you can. In a sense, you are pruning so you can give yourself space to breathe and grow. This is a place where you are going to have to be very strict with your criteria. Be very clear about what an active project is and apply that rule very very strictly.
Another way to reduce an active project list is to use a “Someday | Maybe” folder. I find when my active project list starts to bulge it’s because I have a lot of “I wish to do” projects. The problem with “I wish to do” projects is they are often not important and were created on a whim. After the passage of a little time, your enthusiasm for the project diminishes and if that is the case either delete it, archive it or just put it into your Someday | Maybe folder. You can always come back to it again later if you wish.
In your specific case Denrael, I see a potential problem. If you are using a task manager app to manage all your customer engagements you are probably using the wrong tool. When you have “literally hundreds of open projects” relate to different customers and clients that sounds very much like a job for a Client Relationship Management system. It is possible to manage a large number of clients in a task management app, but you are going to have to do a lot of hacking and modifying and there is going be the need for a lot of updating. That alone is going to take up time. Time you probably don’t have.
I would suggest you look into a robust CRM system to manage all your customers, proposals and bids. That what a CRM system was designed to do and the best ones do that job very well.
Another way to manage a long list of open projects and one of my favourites is to focus your attention on the labels or contexts. The Getting Things Done system was designed for a long list of open projects because you don’t focus on the project you focus on the tool, place or person you need in order to complete a task. In your case, you may have a list of bids to follow up on. If you create a label or context such as “follow up” you can access this list every day to check which proposals or bids you need to follow up on next. You can break it down still further by creating labels such as “Follow up by Phone” and “Follow up by email” if a simple follow up label generates a long list.
The reality is if you are having to manage a long list of open projects you have to get very smart. Planning what needs to get done the next day instead of planning what you would like to get done is crucial. But you also need to be looking out further to the rest of the week and the whole month. What projects must be completed this week? What projects must be completed this month? These questions need to be answered every week and every month if you are going to stay on top of everything.
You need to be very clear about what “completed” actually means too. My guess is just sending out a bid, following it up a few days later is not really completing the project. A completed project would be the bid being accepted and the service being delivered. The bidding process is just the start. The outcome you desire is the bid being accepted, a service being delivered and the money owed coming into your business. So how you structure the project may be another area where you can slim down your projects list. You can divide up a project into the different stages. For example, “the bidding stage”, “the delivery stage” and “the collection stage”. Again, if you create labels for each stage it will allow you to filter tasks down to what needs to happen next on each project. These tasks can then be assigned to the right people within your company.
In that example, your projects would be organised by customer or client. Having a templated project you can call up, duplicate and assign to a new customer will save a lot of time and you can pre-populate the project with your process. Most to-do list managers allow you to create templates and the more advanced to-do list managers will allow you to assign dates in the form of “start plus 3 days” etc. This would then allow you to remain focused on your daily task list as that would be an accurate account of what needs to happen that day.
For any of this to work seamlessly requires a lot of good habits. A daily review of work done and work that still needs to be done is a must. On top of that a strong weekly review that assigns some clear objectives on your projects. For example, “get bid to Client B out by Wednesday” and “follow up on Client C on Monday” these tasks need to be prioritised and dated so they come up on the right day allowing you to have enough time to do the necessary work to complete the objective.
There are a few other, little things that can be done to save time. Automating as much of the work as possible using tools such as IFTTT or Zappier and templating forms and regularly written emails can save a lot of time and effort. But it all comes back to the one thing you cannot control. Time.
No matter how much work anyone has, we will always be restricted by the amount of time we have each day. The key is to find ways of reducing the time it takes to complete tasks we have to perform on a regular basis. Thinking in terms of what you are trying to achieve rather than focusing on the tasks can help. This can reduce the number of steps it takes to get a project to completion. Is the goal to follow up on a bid or is the goal to get the business? If the goal is to get the business, one phone call may achieve that, rather than a ten-day follow-up process involving three emails and a phone call.
Managing a long list of projects is always going to be a challenge and there is no one way that will take away those projects. If a project needs doing, it needs doing. Our goal is to find better and more efficient ways to get those projects completed. Never forgetting what your objective is will always help to reduce the list of tasks. A mistake so many people make is they focus on the tasks and not the outcome. Always remember what the desired outcome of the project is, be very clear about what it is you are trying to accomplish and you will go a long way to making even the longest project list manageable.
I hope that has helped, Denrael.
Thank you all for listening and please don’t forget if you have a question about productivity, time management, goal setting or self-development then please get in touch by email, Dming me on Facebook or Twitter and I will be very happy to answer your questions.
It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 39
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about how to become more productive
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
Time And Life Mastery 2018 Edition
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Hello and welcome to episode 39 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a question that I feel many people want answering. That is how to become more productive in a world that seems designed to make us unproductive. It a great question and I hope to give you a few tips that will help you to get in control of your stuff.
Last week saw the launch of the 2018 edition of Time And Life Mastery course. There’s been a lot of excitement over this course and I would hate for you to miss out. The early bird discount will be ending soon so if you haven’t got yourself enrolled in this complete course, get yourself enrolled today. This is one course you will never regret enrolling in and is a course that can change your life for the better. It would be great to see you there.
Okay, let’s get into this week’s question so it is now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Jenna. Jenna asks: I struggle to get my work finished on time and my manager is always telling me I need to be more productive. The problem is I don’t know where to begin. Can you help?
Thank you, Jenna. That’s a great question and one I am sure is on many people’s minds.
There are a couple of issues I see regularly with many of my clients that have simple fixes. The first is in setting personal deadlines. Now I first came across this one when I began working in Korea. Having come from a working environment where the close of day was fixed. My working hours were the traditional 9 til 5, although for me it was 9 to 5:30. What that meant was when I arrived at work in the morning, I knew I would be finishing at 5:30pm. It was unheard of anyone working beyond their finish time.
When I came to Korea, I noticed many of my students here had a much more flexible end time. It was normal for workers to stay an extra hour or so at the end of the day to finish their work. This is where Parkinson’s Law comes in to play. Parkinson’s Law states: "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.” So if I begin my day knowing I only have 7½ hours to complete my tasks for the day, then it will take me 7½ hours to complete them. If I begin the day thinking I have 10 hours to complete those same tasks, it will take me 10 hours to complete them.
Once you know this law, you can use it to your advantage. When you begin a task set a deadline. Let’s say you have a proposal for your client to do today. When you sit down to work on the proposal give yourself one hour to complete it (or 90 minutes if it requires a lot of work). So you sit down at 9:30am and before you begin you say to yourself this must be finished by 10:30am. And get started. You will find that your brain will go into the focused work zone and you will get the proposal completed by 10:30am. This is one of my favourite time hacks if you can call it that. I use this all the time to write my blog posts and even record my regular YouTube videos. YouTube videos can be incredible time sucks if you are not careful. There’s something about making videos for me that has me always wanted to re-record them. If I do not set a finish time, I can easily spend five or six hours recording three ten to fifteen-minute videos. Instead, I set a three-hour deadline. If I begin recording at 3pm I always plan to have them finished by 6pm. It really does help to focus the mind.
Another thing you can do to really improve your productivity it to begin the day with a plan. Write down the two or three things you absolutely must get complete that day. Don’t leave them in your head. Get them written done where you can see them. Now the key here is to only write down two or three things. These are the big rocks, if you like, that must be completed that day. I know there will always be other things that need doing too, but what you really want to be doing is having the two or three big things that absolutely must be completed that day written down either digitally or on paper on your desk and have them right in front of you. Once you have finished the first thing, cross it off, take a short break and then move on to the second one.
Difficulties occur when you have a long list of to-dos. It is natural for us to look for the easiest tasks, the quick checks. They make us feel good, but the problem, of course, is many of these quick and easy tasks are not actually that important and are easy to do. To really focus you in what is important and to get you working on the work that will contribute towards completing your work by the deadline, keep your list to two or three tasks. If you are really good and take full advantage of Parkinson’s law, you could have those two or three tasks completed by lunchtime and you can then move on to the easier, less important tasks.
Another area I find people often struggle with is not being clear about what work is important. We all have a good mix of routine and project work to complete each day. Difficulties start when you are not clear about what work is important. Prioritising your work is a big part of becoming more productive. This is why beginning the day with a plan based on what current projects are important is vital. However, the routine work can very easily take over the day if you are not careful. There are a couple of ways you can handle the less important routine work. One way is to assign one day each week for admin work. This could be Friday afternoon for example. Friday’s are famously difficult to focus on important work because we are often thinking about our plans for the weekend. If that is the case, you could assign Friday as your admin and cleaning up day. This means you only have easy tasks to do on Friday and you don’t need a lot of focus to get them done. Another way is to allocate a time slot each day to do your admin and routine tasks. Giving yourself one hour a day to just get the routine, easy tasks complete will help you to stay focused on the important, project work for the other seven or eight hours each day. This is my preferred way of doing it. I assign one hour a day for all my routine admin work. I usually assign the end of the day to do this because I don’t need a lot of concentration to do it. But you can choose any time of the day or week to do it.
And now for the biggie. Use you calendar to schedule your work each day. There’s something about seeing a time slot on your calendar that says something like “Prepare presentation file, for next week’s presentation” that really kicks your arse into gear. I guess we are conditioned to follow our calendars more than a to-do list. Take advantage of this. When you plan your day, look at your calendar and between all the meetings and client appointments, schedule focus time. Now only you know when that will be the best time each day. For me, it is usually between 9:30am and 11:30am and between 2pm and 3:30pm. Outside of those times I am either teaching or in meetings. This gives me around four hours every day for focused content work.
Now I understand that in most companies meetings are often scheduled at the last minute, so it would be a little unrealistic to schedule your focused work for the whole week, but if you have established what two or three things you really want to get done for the day when you plan the day, when you get to work in the morning, you can then look at your calendar for the day and schedule those two or three things on your calendar. When you do this, you know what you need to be doing at what time each day. This is one of the best productivity tricks you can use. It really works. Remember, your calendar is sacred. What’s on your calendar gets done and although you are free to change it at any time, you should resist. Once you have scheduled your day, stick to it only allow real, genuine emergencies to change it.
There are many other little things you can do to help. When you are given a task always write it down in a trusted place. Never trust your brain to remember it. When your boss asks you to do something always ask them when they want it by. This actually works on two levels. Firstly it gives you a deadline to work from and secondly, it prevents your boss from changing the deadline. You have an agreed, set deadline.
Another little trick I use is when no deadline is given to me. I will always tell them when I will complete it by. This works because it sets a deadline for me and I get agreement from the other person that the deadline is okay with them. We then have an agreement and because I have committed myself to do the work by a certain time I will make sure I will do it because it was I who set the deadline. It’s almost like a matter of honour. It’s a great incentive.
The truth is becoming better at productivity is really all about knowing what you have to get done and by when. It’s about knowing what you have to do before you start the day and making sure you have enough time scheduled to get it done. It’s simple. I know it means you need to spend ten minutes or so getting clear each day about what you need to get done, but those ten minutes will save you so much time and stress later. Think of those ten minutes as an investment in your sanity and your professionalism.
Well, I hope that answers your question, Jenna and thank you for emailing me your question. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like answering on this podcast, just get in touch either by email, Dming me on Twitter or Facebook and I will be very happy to answer your question.
Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about How I prioritise my work.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
Time And Life Mastery 2018 Edition
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script:
Hello and welcome to episode 38 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
One of the questions I am most frequently asked is how do I prioritise my work. This question has been asked by so many people that I decided in this week’s podcast to answer that question.
Now I am revealing one of the new pieces of gold from my recently launched Time And Life Mastery Course in answering this question but this such a valuable piece of gold I think it is important to reveal it to all of you wonderful people.
Before we get into this week’s question I would like to say if you are struggling with discovering what you want out of life and you feel overwhelmed by all the work you have to do, then please enrol in the Time And Life Mastery Course. It is a complete course, with over 3 hours of video lessons and over 20 downloadable work and tips sheets. You also get the Time And Life Mastery Workbook AND free access to my Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course. There is so much value in this course and one thing I can promise you is if you complete the course and follow the guidance given in the course you will become masters of your life and your time.
This is an investment in you and an investment in your future. Get yourself enrolled today and take advantage of the early bird discount.
Okay, onto this week’s question so it is now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question:
This week’s question is: Carl, how do you prioritise your own work?
Okay, to start with I should give you a little background. I first read David Allen’s Getting Things Done book in 2009 and that was when I decided to change from my beloved Franklin Covey Time management system and go GTD. Now When I first started with GTD, I captured everything I could. I would process, organise, review and do. But what I quickly found was I was assigning dates to almost everything I captured and these then popped up on my daily to-do list in a random mess. Some days I would have 30 tasks, other days I might only have 12. There was no order, no prioritisation and although I was getting a lot done, it felt I was not getting a lot of the important stuff done. I found I was going through my daily to-do list looking for the quick, easy tasks so I could just check off another task. You know, checking off tasks makes us all feel good, doesn’t it?
I should confess, for around two or three years that is how I operated GTD. I just began the day and tried to get as many of these daily tasks completed as soon as I could. It felt good always checking off tasks. I had things like “do student attendance” when I knew I would do that anyway because all classes began with the attendance register. I also had tasks such as “take the dog for a walk” when, again, I knew that was something I would do without having it on a to-do list. I really didn’t need reminding of those things because I just did them. I had them on my list because they were guaranteed tasks I would check off that day and it always felt good to check tasks off.
Then one day, when I was doing a weekly review, I realised that checking tasks off like this did not make me a productive person. All it meant was I was checking tasks off a list. What I began to understand was to be a more productive person I needed to make sure the tasks I was doing each day were meaningful and did actually move me towards the things that were important to me. Like my career development, writing books and helping my students improve their lives. I saw that many of the things I had on my to-lists were not doing that, they were meaningless tasks, tasks I started to call “trophy tasks” because the only thing they contributed to was the good feeling of checking off a task.
So I began looking again at the way I had my system set up and I soon discovered that all I needed was two objective tasks—tasks that moved me closer towards my goals each day—and eight other meaningful tasks that would move my projects towards completion each day. So, in total, all I needed was to focus on ten tasks a day.
These ten tasks were to form the core of my daily workflow. But I also realised there were a number of tasks that, although not important, still needed to be done. These tasks I called my “routine” tasks. These were things like “take the garbage out”, “pay my credit card bill” and “write student feedback forms”. These tasks needed doing, but they did not move any of my projects towards completion and did not contribute towards achieving my goals. I realised if I put those into my eight tasks for the day, then I would not have any room to put in my important tasks. So I created a separate list called “routines”. They came up in my daily list, but I made sure they were always at the bottom of my list and never the top.
That was the theory and it worked. There was a bit of fiddling about, I used OmniFocus at the time and I was adjusting my “perspectives” a lot to try and get the lists only showing what I wanted to see when I needed to see it. Today, I use Todoist and with the flagging system in Todoist I now have a ‘perfect’ way to remove those routine tasks from my daily lists until I need to see them, which is usually at the end of the day.
So, the way I prioritise what is important is to use what I call my “2+8 Prioritisation” method. Two objectives for the day that are almost always related to my goals and eight other tasks that are important and are project related. Daily admin and other unimportant tasks that need doing, but do not contribute to my goals or projects, are considered routines and these will be on my daily list when they need to be, but for the most part of the day are out of sight and out of mind.
The problem I see with most people’s to-do list is they become a dumping ground for unimportant work. We then schedule these unimportant tasks randomly so they come upon us when we should really be focused on our important work. Work that takes our lives forward. And as we all know our human condition is not perfect in any sense of the word and so we start checking those unimportant tasks off because of how they make us feel and we end up feeling busy, overwhelmed and exhausted, yet we have not done anything important.
What I have found over the years I have been using the 2+8 Prioritisation method is you have to get really good at deciding what is important. You have to be very strict in applying the principle. When you do your daily review at the end of the day (the Golden 10) you need to look at the list you have for tomorrow and start removing tasks so you end up with just ten. Then you look at those ten tasks and select two as your objectives for the day.
When you first start doing this it will be very hard. Your brain will rebel and tell you everything is important. You must resist. Remind yourself that your goals and your active projects are the most important things. That moving your life forward is far better than doing tasks that will not improve your life or improve you as a person.
One more advantage of this method is that by only having ten tasks per day that you focus on, you still have enough time in the day to manage those little crises that will get thrown at you every day. You know those sudden emergencies that your boss or customers throw at you at 4pm on a Thursday afternoon. This method builds in the flexibility you need to be like water (as Bruce Lee said… “be like water my friend”) and as David Allen states: no matter what you throw into a pool of water it will react accordingly whether you throw in a small pebble or a giant rock. It will react appropriately and then return to its natural state. The 2+8 Prioritisation method will do just that. It allows you to be just like water. You have the flexibility and time space to deal with crises in an appropriate way so that you can return to your natural, relaxed, productive self quickly and effectively.
Hopefully, this has helped you to understand why prioritising to some degree allows you greater flexibility and will move you closer to reaching your peak productive self. I know it is not easy, but having been through it myself I can assure you the effort is well worth it because of what you become from making these small, but significant changes in the way you operate your to-do list.
Don’t forget, if you want to take complete control of your own life and your own time, then get yourself enrolled in my 2018 edition of the Time And Life Mastery course. This is a course that will prove to be a very valuable investment in you, your future and the way you want to live your life.
Thank you for listening to this podcast and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about How to find what it is you want to do with your life.
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Why Drifting Through Life With Result In A Lifetime of Regret
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Hello and welcome to episode 37 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week’s question is a rather popular question. I also find a lot of my English communication students also struggle with this. Discovering what it is you want to do in life. I know that sounds like a big philosophical question, but the truth is if you don’t know what it is you want to do with your life you are going to drift and drifting through life is never a good thing. As I wrote in my blog post last week (a link is in the show notes) drifting through life results in a life of regret and by the time you realise you have spent your whole precious life drifting it is often too late to do anything about it.
Before we get into this week’s question, I want to give you guys a heads up to the launch of my Time And Life Mastery 2018 edition course. Time And Life Mastery is my premium online course that takes you on a journey of self-discovery and shows you how to discover exactly what it is you want to achieve in life. Once you have established what it is you want to achieve and do, the second part of the course shows you how you can take control of your time so your goals and purpose take centre stage of your daily life.
It’s a fantastic course and last year’s edition was my most popular course by far. The course launches on the Friday 3rd August and I would love to see you there. There’s a link in the show notes to the course’s page where you will find all the information you need.
Right, onto this week’s question so it is now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Sandra, Philip and Sandeep. They ask: I know it is important to have a plan, but I really don’t know what I want to do. Do you have any tips on how to find my goals and purpose?
Thank you for the question guys.
As I mentioned in the intro, I know this is a very difficult question for many people. In fact, if I am being very honest with you, it took me a very long time to discover what it is I want to achieve in life. I would have been around 32 years old before I discovered that teaching was what I wanted to do. Before that, I tried many jobs from hotel management and selling cars to being a lawyer. All of which left me feeling empty and not excited about the future. It was only when I took the chance to come to Korea and teach English did I finally discover that teaching was what I wanted to do and that I loved everything about teaching from the planning of lessons to the helping of students to improve an area they were really struggling with. It was my willingness to experiment and try new things that finally led me towards teaching and the discovery that teaching was the vocation I loved doing.
So that would be my first piece of advice. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Experimenting doesn’t mean quitting your current job and trying something new, but let’s say you are curious about teaching, there are plenty of opportunities where you can volunteer to teach something you know about. That could be inside the company you work for—you could volunteer to do a presentation on your know-how. One of the companies I used to work for did a monthly training session where a different teacher each month would do a fifteen-minute training session on their own teaching know-how. It was a great way to get new insights into teaching and how to handle difficult, non-responsive students.
Another way is to start doing whatever it is you want to try. If you want to be a writer, then start writing. Begin a blog and write something every week. You don’t need to publish anything. You just need to write. You can judge for yourself if you enjoy the process. Same goes for creating videos or making your own music. We have the technology now on almost all our devices to create and make things whether that is writing, film or music production.
But let’s say you have absolutely no idea what it is you want to do. How do you discover the things you want to do? Well, this is a lot easier than you may think. The first thing you need to do is to take a piece of paper (or a note in your note-taking app) and write “fifty things I want to do in the next ten years” at the top. Then, underneath the title begin writing down everything you would like to do over the next ten years. Don’t filter anything. No matter how unrealistic something is if you want to do it or would like to try to over the next ten years get it written down. This is not about what is possible and what is not. This is just a list of things you would like to do over the next ten years.
One of the things on my ten-year list is to fly to the UK and buy a brand new Aston Martin DB11 and drive it all the way to Korea from the UK. Aside from the prohibitive cost of actually buying an Aston Martin, it is also a rather unrealistic thing to do. However, it is not really about whether you will actually do something it is more about getting your thinking into a place that will allow you to discover the kind of things you truly want to do in your life.
The problem we all share is that over the years we have developed filters in our mind about what is possible and what is not possible. Many things we have labelled as being impossible have become that way, not because they are actually impossible, but because we have allowed these filters to develop by listening to other people who have told us what are the right or wrong things to do. But remember, when someone else tells you what is right and what is wrong or what is possible and what is impossible they are only giving you their own opinion. Opinions are not necessarily correct. Often the best way to find out is to try for yourself.
Now this list of fifty things is going to take some time. When I did my list it took a few weeks to get it to fifty. The first twenty were quite easy. After that, it became much harder. But I persisted and after a few weeks, I had a list of fifty things I wanted to achieve over the next ten years.
The funny thing is, many of the things on my list have become true. I have begun a blog, started a YouTube channel on productivity and written a book each year. All of these things I found I really enjoy doing. Strangely, writing the blog, my YouTube channel and this podcast are all related to teaching people. Most of the things I really enjoy doing come back to that. Teaching. It is what I do and it is what I feel is my purpose.
Once you have your list of fifty things you are going to find there are quite a few things that have a common purpose. For me, it was creating content to share with other people. Of course, there were a few material things on there too. Buying the Aston Martin for example and also buying a house on the east coast of Korea. These are material and they are things I want to do over the next ten years. The point is you write everything down. Don’t let whether something is possible or not stop you from putting it on your list. The whole point is you have a list of your desires and wants.
Now, once you have your list of fifty things you will need to start dividing it up into when you would like to accomplish them. Some of them you may want to do in the next year. Put those on the next year list. Others may be in the next three years, or perhaps 5 years. And of course, some of the bigger, more ambitious things may require a bit more time. Put them on your ten-year list. When you divide these things up into when you want to achieve them, try to get an even a stream as you can. There’s no point in loading everything up into the next five years. This is a ten-year list. So spread them out over a realistic timeline. My Aston Martin idea would go on my ten-year list for example. There’s a lot of things I want to do over the next year and taking one or two months off to travel across the world is not going to be very practical when I want to develop my YouTube channel and blog over the next five years.
One thing I can promise you is this exercise is fun. It allows your imagination to run wild and it breaks down the limiting self-beliefs that you have acquired over the years about what you can and cannot do. And we’ve all picked up those limiting self-beliefs. This is one of the reasons why many people struggle to find what it is they want to do with their lives. They allow these beliefs to take hold and to start believing they cannot do things. The truth is you can do these things, but you first need to allow your imagination to open up. Once your imagination opens up and you get fifty things written down, the next step is to start and work on a plan to make them become a reality.
For me, starting the YouTube channel was a big challenge. I have never been comfortable in front of a camera, so I realised I would have overcome that fear first and then develop a theme and a plan to make it happen. Three years ago I did that. It took a few weeks, a lot of abortive attempts but I persisted, and today when I look back at my first videos I cringe at how awful they are. But then I look at what I am producing today and what I have learnt over the last three years about video production and editing and I feel happy I am progressing in the right direction. The same can be said for my blog. I read those early blog posts and laugh at how bad they were. But again, over the last three years or so, I have learnt a lot, got better and now I feel confident I can sit down and write a reasonable blog post. Now I am a contributing writer for Likehack - so I must be doing something right!
The thing is we have all got to start somewhere. And if you really have no idea what it is you want to do with your amazing life then the best place to start is with a piece of paper and start writing out all the things you would like to do. It doesn’t matter whether some of those things are crazy, stupid, impossible or the complete opposite of what you are doing today. It does not matter how old you are. It is never too late to change direction. The point is if you discover you are moving in the wrong direction then it is better to find out now rather to never find out.
So start the list. It will take you a few weeks to get to fifty. But the time and effort is well worth it because of what you will discover about yourself.
Good luck and remember, if you do want to go into a lot more detail and you are serious about building a life you can be proud of, then take a look at my Time And Life Mastery course. That could very well be the course that changes your life for the better and set you on your way to accomplishing the things you really want to accomplish.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about What it takes to become productive.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script:
Hello and welcome to episode 36 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this episode, I have a wonderful question about productivity. I suppose it’s an obvious question, really, but one we very rarely ask. So in this episode not only are we going to ask the question, we are going to answer it too.
Before we get to this week’s question though, I’d like to say a big thank you to all of you who enrolled in my special offer last week. Now it’s time for you to get down and do some studying and building. So good luck with that and if you have any questions about setting up your own systems, then feel free to get in touch.
Don’t forget, if you want to discover a system that is flexible and is customisable to work for you, then get yourself enrolled in my FREE beginners guide to building your own productivity system. It’s around 45 minutes long and will give you all the tips and tricks you need to create your own, bullet-proof productivity and time management system. The link to the course is in the show notes.
And, if you have a question you would like answering on this show, then get in touch. I’m more than happy to answer any question on productivity, goal setting or self-development so send those questions in. You can ask me via Twitter, Facebook or direct via email.
Right, onto this week’s question, so it’s time for me now to hand you over the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Janet. Janet asks: I’ve struggled with becoming more productive for years and was wondering what you think is the skill needed to become a more productive person.
Thank you, Janet, for the question. A very good question indeed and a question that had me thinking quite hard.
For me, the single most essential skill required to become a more productive person, if you can call it a skill, is self-discipline.
You need the self-discipline to keep going with your system even on those days when you don’t feel in the mood.
You see becoming a more productive person is not a case of cleaning up your desk and tidying up your files one day. Becoming a more productive person is a way of life. If you have spent most of your adult life in a disorganised state where you cannot even remember where you placed your car keys every morning, then that is nothing to do with whether or not you are a productive person, that is more a case of not having the discipline to put your keys in the same place every evening when you return home. And it takes discipline to develop the habit of putting your keys in the same place every time.
The basics of a good productivity system is what I call COD - Collect, Organise and Do. To collect everything that comes your way into your inbox, to then organise everything you collected that day into its rightful place, and to do the work you planned to do is not a difficult concept. In fact, it is a logical, simple concept. Putting it into practice day after day doesn’t take a PhD degree either. It’s simple. What it does take though is discipline. The discipline to collect everything, to organise it and to do it when you want to get it done, rather than need to get it done.
We all have those days when we just don’t feel in the mood. When we just want to stay in bed and do nothing but watch TV all day. We are human after all. But what I have noticed in the most productive people I’ve met is they know exactly what they want to accomplish each day and they start the day with that knowledge. It gives them a kind of energy to get themselves out of bed and start the day full of energy. It’s as if they see each new day as a new opportunity to achieve something fantastic. And that’s true. Each new day does give you a new opportunity to create something very special.
Another trait I’ve seen with very productive people is they are in complete control of their calendars. They know what’s on their calendar because they put it there. I notice this with my own dentist. She’s an incredibly productive person. All her scary tools are placed exactly where she needs them and she carefully plans out each treatment course with each patient. Her appointments calendar is linked to her personal calendar so she only allows appointment times that will fit into her lifestyle. Even though, as a dentist, her day is made up of patient appointments, those appointment times fit around her schedule and not given at the whim of patients or anyone else. She allows enough flexibility on her calendar to deal with emergencies and I’ve never seen her overstretched or stressed.
And that’s one of the benefits of being in control of your calendar. You can keep things flexible, and prevent anything going on there that you have no real desire to do. It also means when you do your Golden Ten at the end of the day you can trust that what is on your calendar is what you want to do and not something other people want you to do but you have not desire to do yourself.
But it always comes back to self-discipline. You need the self-discipline to collect everything that has meaning to you, to organise that stuff into its appropriate place and to just get on with the work whether or not you are in the mood to do so. You need the self-discipline to say no to the things you do not want to do—even if that is saying no to your boss or clients.
It’s hard, I’m certainly not suggesting otherwise. But although it is hard, it is a skill or trait worth developing. Because when you do have the discipline to do the collecting, organising and doing as well as saying no to the things you feel will not take you or your life further forward, you will find you begin to feel a lot less stressed and much happier. You will feel nothing can stop you achieving the things you want to achieve and you start to get a lot more of your important work done.
So how do you become more disciplined with your productivity system?
The best place to start is with your collecting. Take a weekend and have a look at how you have your collection tools set up. Are they apps on your phone, or is it a simple notebook. Ask yourself: is this the best way to collect everything? Look at your general collection system—by that I mean if you have an idea, how would you collect it right now while you are listening to this podcast. Is it easy? Is it fast? If not, find a way to make it easier and faster. Once you are happy with your collection system, try it for a week. Make sure you are not resisting. Make sure that you do it every time every day. Tweak it if necessary but make sure you are doing it every time.
For the organising part, get that on your calendar. Choose a time at the end of the day when you know you will not likely be disturbed and block a fifteen-minute segment in your calendar. I personally block 10pm every weekday to do my organising. I don’t schedule calls and I don’t allow anything to stop me from taking ten to fifteen minutes to organise every thing I collected that day. I have actually made a routine out of the time between 9:30pm and 10:30pm. I take my dog out for a walk at 9:30pm and when we get back around 10pm I do my organising. I’m usually finished organising by 10:15pm and I then do a little reading or watch a short video before heading off to bed at 10:30pm. Creating a pre-bedtime routine is a great way to build your discipline. Once the routine becomes a habit, you no longer feel you have to push yourself to get on with it.
Finally, on the doing part, well that is a natural progression from your Golden Ten. (that’s the ten minutes at the end of the day when you organise and plan the next day) once you have completed your Golden Ten you should have a clear view of what you want to get accomplished tomorrow and what your two objectives for the day are. Once you have those written down or onto your to-do list you can go to bed happy knowing that the day ahead is planned and you are ready.
Sure, all this does take time to build up the routines. But before they become a habit and a routine, you need the discipline to follow through and do this every day. After a week or so it starts to feel natural and after two or three months you are well on your way to making being a productive person just a part of who you are.
Changing old habits is hard. I know. I’ve been there. But change is how we grow into better people. The discipline and effort are well worth it because of what you become. Yes, you will fall down, you will slip into old habits, but the important thing is you get back into developing your routines and habits as quickly as you can. It will feel like hard work when you start. There will be days when you think it’s just not worth it. That’s when you need to tell yourself that the effort will reward you massively in the future and tomorrow is another day with another attitude and another chance to prove to yourself you can change and you can become more productive.
When you become more disciplined about how you organise your life, you will find there will be other areas of your life you can change too. Areas you are not happy with and with your new found discipline and productivity skills you will find your whole life will change in so many positive ways.
Good luck, Janet and again, thank you so much for your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about David Allen’s Getting Things Done.
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Hello and welcome to episode 35 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a question about GTD and what I think is the most important part of the whole GTD philosophy. It’s a great question because all five parts are important in their own way. But there is one part that if you don’t do it, nothing else will work.
Before I get into the answer though, I want to let you guys know that I recently updated my learning centre. I’m very excited about this because it takes me to the next stage of my online course development for all of you. To celebrate this launch, I have a HUGE sale on my bundled courses. I have taken off over 50% these courses and you can take advantage of this special offer. All you need to do is go to the special offer page—a link to which is in the show notes—and buy yourself a bundle. When you do buy a bundle you will get all future updates for free as well as any new courses I do. You are in a way, inflation proofing yourself. So go on. Pick yourself up a bundle today. The offer ends at Midnight on Monday, but for you wonderful people I have secretly extended the offer to lunch-time on Tuesday.
If you really want to get yourself better organised and become more productive, this is a wonderful opportunity to get yourself some valuable education, an education you can take with you everywhere you go.
Okay, onto this week’s question. So that means it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Paul in Canada. Paul asks, Hi Carl. I’m a big fan of GTD (Getting Things Done) and was wondering what, in your opinion is the most important part of GTD?
Before I go… Don’t forget to get yourself enrolled in one of the bundles. This will be something you will never regret.
Good question and this is a question I have pondered over the years. I’ve switched between all parts of the GTD process, but in the end, to me, there really is only one part that is crucial. That is the collecting (or capture in GTD speak)
The reason for this is if you are not collecting your commitments, appointments and ideas, it doesn’t matter how elaborate or beautiful or well organised your system is, if you have nothing to put in it, it is never going to work. The whole point of any productivity system is you are getting out of your mind the stuff that you are trying to remember and to get them into a trusted place where you can make decisions about them when you have more time. If you are not collecting anything, then you have no decisions to make and you will be trying to remember everything in your head. And, as we all know, that is not the best place to keep stuff you want to remember or make a decision about later.
Part of the reason many people feel overwhelmed and overstressed is that they are trying to remember everything in their heads. Now out heads were not designed to be memory banks. Our heads were designed to recognise patterns—we walk outside and we see rain, that tells us we need to either put on raincoats or grab an umbrella. Or if we absolutely must remember to take a book to work with us, we place the book in front of the front door so that our brain will see it in the morning and say: “ that doesn’t look right. Why is the book there? Oh yes, I must take that book to work with me” Our brain is seeking out patterns and things that are out of place. That triggers a response and that response results in an action.
The problem here is when we try and trust our brains to remember things like call that customer, reply to that email and buy milk. All these little tasks have no triggers unless they are written down in a trusted place. When you’ve had a long day at work, fighting fires and dealing with all the issues, as you go home you are thinking about all the things you need to remember for tomorrow, you are not going to remember to buy the milk. Our brains are just not that good at things like that.
When you have a great collecting system though, you can get all those things you have to remember out of your head. When you trust the place you put them in, then you start to make progress.
Of course, if you’re not processing or organising what you collected, then things will fall apart at that level, but if you don’t collect, then everything falls apart and you will feel overwhelmed and stressed trying to remember everything that comes your way.
Once you understand the importance of collecting everything in a trusted place, you can then begin to develop ways of making the collecting process as fast and easy as possible. In my early days of GTD, I carried a little pocket sized notebook with me everywhere, but I soon realised that was just another thing to remember to take with me. It wasn’t the most efficient way to do it. When the iPhone finally launched in Korea in 2009, that was when I really got my collecting system working.
Our phones are always with us. We carry them everywhere and smartphones are basically pocket-sized powerful computers. In this little device, we have access to all the information we could want. We also have the ability to collect any information we want in almost any format. That could be text, a photo, a PDF file, an email or a webpage. There’s no need to be carrying around scraps of paper, napkins or any other random materials with scribbled down numbers and don’t forgets. Everything can be collected in one place.
That though does create it own challenges. Yes, you can now collect everything very easily in almost any format, but where do you store it? Where can you collect all this stuff so when you need to see it you know exactly where it is? Now, this is the reason I have always advocated creating as simple a system as you can. I like to think of it as my “one project” one app for one purpose.
What I mean by this is having one app for each of the different types of things you collect. So, if I make an appointment, it goes straight into my calendar. If I have an idea, it goes straight into my notes app and if I have a commitment or task it goes into my to-do list manager.
So, in my case: random thoughts and ideas - Evernote. Tasks and commitments - Todoist and events and appointments - calendar. Each app has a purpose, each app deals with a different purpose.
Now, I know many of you may be thinking, couldn’t you do that with one app and sure this is possible. But I’m thinking a little more long-term than that. When I am organising, I like to compartmentalise. When I am organising my tasks and projects I want to be working in my task manager. When I am developing ideas and projects I like the free-flowing functionality Evernote gives me. And of course, when I need to know where I am going to be, I will look at my calendar. It’s just the way I like to compartmentalise. You, of course, may be different and prefer everything collected in one place. There really is no right or wrong way of doing this. The important thing is whichever way you do it, it works for you.
So, if collecting is the most important part of any productivity system, the next question to ask is how do I optimise my collecting system?—How do I make collecting as easy and fast as possible?
One of the things I’ve found over the years is if your collection system is not efficient and fast you will not collect everything. You will continue to trust your head to remember things. When you optimise your collecting for speed and ease, there is no reason to resist and you will soon develop the habit of getting everything into your system.
Now I do a complete review of my system every three months. I look at all areas of my system, from collecting and organising to doing (the COD system - Collect, organise, do) But the one area I spend most time on is looking at how I collect things. I look to see if I resist collecting certain types of stuff. If I am, I work out the reasons why and what can be done to remove the barrier. Most of the time it is because I have too many steps. I apply what I call “the subway test”. This is where I ask: can I collect an idea, task or appointment while transferring trains while on the Seoul subway system? Essentially can I capture using one hand and my phone? If the answer is yes, I see if there are any ways this could be sped up. Using Siri for example, or are there any new capturing apps like BrainToss or Drafts? Are they faster than Drafts? Etc etc.
So for me, the speed and simplicity of collecting stuff is the most important part of the GTD system. I would guess over the years I have spent hour and hours fine-tuning my system so I could make this part of the GTD system as fast and efficient as possible.
For those of you wondering how I have things optimised at the moment, then I use Drafts. Drafts is a little note-taking app with a huge amount of power. It allows me to collect everything from a task, an appointment to an idea into just one app. Once the task, appointment or idea has been collected I can send it either direct to my Todoist inbox, my Evernote inbox or my calendar. I’ve been using Drafts for years now and hands down it is by far the best collecting tool I have come across.
The app sits in my dock on both my iPhone and iPad and it has become a simple habit for me to simply open up the app, type or dictate my thought and send it off to the right place.
Now for those of you interested, I have done a few videos on how I capture on my YouTube channel. Most recently, following an update to the Drafts App, I did a video on how I use it with both Evernote and Todoist. I will put a link to these videos in the show notes so you can see it all in action.
So there you go. In my humble opinion, if you really want to optimise your productivity system, begin by looking at how you collect stuff. Ask yourself the question “what can I do to make collecting as fast and as efficient as possible “ and really get fast at it.
It does take time to get into the habit of collecting and the habit-forming is part of the process, but once you are there, you really will have developed a process that will alleviate most of the stress and overwhelm you feel.
Thank you very much for listening to this podcast. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like answering you can contact me either by email, Twitter or Facebook. All my contact details are in the show notes.
And finally, if you really want to take your productivity to the next level and are serious about creating a life of joy, accomplishment and purpose then get yourself enrolled in one of my bundles while they on this amazing special offer. Remember, you only have 24 hours to get yourself enrolled to do it today. Get that into your collection system and get it done.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about handling digital distractions while working from home.
Links:
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Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Weekly Objectives Planning Sheet Download
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Hello and welcome to episode 34 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Digital Distractions. They are everywhere! Not just your phone and computer, but on billboards, in your car and on your TV. You just cannot escape them anymore. And that poses a problem for all of us. How can we get any quality work done if we are constantly being interrupted by a beep, ring or a breaking news banner? Well, that’s the topic for this week’s question.
Before we get into the answer for this week’s question, just a quick announcement. For all of you wonderful people enrolled in my Your Digital Life 2.0 Online course, I released the fourth supplemental class last week. You can access it via your learning centre login page. If you haven’t enrolled yet, and struggle with getting all your stuff—your commitments, projects, appointments and life—organised then this course is designed to help you by giving you the skills and know-how to develop your system so that nothing can stop you. You will learn to prioritise, build your goals into your daily life and start living the life you want to live. Details of the course are in the show notes.
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question:
This week’s question comes from Simon. Simon asks, "How do you deal with digital distraction when working at home"?
Ahhh distractions, and not just any distractions, digital distractions and when we are working from home. Thank you, Simon, for this question. I know this one is a real issue for many people, whether or not you work from home, and if not dealt with can lead to missed deadlines and a lot of stress.
Fortunately, there are a few strategies you can follow that will help. But for these to work you are going to have to put your phone down. For some of you, I know that is going to be very difficult. But the reality is, as with any distraction, you always have a choice whether to acknowledge the distraction and let it into your life or not.
The first, obvious thing you can do is turn off those beeps and pings. You don’t need them. You are going to be looking at your phone or computer within the next few minutes anyway—we all do these days. Why do you need some kind of sound to also tell you you have a new email, a new What’s App message and a Facebook mention? Just turn the sounds off. Instead, leave the badge app icon on. What this does is leave that little red number on the app if you have anything unread. If your most important apps are on your home screen you will see that little red circle next time you pick up your phone and let’s be honest, we all look at our phones perhaps a little too frequently.
Whether you want anything showing up in your notifications list is entirely up to you. I would suggest you do an audit of your apps, both on your desktop and mobile devices and turn off any notifications from apps that are not going to be giving you anything urgent. Facebook, Twitter etc. I like to have important messages show up in my notification screen. I have my messaging apps, my email of course and any missed calls. The problem is when you download a new app, by default most of them get added to your notifications screen. My guess is you will find most of them are not required so you can turn them off.
I keep Facebook notifications on in my notification screen simply because my mother uses Facebook to communicate with me. But for all other social media my notifications are off.
The next thing you can do is to get serious about your work time. Working from home gives you a lot more freedom about when you sit down and do work. With that freedom also comes the opportunity to waste time checking email, social media and the news. And we all know these can take you journeys of pure time procrastination heaven. Not good if you want to get work done.
Use your calendar to block time out for focused work. Let’s say you block out 2 hours between 9 am and 11 am for focused work and allow yourself between 11:00 am and 11:30 am for communications. How you define communications is up to you. It could mean just email, or you could broaden it to include social media messages. Allow yourself some flexibility here. You’ve just done a period of two hours, uninterrupted work. You deserve a reward of some sort.
If you work for a company that monitors you while you are working have the discussion with your boss. See if you can have that two hours of uninterrupted time. Don’t just assume your boss will not allow it. It’s surprising how amenable to time blocking bosses are when they can see the benefits to the quality of your work it will bring.
Another great way to minimise distractions, if you can do it, is to get up early. Last week I had an early morning meeting cancel on me. I was already awake having just completed my 5-6 am studying and found I had a full morning of uninterrupted time. So, at 6 am I got on with the writing work I needed to do that day. By 8 am all my writing was complete and I had begun doing the less important stuff. By 9:30 am I had finished all my work for the day and I received no digital distractions at all. Purely by accident, I had spent three-and-a-half hours doing work with no distractions and I got all the days work done. That goes to show just how much time you lose to distractions every single day.
I’ve written about this story in the first edition of Your Digital Life, and it’s worth repeating. Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond, and my writing hero used to write when he was staying at his holiday home in Jamaica every January to March. Between 9 am and 12 pm every day. He would close the windows to his writing room and just write. his wife and guests staying with him knew not to disturb him and he just got on and wrote. Back in the 1950s, there were no mobile phones or computers connected to the interweb and he had no landline phone at his house, Goldeneye. It was famously sparse—we would call it minimalistic today. It was just him, his typewriter and his imagination. No distractions at all. Ian Fleming managed to write a full novel each year in just six weeks using this method.
But times have changed and we live in a very different world from 1950s Jamaica. We have a lot more digital distractions, however, I believe we should sometimes try to recreate the environment from 1950s Jamaica and just turn everything off and focus on the work we want to get done. I actually do this every Monday morning. Monday’s is when I write my weekly blog post. Between 10 am and 12 pm I sit down at my desk and write. My phone is on do not disturb, and there is no one around to distract me. For me, it is two hours of pure heaven. I can fully understand why Ian Fleming managed to write a full novel in 6 weeks. Those 2 hours of undistracted time is some of the most productive hours I have each week.
Another area you can look at is when you are at your most creative. What I mean by at your most creative is when your mind is freshest and is primed for doing work. I always thought I was a night owl. But I found that actually, I am much more creative in a morning. This means I am much less susceptible to distractions in the morning. While I can do work in the evening, I find I am much more likely to run down rabbit holes of digital procrastination and so the quality and quantity of my work suffers. Once I discovered this, I began scheduling my important work in the mornings and my less important, or less time-sensitive work in the evenings. That gave my productivity a huge boost. I was much less tempted by Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and felt much more comfortable with my phone off.
Finally, another trick I use is setting deadlines to finish work. Currently, my wife is in China and each evening we have a FaceTime call. We talk around the same time every evening so I know roughly what time I need to get my evening admin work done by. This acts not only as an incentive to get my work finished it also gives me a nice deadline each evening. Our minds are very good at getting work done by a set time if we set a finish time. Quite often, particularly when we work from home, our finish time can be quite open. We think if I don’t finish by dinner-time, I can come back after dinner and continue for another hour. The problem here is your mind doesn’t have any sense of urgency when you do this. If you begin the day by fixing the time you will finish you will find you work much faster and are less likely to allow yourself to be distracted by the non-important. There is a sense of urgency and that will work in your favour.
Well, I hope you found these tips and tricks useful. Remember, your phone or any digital device is not your master and you should never ever let them become your master. Digital devices are your servants. They are there to serve you and not the other way round. If you have important work to do then give your servants time off and focus yourself on the work that needs doing.
Thank you very much for listening to this episode. Don’t forget to check out the Your Digital Life 2.0 online course, there is a lot of great stuff in there that could turn you into a productivity ninja with a system you create that you trust and helps you to get your most important projects and goals done.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast, I answer my own question about waking up at 5 AM.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Weekly Objectives Planning Sheet Download
The Ultimate Goal Planning Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Hello and welcome to episode 33 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this week’s episode a change from the usual format. This week, the question comes from myself and is about why I decided to join the 5 AM Club, made famous by Robin Sharma and what I have discovered about waking up at this un-Godly hour and why I believe you should be doing the same.
But, before we get into this week’s question I’d like to ask any of you wonderful listeners who also watch my videos on YouTube if you have anything you would like me to cover in my Todoist, Evernote or Working With Work series, please get in touch and let me know. I love answering your questions and I would like to open this up to my YouTube channel as well. All my contact details are in the show notes, but if you won’t look at those, you can simply email at carl@carlpullein.com
Okay, it’s now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question:
This week’s questions from… Carl. Carl asks: So, Carl why are you waking up at 5AM every morning?
Good question Carl.
Well, I guess most of you have heard people say that waking up early is a positive habit to have. It energises you, it gets you ahead of the day and it put you in front of everyone else because very few people do it. And sure, I also had heard all those things, but honestly, I was never really tempted to join those early birds. I preferred to allow myself to think I was a night owl and that mornings were just not for me. It’s a very comfortable way to think and it meant I could continue deluding myself into thinking I was simply not made to wake up early.
But being comfortable is not really a good state to be in. When you are comfortable you are not growing. You are not developing and you are not becoming better. Over time if you allow yourself to remain comfortable you begin to stagnate and when that happens you soon find your whole life stagnates. You no longer get those promotions, your health begins to decline, you stop making new friends and seeking out amazing people and mentally you stop learning. Comfortable is a state that should scare you.
This is why I made the decision to start waking up early. I knew I was making excuses for not waking up early by deluding myself into thinking I was not an early bird. I also needed to find time to study Korean language to fluency over the next twelve months and after many failed attempts of studying in the evening there really was only one option left. Study Korean between 5AM and 6AM every morning. That knowledge has been spinning around in my mind for a few months now. So, I decided to do something about it. I began waking up at 5AM on Monday last week to study Korean.
Now, I’m not going to deny it, it was not easy waking up at 5AM. The first day was hard, so was the second. But I persisted. It takes a lot of self-discipline and, I believe, more importantly, a purpose. I have a clear purpose for waking up at 5AM. I want to be fluent in Korean by June next year. The benefits to me of being fluent in the language of the country I live in far outweigh the luxuries of staying in bed. The thing that has really surprised me is that after years of telling myself I cannot wake up early, I can. And it is not as difficult as I led myself to believe. Now, after two weeks of doing this—yeah, I know it’s still early days—I love waking up early. I no longer feel exhausted during the day and although I do go to bed an hour earlier than I was doing before, nothing much else has changed to the way I do my work.
I have also found I enjoy learning Korean—something after many failed attempts before I have never done—and I feel I am progressing. There have been days where I felt I didn’t learn very much, but I have noticed even after a short period of time I can read hangul faster (the name of the Korean characters) and I feel more confident when using taxis, ordering coffee and shopping.
So, should you join the club? Yes, I think you should. But there are a few things you do need to know before you start.
It’s all well and good waking up at 5AM, but if you have no plan to do something constructive with the hour between 5 and 6 you are going to waste the opportunity it gives you. If all you do is check your social media, email and worry about work, then you are not making the most of this wonderful hour. I have made it a rule not to check my email or social media during this time. This one hour is for study. Once I am fluent in Korean I will find something else to learn. This is a very special time. No one is disturbing me… Well, my little dog is. He doesn’t understand why we are waking up so early. You need to make the most of this quiet time. You can use it for exercise, meditation, planning or learning or a combination of all these things. What you do need to do is have a purpose. A reason for waking up early. Without that, you are going to find it very difficult to find the motivation for lifting your head off your pillow when your alarm goes off.
You should also be ready to adjust your evening routine a little. The first couple of days I went to bed around the same time I always had done. This was a mistake. Because I was waking up around an hour earlier than I used to do, that lost hour of sleep was really hurting my effectiveness and productivity during the day. After a couple of days, I realised I needed to go to bed earlier to compensate for the earlier start. That made a very big difference to the way I felt during the day. Now. Instead of going to bed at 11:30pm, I am am heading off to bed around 10:30pm. It does mean I have to get my work finished by 10pm so I can go through my evening routine and plan the next day, but overall all I have had to do is spend less time reading what my friends have been up to on Facebook and Instagram and that is no real sacrifice.
You need to be committed to this. If you break the chain, so to speak, and skip one or two days, you are not going to maintain the progress. I am being flexible. I don’t wake up at 5 am on a Saturday or Sunday. I wake up at 7 am instead. I used to wake up around 8 am on a weekend, but as I am waking up an hour earlier during the week, I decided to wake up an hour earlier on a weekend. I also made sure I changed what I was studying on a weekend too. Instead of studying via notebooks and books, on a weekend I watch videos of news readers and interviews in Korean. This way I can learn the right intonation and enunciation in my target language. Whatever you decide to do with your extra hour, make sure if you do decide to maintain it on a weekend you do something a little different. It adds a little variation and variety and this will keep you fresh and prevent you from going stale.
Whatever you decide to do with your one hour, the biggest benefit you will find is you gain an hour of ‘me-time’. In a world where so many people are complaining about not having enough time to do the things they want to, when you begin waking up at 5 am and you spend that first hour of the day only on yourself you will feel a lot less stressed. It gives you time to think, time to work on yourself and time to do the things you want to do. This is your hour to do with whatever you want to do. Spending the time on developing yourself—becoming a better you—can only be a good thing. You can start that hobby you have always wanted to start, you can read the books you have always wanted to read, you can do the exercise you have always wanted to do or you can learn the language you have always wanted to speak. All these reasons are win wins for you. This is your hour after all.
Well, thank you very much for listening to this episode. I hope it has given you some motivation to get yourself out of your bed early in the morning and begin a new life of learning, self-improvement and growth. Remember, this is your time—time to spend on yourself—don’t waste the opportunity. Great things await you and all it takes is lifting your head off the pillow at 5 am in the morning. Good luck and please let me know how you get on and what you are doing with your special hour.
It just remains for me to wish all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about prioritising the tasks you do each day.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Weekly Objectives Planning Sheet Download
The Ultimate Goal Planning Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 32 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week’s question is all about achieving goals. Something I know a lot of people struggle with and yet, there is a method that is incredibly powerful and will change the way you think about how possible it is to achieve the goal.
Before we get into this week’s question though, I'd like to remind all of you who have enrolled in my Ultimate Guide To Goal Planning course that I published the first supplemental class last week. You can take the class by logging in to your account and you will find the class in the supplemental classes section.
Okay, let’s get into this week’s questions and so it is now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Charlie. Charlie asks: Hi Carl, I really struggle with getting started to achieve my goals. I know what I want to achieve, but just don’t know where to start. Do you have any tips for getting started with my goals?
Good question, Charlie.
I think the hardest thing about achieving goals is not really discovering what you want to achieve, but rather how to get started achieving the goals. Knowing where to start and how to start can be very difficult.
Once you have discovered what it is you want to achieve you should write it down. Whether that is in a digital format or in a paper notebook is really up to you. My advice is to write it in a format you prefer. Personally, when I write out my goals in the first place, I usually do it on paper. There’s a very good reason for doing this. The process of writing out your goals helps to get your mind accepting your goal. In many ways, your mind is going to be your best friend and your worst enemy. Best friend because your mind will give you the methods to achieve your goals. Worst enemy because your mind will also throw up all the excuses you need for not doing anything towards achieving them.
Once written down, I start writing out the action steps I will need to achieve those goals. At this point, it’s more of a brain dump, rather than a strategic game plan. I want to get as many ways I can think of to achieve the goals written down. Some are crazy, some a practical. It really doesn’t matter. What matters is I have a long list of ways I can achieve my goal.
Once I have fleshed out my goal with actionable steps I go through those actions and delete all the impractical ones or ones I feel isn’t going to work. I then transfer these practical steps to my to-do list manager. I want to be able to build those actions into my daily to-dos.
However, before I get to even fleshing out my goals on paper there is a simple trick I use that is incredibly powerful and one that transforms a goal from a statement into a question that has my brain seeking ways to make the goal happen. It’s a simple change, but one that lights up the creative centre in your brain.
Let’s say you have a goal to earn $1 million in the next 12 months. Now for a moment let’s forget about whether this is possible or not. What most people do is write it out like:
“I will earn $1 million in the next 12 months.”
Now the problem with writing it this way is your brain will now start thinking of all the reasons why you cannot earn $1 million in the next twelve months. (this is your worst enemy at work) Our survival instinct in our brains is programmed to avoid failure and risk and having such an ambitious goal, your survival brain is going to recognise the potential for failure and begin the process of discouraging you from setting the goal. If that fails, it will give you all the excuses you need to not start working on achieving it. This is because many thousands of years ago when we were on the menu for large tigers and other predators, any risk we took would likely result in us being consumed by one of them. Not a good outcome. So we are naturally very adverse to risk and the possibility of failure.
Instead of writing goals out in this way, reframe the goal as a question. By that I mean ask yourself “What do I have to do to…” and then write your goal. So in our $million example, we would write the goal out as:
What do I have to do to earn $1 million in the next 12 months?
What happens next is something bordering on miraculous. Instead of your brain looking for excuses why you cannot achieve the goal, it will now start looking for ways to achieve it. It’s quite scary how your brain changes from being negative about a goal to becoming a creative solutions machine for finding ways you can achieve it.
Now I tested this out the other day. I don’t really have a goal of earning $1 million in the next twelve months, but I decided to try this out. The first thing I did was ask - how much do I have to earn each day to make a million dollars in the year? That worked out at $2,740 per day. I then asked how many products would I have to sell per day to earn that, that worked out at 90. Suddenly, instead of looking at the goal of earning 1 million dollars I was asking “what do I have to do to sell 90 products per day?” This took me into all sorts of different avenues and in the end, I came up with a set of things I would have to do to change the way I am working today so that over the next twelve months I could earn 1 million dollars.
But let’s take this to a more realistic level. Imagine you want to lose some weight. And in this example, you want to lose 30 pounds in the next six months. Challenging, but not impossible. So here you might start asking what do you have cut out of your diet that would help losing weight. Perhaps you eat too many cookies or maybe you put too much sugar in your coffee. So you could write down reduce my sugar intake by half, or stop eating cookies Monday to Friday. You might decide going out for a walk at lunchtime would help or taking an evening stroll after dinner. Basically, what you are doing is writing out as many ways you can think of that would help you to achieve your goal. It’s a sort of brain dump.
The point here is that your brain goes from searching for reasons and excuses about why you cannot achieve your goal of searching for ways you can achieve your goal.
Once you have a list of ways to achieve your goal, you can now start sorting them out into what you could start doing straight away. You can look for action steps that you can begin doing today or tomorrow. You can delete the ones you think will not help and you can add others as they come to you.
The deeper you go with this, the more likely you will find better ways of achieving your goal. You may find you have to adjust your timeline a little—something I often have to do with my goals.I can be a little over-optimistic at times—but if you stick with it, you will soon find action steps you can start right away that will begin your journey towards achieving your goal.
Once you have a good list of action steps, get them into your to-do list manager. I often find people write goals down in a separate place from their to-do list manager. This could be a notes app or a journal somewhere. That is good, but if they are not also in your daily to-do list manager you are not going to do the necessary tasks to achieve your goals. The action tasks required to achieve your goals need to be in your daily to-do list and the only way to get them into your daily to-do list is to have them set up as projects in your task manager. I know duplication, generally, is not a good thing, but in this instance having your goals written down in a journal or notebook and also in your task manager where they are feeding your daily to-do list works and works extremely well. It helps to keep your goals up front and centre when you are planning your day or week.
Finally, I use what I call my Weekly Objectives Plan. This is a sheet I use when I do my weekly review on a Sunday afternoon. This sheet helps me to focus on the things that are important to me. Now, this is not just about my goals, it is about all the things I want to achieve over the next week. There is a section dedicated to my goals and habits. This is where I can allocate a particular goal to each day of the week. Once I have completed this sheet I make sure that my daily to-do lists for the following week have action steps each day related to the goals I want to focus on. This helps me to stay accountable to my goals and ensures each day I have to do something towards achieving my goals. Of course, there will be days when events over-take you and you may find you cannot do what you wanted to do. But the idea is that by using this planning sheet you will stay focused each week on what you want to achieve as part of your goals. You can download this worksheet from my website, carl pullein.com - there’s a link in the show notes where you can download it for yourself.
Hopefully, this answers your question, Charlie and thank you. Thank you also to all of you for listening to this episode. If you want to learn more about planning and achieving your goals I have an online course you can enrol in at my learning centre. There’s a link to the course in the show notes and it would wonderful to see you there.
It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about prioritising the tasks you do each day.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about prioritising the tasks you do each day.
Hello and welcome to episode 31 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week it’s all about prioritising, and how to prioritise your daily tasks. I know this can be difficult because we often feel every task has a priority and so deciding what must be done and what you would like to do can be overwhelming sometimes. Getting good at this takes a little time and continuous practice but it is possible.
Before we get into this week’s question, could you do me a little favour? If you like this podcast or any previous episode of the Working With… Podcast and you feel what is discussed could help someone, please share it with them. This way, together we can help a million people discover the wonderful benefits of being better organised and becoming more productive.
Okay, it’s time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, who has found her voice again, for this week’s question.
This week’s question from TJ. TJ asks:
How do you use the concept of "priority" in your daily tasks? Is it strictly an indicator of "importance" or does it serve some other function in your system?
Excellent question, TJ.
For me, a task becomes a priority when it is important to me and the work that I do. Seldom does a task for someone else become a priority unless it leads directly to achieving something important. Let me give you an example. If I have a task such as write this week’s blog post and a task to review a presentation for a client. The priority for me would be write the blog post first as that directly contributes to my goals and purpose. Reviewing the presentation, while important for my client, it would only be done after I have written the blog post. It would still get done that day, but I would not drop everything else to review the presentation file for my client. For me, my higher purpose is to help as many people as I can get better at productivity and time management. The blog post would help more people. The presentation helps one person. Bear in mind, the presentation review still gets done that day, it’s just a question of priorities and in which order I would do the tasks.
Another reason I would choose to write the blog post is that it requires a lot more creative energy. Reviewing a presentation is simply checking keywords, spelling and grammar. Writing a blog post requires creativity and thought. I know my brain’s ability to be creative is much better in a morning so that task would get done first.
To get better at deciding what your priorities are I would always suggest that tasks that contribute to your higher purpose, your goals and the things you want to achieve should always come first. They should be your priority. The dangerous trap we often fall in to is when we want to please people. When we prioritise pleasing other people we sacrifice what is important to us for what is important to someone else. That never leads to a good outcome for us.
Of course to get better at prioritising we need to know what is important to us. I find a lot of people have never taken any time out to think about this. That is a mistake. When you don’t know what is important to you, the things that are important to other people will always become your priorities. If the only important thing about your work is the paycheque every month, then the priorities of your boss and colleagues will become your priorities. Your own career, happiness and development will not be a priority. You will just do work set by other people, you will never volunteer to be involved in projects that develop you, you will never grow your own skill set and you will never go very far with your career. You will be, in effect, stuck in a dead-end job. A dead-end job of your own making. There’s no one else to blame… Really.
If you haven’t done so already, I would recommend you take a piece of paper and write out the fifty things you want to do in the next ten years. This is a great exercise because it forces you to think about what you want and not what someone else wants. When you do this you will find the first ten to fifteen things are easy. It’s after you have twenty things on your list when things get harder. Then you have to force yourself to go deep and think. What you will find revealing is the things you come up with after the first ten or fifteen. These are the real, subconscious things you really want to do and it will tell you a lot about what is really important to you. It might be travel, it might be a beautiful home, it could be experiences you want to experience in your life or it could be skills you want to acquire. All these are good things.
So how do you prioritise on a daily basis? For me the best way to do this is to ask the question:
What two tasks could I complete today that would have the biggest impact on my goals/projects?
This question is powerful in that it really focuses your mind on the things that are important to you. What you are looking for are the two tasks on your daily list of tasks that you feel will take you a little closer towards achieving what you want to achieve. Something as simple as going out for a walk at lunchtime would contribute to your goal of losing some weight or spending thirty minutes on the outline of the book you want to write. Anything like these would be good tasks to prioritise as they are focused on the things that are important to you.
Now of course, I am not suggesting you exclude everyone and everything from your priorities. That would be impractical. What I am saying is that you should never forget about what you want. If your career is important to you and you want to climb up the company towards senior management, then your boss’s priorities may very well be also a priority for you. If your family and friends are important to you, then prioritising spending time with them is also important. What is important is that you get to choose what is important to you and what is not. Not someone else!
I always recommend you only prioritise two tasks in this way. Two tasks are achievable. If you start getting greedy and try to achieve four or five such tasks per day you are going to fail to complete them every day. When that happens the power of your two objectives for the day loses its power. Two tasks are achievable and once they are completed you will feel great.
Now for the rest of your daily tasks, I would suggest you prioritise eight more tasks. This means each day you have ten tasks that you have assigned a priority. Your two objectives and eight other tasks. The reason for this is that we all probably have more than two tasks we need to complete each day. Some are more important than others. Some must be completed that day others not necessarily. By selecting eight further tasks as would really like to get done today—but it would not be the end of the world if you don’t—it helps you to keep focused on other projects and keep things moving forward each day.
The beauty of prioritising in this way is that you are always moving forward on your goals and projects. Nothing gets missed and you are forced to stay focused on what you want every day. The problem most people find is when things get very busy in their lives, and it will from time to time, it is far too easy to lose focus on what is important to us and end up sliding towards doing work that is not important to us. We start to feel busy and overwhelmed which leads to stress and a feeling we are running around in circles achieving very little. This method of prioritisation allows you to have two tasks every single day that you can focus on getting done.
I mix my two objectives for the day up quite a bit. On busy days, when I have a lot of classes and meetings I would make them easy tasks to complete not requiring a lot of time to do. On less busy days I will choose tasks that may take longer. This is why when you do your Golden 10—the daily mini-planning session at the end of the day—you can see from your calendar how busy you are going to be and make wise choices.
It doesn’t take a lot of effort to prioritise your day, but it does take commitment. Spending ten minutes at the end of the day to look at your calendar, your tasks for the next day and selecting two tasks to be your objectives for the next day are well worth the time. This ten minute period, and that’s all it takes once you get into the habit of doing it, can transform your productivity. It can focus you on what is important to you and it can keep you moving in the right direction. And that is what being productive is all about.
I hope that helps you. Please remember, if you have a question you would like answering on this show, please drop me a line either by email or by DMing me on Facebook or Twitter and I will be delighted to answer your question.
Thank you very much for listening. It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast, I answer a question about how I have managed to maintain a running and exercise programme despite working a full-time job.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Ultimate Goal Planning Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 30 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this week’s episode, I have a question about health and fitness. This is an important question because we all know being fit and healthy and doing some exercise regularly is vital to our long-term health. We are living longer and expecting more, yet if we don’t look after our health in our early lives, it will come back and destroy the quality of our lives when we get older. What we eat, how much alcohol we drink, whether we smoke and how frequently we exercise are all important factors if we want to maintain our health and vitality long into our lives.
Before we get to the question though, thank you to all of you who have enrolled in my Ultimate Goal Planning course. I will be updating this course regularly, as I do with my Your Digital Life 2.0 course, so keep your eyes open for additional classes coming through each month. If you haven’t enrolled yet, you can enrol in the course from the link in the show notes for this podcast. The whole purpose of the course to get you thinking about what you want, rather than spending too much time worrying about what others want from you. This is your life and you get to decide what you want to get out of it if you just take some time out to decide what it is you want.
Okay, let’s get on with answering this weeks question. Unfortunately, the Mystery Podcast Voice has lost her voice this week, so I shall be reading out the question:
This week’s question comes from Bjorn in Norway. Bjorn asks:
H, Carl,l I have just started running and would like to know how you manage your running programme. I’d also like to know if you have any tips on equipment and training that you could pass on. Thanks.
Thank you, Bjorn, for this wonderful question.
Firstly whenever starting any exercise programme you need to decide when would be the best time to do it and how often. Usually, when someone starts out on an exercise programme they haven’t exercised for many years and so just deciding you are going go out running or to the gym everyday is not realistic. Your muscles are going to be sore, in some cases very sore, and you need to allow time for your body to adapt to this new stress you are putting on it. My advice to all newbies is to go for three times a week for the first month. Any more than that and you are likely to find it so painful you are going to want to give up in the first week. You don’t want that to happen, so go for three times a week to allow your body time to adapt.
Next up, is to decide when you are going to do it. I found asking the question am I a morning or night person? Was a great question to ask. There’s a lot of advice out there that tells you to exercise early in the morning and in general, this is good advice. But for me, I hate exercise in the morning. I never look forward to it and I feel very uncomfortable. I prefer afternoons for exercise and because of the nature of my work, the afternoons work perfectly for me. Find the best time for you and the type of person you are. We not all morning people and some of us prefer evening times. If you are one of those people, then do your exercise in the evening.
The next thing to do is to schedule your exercise time on your calendar. Block out one hour. Even if you only exercise for 20 to 30 minutes, you will still need to shower afterwards. So block one hour. This time is sacrosanct. You must decide never to allow anything or anyone take away your exercise time. This is why it is important to schedule that one hour at a time you know will not easily be stolen by something or someone else. I schedule 2 to 3pm for my exercise days. This works for me as I have classes and meetings in the morning and I teach in the evenings. The afternoons are generally free for me, so this time works. It is on my calendar and what goes on my calendar gets done… My golden rule.
While on the subject of blocking your exercise time on your calendar, I would also suggest you do the scheduling of your exercise sessions on a week to week basis. This means you can look at your calendar and see which days are very busy. On those days you may find you are not likely to have the time. Don’t schedule sessions for those days. Wishfully thinking you will exercise on exhausting days is a sure fire way to lose your commitment. Only schedule sessions when you know absolutely you will be able to do them.
When scheduling your sessions, don’t just write “exercise” be more specific. For example, write “run 5km” or “Do 30 mins gym session”. The more specific you are the more motivated you will be. On my light days I usually write “do 20 mins circuit training” I find this is much more motivating than having a vague term such as “gym” or “run” on my calendar.
Once you have committed yourself, how do you start a running programme? This is much easier than most people think. Always start with what I call a run/walk session. What this means is you run until you feel uncomfortable and then walk until you feel recovered enough and then run again until you feel uncomfortable and repeat the process. If you are new to running you will find you do not run very far. Don’t worry, that is perfectly normal. 100 to 200 metres might be all you can manage. That’s fine. Remember, it takes months and months of regular running to run a half-marathon. It takes time for your body to adapt and the right muscles to develop. So don’t expect to run 5km without the need to walk in your first few weeks. It might even take you months before you can run 5KM without stopping for a walk. It all depends on your physical condition when you start. The important thing is you keep going out on your scheduled runs. Over time you will find you can run farther and require less walking.
A quick tip here is you can use lamp posts to measure you progress. If you can run 3 lamp-posts when you start and at the end of the month you can run 5 lamp-posts without stopping you are making progress.
Just a quick word on muscle soreness, you are going to feel it. You are going wake up in the morning and feel very sore and stiff. That’s normal when you start any kind of exercise programme. After a few weeks that soreness and stiffness will disappear. It is just your body repairing itself and making your muscles stronger. You need to go through that process. It’s good for you. It makes you stronger and you join the same club millions of new runners and exercisers have joined. The pain of starting the journey. Enjoy it, it does not last long!
One thing I would add here is that as time goes by and as your programme develops you will find you start to feel so much healthier and more energetic. It inspires you to look at all areas of your life from your diet to the amount of time you spend sitting down each day. I found after a few weeks I enjoyed the feeling of losing weight (I lost 10 kilos that’s 22 pounds in 3 months when I started running again ten years ago) This inspired me to change my diet and make it healthier. I cut down the amount of sugar I put in my tea and coffee, I started eating salads for dinner during the week and only allowing myself things like pizza on a weekend. Over a few months, my whole lifestyle went from a slow decline in physical abilities to energising my whole lifestyle with increased strength and energy. It was an incredible transformation, not just physically, but mentally too.
Now as for equipment and training.
For running the most important investment you make is in your running shoes. Go to a proper running store (not an online one) and get advice. I find buying running shoes that are half a size bigger than I normally wear is a good tip. Exercise socks are usually thicker than everyday socks and your feet will expand quite a lot when running. Another piece of good advice is change your running shoes every six months. The shock absorption abilities of your running shoes declines as you build up the miles you run. You need to take care of your knees and shins. So don’t be economical with your investment in running shoes. These are you most important investment.
As far as clothing goes, just wear something that you feel comfortable in. If you are running long distances (10k or further) then the lighter the better. And on those sunny days, don’t forget the hat!
As for training, the best advice here is don’t increase your distance (or weight in the gym) until you feel comfortable with what you are currently doing. When you push yourself to go further, faster and longer too soon you are just going to get injured. Slow down. There’s no rush. Remember, once you decide to get fit it is a lifetime commitment, not just for a few weeks. So, don’t rush things.
One final tip for any new runners. Set yourself a goal to run a 10k race in six months time. 10k is a great distance because you will need to have a reasonable level of fitness to complete it. But don’t just set it was a goal. Enter the race. Pay your entrance fee and get it in your calendar. That way you are committed. It gives you a purpose beyond better health and fitness. It makes it feel more important every time you go out for a run.
Running for me has been a real pleasure. It is a great form of exercise because it not only improves my overall fitness, keeps my weight down and gives me bundles of energy every day. It also allows me periods of time to be with my own thoughts, listening to my favourite music and just to be out there off the online grid and be with nature. It’s not just physically good for you, it’s also mentally good for you.
Well, I hope that has answered your question, Bjorn, and again thank you for your wonderful question. I also hope these words have inspired you to at least start thinking about beginning an exercise programme. I can promise you the transformation you will see in yourself in just a few weeks will inspire you to make some incredibly positive changes to you life in so many other areas.
Don’t forget, if you think this podcast will inspire others, please share it with as many people you know. Together we can be part of a movement to help one million people to learn the wonderful benefits of being better organised and becoming more productive.
Thank you very much for listening to this podcast. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about maintaining your plan for the day when new demands are placed upon you.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Ultimate Goal Planning Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Hello and welcome to episode 29 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
Before we get started, I would like to thank everyone who has supported my Project 1 Million. There has been so much support and I feel deeply grateful to all of you who have helped spread the word about the benefits of getting better organised and becoming more productive. Don’t forget, if you like what you hear in this podcast, please share it with as many people you know. The more people we can help discover better productivity the more people we can help change their lives for the better.
This week I answer a question about the problems we all face every day when despite our best efforts to plan the day and do the work we want to do, something comes up that changes the plan. I don’t think anyone can escape this and I know it can be very frustrating. So in this week’s episode, I thought I could answer the question by sharing my strategies for staying on plan with you.
So, now it is time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question:
This weeks question comes from Biraj and Simon who ask: No matter how well planned we are for the day ahead when the day starts a new demand is made that has to be done that day and all our plans have to be changed. Is there anything we can do to stay on plan?
Thanks, guys for your question and I am sure so many of you listeners also have this problem. So, here’s how I deal with this:
The first thing is I never schedule too many tasks for the day. Basically, I set myself two objectives for the day and these can be anything from exercise or preparing this podcast. In fact, as I look at my objectives for today, that is exactly what my two objectives are. To do a minimum of 30 minutes exercise and to get this podcast prepared. Now, as far as my objectives are concerned, I will not go to bed until those two objectives are completed. That is the rule. Of course, if there was an emergency that required all my attention for the day, I am flexible enough to change my objectives, but it would have to be a pretty big emergency for me to change my objectives and I cannot remember when an emergency took me away from completing my objectives.
Today is a busy teaching day for me, so the preparation and notes for this podcast are being prepared either at my desk, while sat on a bus or standing in the subway. The prep notes for this podcast is my objective and I use an app called Ulysses for preparing all my written articles and podcast scripts. Ulysses allows me to write either on my iPad, iPhone or desktop. Basically, I’ve given myself no excuses for not writing. The app is on all my devices and it syncs in real-time through iCloud so as I started writing this on my desktop, when I get to the subway, it will be available on my iPhone to continue writing.
Exercise is a little different. I need to make full use of my calendar with my exercise schedule. So today my original plan was to do a scaled back exercise session at 11AM and head out to teach at 12pm. This meant I could realistically do 30 minutes exercise, have a quick shower, a bite to eat and off to my next teaching appointment. However, I had a cancellation this afternoon, so I rescheduled my exercise session to be done at 4:30pm. I have more time then and can do a longer session without the rush.
The thing is because when I woke this morning, I only had two objectives to complete and I knew no matter what the day threw at me, I would be able to find the time to do those tasks. As usual, my original plan had to be modified, but I only had to modify two objectives, not a long list of to-dos that I hoped to be able to do.
And that is where I think most people have problems. They over commit to tasks. The truth is if you looked at your long list of to-dos you would find only a very few actually must be completed that day. Most of the to-dos on my to-do list are “I hope to do today” tasks and if I am being completely honest with myself, as long as those tasks get done this week I will be fine. I know that Friday afternoon this week is looking quiet for me, and if I need time to catch up with my tasks I could block out Friday afternoon to catch up.
The second list of tasks I have on my to-do list are what I call my “Today’s focus” tasks. These tasks are the priority tasks I have for the day. As a general rule I keep this list to ten tasks or less. I manage this list when I do my Golden 10 in the evening. I look to see what I have planned for tomorrow and if I have more than ten tasks on my Today’s focus list I will remove whatever I have to so there are no more than ten. I also compare this list to my calendar. If I have a day like today, where I will only have a couple of spare hours, I will reduce this list down to around five tasks. I am being realistic here. Just because a task is on your list doesn’t mean you will have time to do it. And I think that is key. You really need to be realistic and try wherever possible to keep the “hope to complete” tasks off your day list. If you have time you can always go to the wish to do lists.
And that brings me to my third list. This list is my next actions list which are all the very next tasks on my projects. Every week, when I do my weekly review, I add the label to the very next action in each of my active projects. This means one task in each of my active projects has a label of next actions. So, each day, if I have completed my objectives and my today’s focus lists, I move into my next actions list and start doing those tasks. The truth is on a week to week basis I really only get to that list maybe twice. It doesn’t really matter too much. If a task is important and needs doing this week, then it will be on my today’s focus list anyway, so nothing is missed.
So the system I have set up is:
First thing in the morning I review my “today’s Objectives” list. This will have the two tasks I must complete that day no matter what. Once I have reviewed that I will usually start on one of them. So this morning, I began writing the script and notes for this podcast at 6:30am while I was on the bus.
The next list I work from is my Today’s Focus list. This list has no more than ten tasks that have a priority and should be done today. It would not be the end of the world if I cannot complete them today, but on the whole, even given a lot of detractions I will get them done before 6pm. I should point out that my two objectives for that day are also on this list. So, my today’s focus list really only has 8 tasks on it.
Finally, if I do have time I will move into my “next actions” list and begin doing as many of the tasks as I can.
This system has allowed me to keep the most important tasks front and centre of my day and also gives me enough flexibility each day to handle any distractions and additional work that must be done that day.
The biggest reason why most people really struggle with this is that they are placing far too many tasks on their daily to-do lists. What you need to do is reduce those daily to-dos down to the essentials. This means you need to get good at deciding which tasks are a priority. I understand this takes practice and time, but it is well worth developing. When you do your Golden ten, the ten minutes at the end of the day when you plan the next day, make sure the tasks you have for tomorrow are important. If they are not, remove them from your daily list. Try to get your daily list down to around ten tasks in total and have a backup list for those days when you complete those ten tasks early. Assign two of those ten tasks as daily objectives and make sure that whatever else happens that day, those two tasks are completed.
Another way to make this work for you is to stop thinking in terms of days, but rather weeks. Instead of seeing a task as having to be completed on a particular day, think of it as a task that needs to be completed this week. I have found this works brilliantly because it allows greater flexibility each day. I often find if I have a meeting or a class cancellation, I can bring forward a task or two from another day that week. It helps lighten my load later in the week. I like to gamify this a little by trying to complete as many tasks as I can early in the week so I can spend Friday afternoon in the park with my little dog. He loves it and I feel fantastic because all the tasks I wanted to complete that week are done and I really enjoy that time the little one and I spend together.
I recently did a video explaining my system and I will put a link to that in the show notes. It shows how I have this set up in my to-do list manager of choice, Todoist and how I use the new pinned favourites feature to really make this workflow work for me.
Before we finish, Just want to let you all know I have a new goal planning course out, The Ultimate Goal Planning Course, and it is a course created to help you to discover what it is you want to achieve and show you, step by step how to make those goals happen. This course has an early-bird discount offer if just $14.99 which will end on Thursday 7th June, so get yourself enrolled before then to take advance of this wonderful offer.
Thank you to Biraj and Simon for the question and thank you all for listening. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on this show, please email me, or DM me on Twitter or Facebook and I will be delighted to answer your question. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about dealing with major and minor crises disrupting your plans for the day.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about dealing with major and minor crises disrupting your plans for the day.
Hello and welcome to episode 28 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a question about what to do when no matter how well you plan the day, crises of one form or another regularly interrupt your best plans and leave you feeling busy but not really knowing what you have accomplished for the day.
Before we get into this week’s question I’d just like to remind you if you have a question you’d like answering in this show, please get in touch via email, Twitter or Facebook (or LinkedIn for that matter) and I will be happy to answer your question. Also, if you haven’t enrolled in my FREE online course; The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System, then please do so and don’t forget to share the course with as many people you know so together we can help a million people to discover the benefits of an organised and productive life.
Okay, into this week’s question, so it is time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question:
This week’s Question comes from Keith in Ireland. Keith asks: I work in a highly reactive environment where dealing with crises every day is the norm. This means I often do not have time to collect the tasks and just have to get them done leaving me feeling frustrated because I do not know what I have done and I am not able to get the work I want done. Do you have any tips for handling this kind of environment?
Thank you, Keith, for your question. I have noticed a lot of questions about this kind of situation regularly come up on my YouTube channel or in comments on my Medium blog and I understand it can be an incredibly frustrating situation when you want to get yourself better organised and become more productive.
Okay, there are a few things you can do.
The first is to not schedule too many tasks on your to-do list in the first place. Now, I know it is much easier to say this than do, but if your days are regularly disrupted by crises, then there really is no point in trying to schedule twenty tasks on your to-do list. The reality is you will never get them done anyway, so not only are you feeling frustrated at not getting the work you want done, you are also wasting a lot of time scheduling those tasks in the first place. It is far better to organise your to-do lists by contexts and work from your lists based on where you are, what tools you have with you and who is with you. In a sense, you follow the GTD principles of only scheduling tasks that absolutely must be done on a specific day and at a specific time.
For example, if you must call your colleague in Galway before lunch-time because she is flying to Geneva at 12pm, you would schedule that call in your calendar or put a date an time on the task in your to-do list manager. At some point you will have to call her before 11:30pm—never call her at 12pm, she has to leave at 12. Calling her then will not make you her most popular person—That gives you 2½ hours between 9:00am and 11:30am to make that call.
Now in my experience of crises, they often need some form of action immediately, but there are always a few minutes between events unfolding where you have time to make a call. That would be the time you make that call to your colleague.
Many years ago, I worked in the hotel industry and that is one of the most reactive industries to be in. Guests and customers have a bad habit of asking for things at the most inconvenient of times. And, while to the guest their request may be simple, the reality is I would have to go from one side of the hotel to the other, talk to the chef, and anyone who has experience of the hotel trade in the 1990s with know that most chefs in the 1990s hated everyone who was not a chef and they always had a big knife in their hands. Ask very gently for what I needed and then get back to the other side of the hotel as quickly as possible, Any delay and the guest would be calling reception asking what had happened and then reception would ‘bleep me’ which meant I had to run to reception to find out what they wanted, only to find they wanted to know about something I was already dealing with. And this went on ALL day.
It left little to no time for doing the work I was employed to do. Back then, GTD had not been invented and I was already writing down on paper (no smartphones back then) the things that had to be done that day and carrying that little notebook with me everywhere I went.
Every day when I came on shift, I would have a hand-over meeting with my co-worker and he would tell me what he had managed to do that morning or night and what was left to be done. I had to learn very quickly how to prioritise. A meeting scheduled to start at 8:30am in one of our meeting rooms always took priority. Fresh iced water had to placed in the room at exactly the right time.
What I learned was that as long as I had a list of the things that needed doing that day, I could manage the requests and crises when they came up. I dealt with them, did want needed to be done and carried on getting my work done. Sometimes, a meeting organiser would ask for the tea and coffee to be served an hour earlier. There was often no time for this to be written down on the function sheet, but I made sure I wrote it down in my little notebook. Between all these little jobs, crises and requests I would be referring to my notebook— what needed to be done next?
The important thing is that the work or task gets done. There is always time at the end of the day to take a breath and reflect on what you had done and what still needed doing. Whenever I finished my shift I had a handover with my colleague and I would go through what was done, what was almost done and what still needed doing. It was a wonderful cycle and I also learnt the importance of working as a team.
Sometimes there is no time to write down the task. You just have to do the task. Call the right person, email the documents or just go talk to the customer. There is always time afterwards to reflect on what it was and decide whether you need to record what you did somewhere.
Because of my experiences in the hotel trade, a wonderful trade to be in, by the way, I learnt that long lists of to-dos rarely get done and this leads to frustration and more often than not giving up on trying to be organised. Maintaining as a shorter list of planned to-dos as possible always gave me the best chance of getting what I wanted done and it also meant I learnt the importance of being patience. Small steps each day soon build up to big achievements.
And this shorter list of planned to-dos also means on those rare quiet days, once you have completed the to-dos you want to do, you can look at your contextual lists and decide what you can do next. There will always be something you can do from what you have planned tomorrow, today and that does keep you moving forward.
One more thing I learnt in the hotel trade was the ability to anticipate problems. I learnt early on that no matter how well planned you are for something, once that plan meets reality everything changes. It’s like the famous quote “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” Or as Mike Tyson put it more eloquently, “we all have a plan until we get punched in the face”. This is the reality of life. As I learnt more about my industry I found it was actually quite easy to anticipate what might go wrong and so I developed methods—templates if you like—for dealing with those issues. I still use that today. Whenever I am scheduled to do a talk I know there are likely to be problems with the IT department not knowing how to connect a Mac to their projector or the power disappears in the middle of my presentation. I make sure I have a PowerPoint copy of my presentation on a USB drive and a PDF print out of my slides in case I have to go without the use of a projector. I haven’t used any of these backups for a very long time, but I know one day it will happen so I prepare myself. Always prepare yourself for the worst happening.
So, the best advice I can give you,Keith, and anyone else who works in a highly reactive industry is carry a little notebook with you where ever you go. If you prefer you can use your phone, but in reactive situations, I have always found the trusty pen and paper is the best way to capture what needs doing and crossing them off when they are done. Expect things to go wrong and keep your scheduled tasks to barest minimum. Work from contexts— the people, place or tools required to do the task— and develop strategies for dealing with the common crises that occur.
Finally, even if you are not handing over to a colleague at the end of a shift, it is always a good strategy to do a five or ten minute reflection at the end of your working day. Reflect on the things that happened, how you dealt with them and ask yourself if there is anything you can do in the future to either anticipate that kind of crisis or prepare for the crisis happening again so next time you are prepared and can put in place a trusted action plan.
I hope that helps, Keith and I hope that helps anyone else who works in a very reactive industry.
Don’t forget to keep your questions coming in. I want to help a million people between now and 2020 to get better organised and become more productive and I can only do that with your help. Please spread the word, share this podcast, share my blog posts, YouTube videos and share my online courses with anyone you feel will benefit from learning more about the wonderful benefits of being productive.
Thank you very much for listening and it just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about finding time to achieve your goals.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
Hello and welcome to episode 27 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this week’s show, I answer a wonderful question about finding the time to work on your goals when you have a full-time job and little spare time in the evenings and at weekends.
Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like me to answer then all you need do is email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
Oh and I would just like to thank all of you who have enrolled in my recently published new FREE online course; The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System. I’ve been overwhelmed by how many people have enrolled and I feel so thankful to be able to help so many people. So a BIG thank you to all you who have enrolled. It really does mean a lot to me.
Ok, let’s get into this weeks question, so it is time for me now to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice, for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alana. Alana asks, Carl, I have a lot of goals and plans, but never seem to have time to do anything about them. Is there anything I can do that will help me focus on my goals every day?
Great question Alana and thank you for sending it in.
I think this is a problem many people face when they really want to change their lives, but have work and social commitments that always seem to take up much of their available time each day. I know I have struggled with this in the past.
The thing is if your goals are important enough to you, then you will always find a way. If what you want, and your reasons for wanting it is strong enough, finding the time usually comes naturally. Whenever I am working with a client and I see they always have an excuse for not doing anything towards achieving their goals, I always ask them about the reason they want to achieve that particular goal— what we call “their why”— most of the time I find their reason for wanting to achieve the goal is not personal enough.
What I mean by that is if the reason you want to achieve something is to impress your boss or impress your family and friends, then the reason for doing it is not for you. Sure, if you do achieve the goal, people might go “WOW!” for a few minutes, but then your achievement will be quickly forgotten. If, however, your reason for achieving the goal is deeply personal, then when you do achieve the goal, the feeling of accomplishment and achievement lasts much longer and always inspires you to set yourself another, more ambitious goal. It becomes a beautiful cycle of achievement.
Let’s take an example. Let’s say you have always wanted to build your very own application. You want to create a note taking app that you believe will be the best in the market. That’s a good starting point, but the next question you need to answer is “why? Why do you want to build this app? Now, there could be a number of reasons. Reasons such as you have never been able to find a note taking app that works for you and you want to build one, it could be because you love building things or it could be because you really want to start your own business. All of these are good, valid reasons. Get these reasons written down underneath your goal.
Your reasons are your motivation. Almost everyone I know would love to be a millionaire. I’m sure you would too. The reason most people will never become a millionaire is that their “why” is not strong enough and not personal enough. Building your own app, losing weight, becoming a millionaire is easy, but the process of building, losing or becoming any of these things is hard. Often very hard. Losing weight is a great example. Most people make a decision to lose weight just after they have eaten a very large Sunday dinner and finished that off with a ginormous helping of chocolate fudge cake Hmmmm. As they sit down after eating, they look down at their stomach and see this bloated beachball of a stomach and say “I must lose some weight”.
Well, when you are full it IS easy to decide to lose some weight. But what about the next day. You eat a banana for breakfast and you have a salad for lunch. How do you feel at 4pm? You’re very hungry. Now, how easy is it to maintain a diet? Not so easy. Past experience has taught me ignoring hunger pangs is incredibly difficult and if someone comes round to your table with a packet of biscuits (cookies to my American friends) how easy is it to say “no” now? This is why your “why” has to be strong and has to be personal.
I say “personal” because often we think we have a strong “why”, but the “why is someone else’s why. A great example of this is when we visit our doctor for a checkup and the doctors tell you you need to lose a little weight. Sure, losing weight might be good for your long-term health, but what if you are happy with your weight and you don’t see it as a problem? Here we have a situation where the goal is clear - lose some weight, but the motivation to lose weight is not strong. You are not going to lose weight. The why is some else’s why.
When you have a clear goal, and a strong, personal why, finding the time to do something with the goal is much easier. But before you can go about achieving the goal you need tasks that will help you to achieve it. Let’s take the note-taking app goal. To create an app of any kind involves a lot of steps. It is not just about writing the code. You need to think about the design, the colours the features and interface. You also need to start building the code. If you have no idea how to code, then you need to start learning how to code. There are many steps. This is great because there will be a mixture of big and small tasks. Tasks that will take many hours and tasks that will only take a few minutes. Get these all written down somewhere. In a task management app, a notes app or a notebook and paper. Just get them all written down.
Okay, I know this is a very long way round to answering your question Alana, but the truth is, unless your goals are set properly, they are crystal clear, have a strong why and have a precise deadline, you will never find the time to do anything about them because there will always be something else that seems more important than your goals. Once you have your goals set up strongly, then you will find it much easier to motivate yourself to find the time.
I have found in the past if I am trying to achieve a personal goal when I am working it can be very difficult to motivate myself to spend time working on the personal goal once I finish work. A few years ago when I decided to take part in the ChunCheon Marathon here in Korea, I found it incredibly difficult to find the time to do the running to prepare for the marathon. What really helped was my desire to prove to myself that although it had been ten years since I had run a marathon, I could still do it even though I was now in my forties. So when I came home after a long day of teaching and it was pouring with rain outside, all I had to do was remind myself of my reason for running the marathon and I soon found I was dressed in my running gear and heading out the door for a run. It really does come down to your reasons why you want to achieve the goal.
Another way to keep yourself moving forward with your goals is to schedule time each day to work on the goals. Don’t go mad here, just allocate time between say, 9:00pm and 9:30pm to work on your goal. It could be doing some research if you are very tired or it could be writing code, running, doing yoga or any number of things. All you need to do is refer to your list of tasks the night before, choose one task that you will complete the next day and write it down on your to-do list or calendar. The very act of choosing the task, writing it down and having a set time for you to work on the goal will be enough to motivate yourself to get it done. I have a set time each day between 10:30pm and 11pm to study something. It could be anything, a TED talk, a motivational video on YouTube or some reading research. All that matters is I do some learning each day as that is a goal for me. To learn something each day that improves my life and my skills. I have been doing this for over four months now and it is surprisingly easy to sit down at 10:30pm and get started.
Of course, there are the elements of PACT. Patience, Action, Consistency and Time. When you throw these into the mix you really are setting yourself up for success. To build an app, lose weight run a marathon, they all require patience. You need patience because none of these will happen overnight. Likewise, if you are not taking any action, consistently over a period of time you are never going to reach the finish line of any of your goals. You have got to make a “PACT” with yourself and make it happen.
The truth is we all think we are busy. But busy is just a state of mind. Sure you might have a lot of things to do each day, but we also have the same time each day—24 hours— and what we do with most of those hours is entirely up to us. Prioritising the things that are important to us, should always be at the top of our lists and pre-planning what we will do, the night before when you do the Golden 10 minutes, and committing yourself to doing those tasks is the only way you are going to make it happen. There are no substitutes or quick fixes. You just have to do whatever it takes to make it happen and we all have that ability. Whether we choose to use that ability really does come down to us and our motivation for doing whatever it is we want to do. Which is why having the right “why” for doing achieving your goals is so vital.
I hope that answers your question, Alana and thank you for sending in your question. Thank you all for listening to this show, please subscribe to the show so you can have each episode delivered automatically to whatever app you are using to listen to podcasts.
It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about work and personal tasks.
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The Beginners Guide To Building Your Own Productivity System
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Hello and welcome to episode 26 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a fantastic question about dealing with work and personal tasks and whether or not these should be treated differently. It’s a question I am frequently asked on my YouTube channel about the Your Digital Life 2.0 system and so I thought this podcast would be a great place to answer the question.
Before we get into this weeks question, I want to let you guys know I have just launched a brand new FREE beginners guide. This online course is a little under 1 hour long and is an update to my other FREE beginners guide to getting your self better organised and more productive. This new course gives you the building blocks for building your very own productivity system. It is just an outline but is packed full of useful tips and tricks. So, if you are new to productivity and time management and want to build your very own system, then this course should really help you to start off with the right tools and mindset. The link to the course is in the show notes for you.
And one more thing. This new course is the start of a new project. PROJECT 1 MILLION. This is all about me helping one million people by 2020 to find the benefits of becoming better at time management and more productive so they can enjoy their lives stress-free with better health and better relationships with the people that matter to them. More details of this project will be coming out over the next few weeks, but if you like what I do, then please share my podcast, blog posts, videos and all the other content I produce with as many people as you can so together we can help the people in our lives discover the amazing benefits of getting organised.
Okay, enough of my preamble, now it is time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Joshua and Joshua asks: Do you separate your work tasks from your personal tasks or do you treat all tasks the same?
Thank you, Joshua, for the question.
This question is often asked of me and I can answer it simply. I treat all tasks the same. To me, a task is a task and just needs doing. It does not matter whether it is a work task or a personal task.
Many years ago, I did try and separate the different tasks. And a few years ago it was actually quite easy to separate work and personal tasks because I worked in an office with set hours and my mobile phone had no email. But then came along the iPhone and other smart phones and now email is with me 24 hours a day and my clients and students don’t think twice about messaging me late in the evening to let me know about a meeting reschedule or asking me to check something.
This meant that it became very impractical to try and separate the two types of tasks so I just decided to treat all tasks the same. If a task needs doing and I have the right device or tool with me, then I just get it done. This has meant that I have fewer decisions to make over all. The only decision I need to make now is “what can I do next based on where I am, who I am with or what tools I have with me?” I no longer need to think whether I am in work mode or personal mode. All modes are the same.
An example of this was last week. Usually, I take Friday nights off and just relax in front of the TV. But I was going away on a trip last weekend, so around 10 pm I sat down at my computer and did a couple of hours work. Because I no longer distinguish between work and personal time, I had the freedom to just get on with some work. It meant I was not stressed at all on Friday. I was not rushing to get my work finished before 6pm, I just had a normal day and decided I would do some of my work tasks after I had had dinner and watched a little TV.
And that’s the problem with drawing hard lines between your work life and personal life. It just causes unnecessary stress. Of course, you do need to maintain some balance, but when you try and only do your work tasks Monday to Friday 8 am to 6 pm and only do personal tasks in the evenings and at weekends, something is going to break. You have no flexibility. And when you have no flexibility your stress levels will increase and you will start missing deadline on important work or you will not achieve the quality you want to achieve. Work related issues will be on your mind on a Sunday evening but because of your strict lines, you will not allow yourself to do anything about it. That to me is avoidable stress. If something’s on your mind and you have the time and are in the right place with the right tool, then just get it done. Don’t worry yourself about when you are doing it. Just get it done. It’s a lot less stressful to think like that rather than trying to erect un-natural barriers.
If you have a free Sunday evening and there’s nothing else to do, why not start doing some of those work related tasks? Same works for Friday afternoon in the office. If you have all your work done and there are a few things you want to buy online, then just go ahead and place those orders. These are tasks on your to-do list anyway and it really shouldn’t matter when you get them done. The only thing that matters is you get them done.
Sometimes we over complicate things when we put up unnecessary barriers. I know it always sounds great when people tell us they don’t do anything related to their work after 6 pm or at weekends. The thing is the effort required to not think about or do anything related to our work at home or not do anything related to our personal lives at work, just doesn’t seem worth it to me.
There are times when I will just shut off the work tasks of course. For example when going away on holiday. I remove the dates from my work tasks in my to-do list manager so they do not show up in my daily lists. But as I run my own business, I do need to keep an eye on my email in case there are any emergencies brewing or I need to reply to a client. But on the whole, I do not separate anything in my daily lists. Personal and business routines are all in the same project folder called “routines” and my Areas of Focus projects are a mix of personal and business. These are just placeholders anyway as the tasks I want to complete on certain days will come up in my daily lists as and when they are due to be done.
If you really think about it though, tasks naturally fall into place. Your work tasks are generally tasks that can only be done during the so called ‘office hours’ or in the office and your personal tasks can only be done when you are at home or in the evening. This means there really is nothing to be too worried about where you place your routine tasks. As long as you are dating things appropriately and getting tasks done when they should be done—that’s all that matters. You are getting the work done.
A lot of time when I am asked this question it is in relation to my routines folder in my to-do list manager. In my Your Digital Life 2.0, I advocate that you take all those routines tasks that just have to be done, but do not take your life further forward or help in any way towards achieving your goals—things like take out the garbage or update the weekly sales report—and put them in a folder called “routines” and inside that folder create three sub-projects called “daily”, “weekly” and “monthly” and put all those routines in their relevant folder. This way you can remove these tasks from your daily lists when you are focused on your work and only see them when you need to see them.
The reason for doing this is because when you look at most people’s to-do lists they are a mix of work and personal tasks, important and not important tasks and as most people tend to pick and choose what tasks to complete based on their mood they end up doing tasks that are not taking their lives further forward or doing anything to achieve their goals. It is far better to see a list of tasks that need doing and are going to take your life further forward and focus you in on the work that matters. Once you have the important tasks done for the day, then you can go into your routines and work on doing the routines that need doing today.
So there you have it. That’s why I do not keep my work and personal tasks separate. If a task needs doing it needs doing and I do not discriminate between work and personal. All tasks are created equal in my mind.
Than you again for your question, Joshua. I hope this answers your question.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about managing university life.
Hello and welcome to episode 25 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this week’s show, I answer a question about managing time pressures when you are at university. This comes from a question I asked on Twitter and YouTube a couple of months ago about what difficulties university students face while at university. It’s a great question that touches on quite a lot of time management practices.
Don’t forget if you have a question you can DM me on Facebook or Twitter or you can do it the old-fashioned way and email me at carl@carlpullein.com
Okay, it is now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Antonin, a university student from France
Hi Carl. I’m personally struggling with three points: Living on my own for the first time, I now have to do my own laundry, cooking, cleaning etc which can be very time-consuming. Managing my social life, there are so many people who want to permanently hang out and having to constantly study new topics, prepare for tests and exams and write papers. Do you have any advice on handling all this?
Thank you, Antonin for such a great question, and a question I think many of my listeners will find similarities with their own life particularly those at university.
Okay, let's get started with priorities. One thing I strongly believe in is people should not have to sacrifice their social life because of their studies or work. We are human beings living in the twenty-first century. We should not be spending all our time working, studying and doing chores. Life is not about those things alone. We need time to socialise, spend time with our friends and university particularly is a time when we build friendships that will last a lifetime. So, time spent socialising needs to built into our schedules.
But, the main purpose of being at university is to get out with a degree. So this needs to be addressed first.
Your most powerful weapon with all of this is going to be your calendar. You will also need to practice “what’s on my calendar gets done” This is vital if you are going to manage all your commitments, obligations and get your coursework and test and exam preparation done on time and to a high degree of quality. Your calendar is non-negotiable and must be done when you assign the time to do it. Of course, you can build flexibility into it, after all, you are in control of your calendar… I hope!
My advice here is at the start of the semester take your class schedule, exam periods and assignment due dates and get them into your calendar first. You should be doing this before you do anything else. These ‘events’ need to be built into your calendar because your lectures, meetings with professors, exam dates and assignment due dates are non-negotiable. The good thing about being at university is that these events are usually on a subscribable calendar you can subscribe to so, adding these dates to your calendar should be as easy as simply subscribing to your course’s calendar. If you cannot subscribe, then you will have to manually enter them. The advantage of manually entering the dates is you have control over them. When you subscribe to a calendar you have no control. So the choice is yours.
Once you have these events on your calendar, look for assignment due dates and the exam period. Now depending on how much time you want to prepare for these events, block off time leading up to them for revision and writing. When I was at university I began my revision for exams six weeks before the exam week. So for me it would be simply blocking time off for revising six weeks out from the exam period and reducing my social life for that period.
For assignments and tests, you again can decide how long you want to prepare for these and block off the appropriate time. What you are doing is making sure before you put anything else on to your calendar you are taking care of your university work first. That, of course, is the main priority.
Now, when I was at university our first semester began at the beginning of October and ended the end of January. There were no exams in that period, but we did have three written assignments to complete by the end of the first week of January. This essentially gave me plenty of time to enjoy freshers week and spend time socialising before beginning my written assignments from the middle of November. My aim was to get the first drafts written by 20 December, where I could take a week off, enjoy time with my family over the Christmas holidays and then get back to finalising my assignments from the 27th December. This gave me around 10 days to do nothing but finalise my assignments before their due dates. It also allowed me time to enjoy the new year festivities and still have plenty of time to get the final drafts completed.
This was all possible because I used my calendar to schedule the time required to get these important assignments completed.
I followed the same routine when it came to preparing for my exams. I would go into lockdown during the week. But, and this was important. Every Friday and Saturday night I made sure I went out with my friends. Friday night was rugby night where we went to watch Leeds Rhinos when they played at home and then out for a few beers afterwards. Saturday was “Top Banana Night” at the Town & Country nightclub in Leeds. This was where they played nothing but eighties classics and was a fantastic night out. Seriously, the eighties had some awesome dance music! I should point out I was at university in the late 1990s, so going to club that only played eighties music was out of this world.
After finishing at the club my friends and I would stop off at the Rajput Indian restaurant for a curry before heading home… Usually in a not too good a state. However, Sunday afternoon was back to studying… Often with a banging headache.
The thing is, if I were to lock myself away seven days a week to study, I would have gone mad and the quality of my studying would have suffered. Our brains need a rest and Friday and Saturday nights were a great way to get out, let my hair down (what I had left of it) and just enjoy myself. It always helped me to get back to my studies refreshed and ready to start again. These nights were scheduled in my calendar.
As for doing the household chores here, you need to be a bit strategic. If you assign a cleaning up day once or twice a week you are going to spend too much time cleaning and tidying up. It is far better to do a little often. I usually did my cleaning, laundry and grocery shopping in between my studying. I would study for a couple hours, and then spend twenty minutes or so cleaning something up. Doing the dishes, doing the laundry or vacuuming my house. That physical work would give my brain a break and household chores are not brain taxing, so they were a great way to give myself a rest and keep myself on top of my cleaning. The funny thing is, I still do that now. It worked so well when I was at university, I carried the practice on once I entered the workforce.
Now for managing the work you need to do for your individual classes, here I would use a good to-do list manager. What you can do is create projects for the different courses you are taking and put the work related to those courses on your to-do list. The thing here is you have a list of all the work that needs doing. You can see what needs doing and you can collect all the work your professors give you straight into your to-do list manager. I would recommend Todoist for this as it is very easy to use and the free version would do the trick perfectly. If you want to upgrade to the premium version of Todoist it is not too expensive at $28.99 per year. But, the upgrade is not essential for your university life. Just being able to organise your to-dos into projects would be enough to keep you on track with the various assignments, essays and test prep you have. You can also add a project for your domestic routines, the cleaning, the laundry etc.
What your to-do list manager does is maintain the micro level tasks for you. Your calendar works on the macro level. So your calendar will say “work on Biology assignment” and your to-do list will tell you exactly what needs doing such as “edit intro” or “add-in results excel file”. This really does work well and prevents you having to waste time trying to decide what you need to do next.
If you want to learn more about getting the most out of your to-do list manager and calendar, I have a FREE online course called, The Beginners Guide To Getting Organised you can take. This is a 45-minute intro to getting yourself better organised and will help you to understand the basics better. If you are ready to go to the next level of productivity, I do have my latest course, Your Digital Life 2.0 Online available which will really take you to the next level of productivity and time management.
Hopefully, that has helped, Antonin. I also hope this has helped all of you who are struggling to manage their daily work or student life as well as their family and friends commitments. Remember, no matter how busy you are, you should not be sacrificing your social life completely. Sure, you may need to reduce it a little from time to time for busy periods, but you should not be sacrificing it completely. No matter how busy you are, you do need to take some time off.
Thank you very much for listening to this podcast. Contact me at any time if you have any questions and I will answer them as soon as I can so we can help as many people as possible get control of their time and their life.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about rest and relaxation.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Hello and welcome to episode 24 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, it’s time to take a rest, well okay maybe not for me, but this week’s question is all about the importance of being well rested so you can get the important work done.
Before we get into the question, if you have a question about productivity, time management, goal planning and getting the important things done, then please get in touch either by email or by DMing on Twitter or Facebook. I will be more than happy to answer your questions.
And one more thing, for those of you enrolled in my Your Digital Life 2.0 Online course, I have now released the second supplemental class which you can watch right now. In this class, I take you through how I do my Golden 10 every evening.
Okay, let's get it to the question, so it is now time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question…
This week’s question comes from Sander. Sander asks:
Hi Carl, I have a real problem with taking rest at the right times. I am a graduate student and when I am under pressure writing my assignments and other university work, I find I always sit down to write when I am tired. Do you have any tips on getting the right amount of rest and doing work when I am not tired?
Thank you, Sander, for your wonderful question.
One of the most important things you can do is to analyse when you at your most effective. On this everybody is different. Some people do their best work in the mornings, others find the afternoons or evenings are best for them. There really is no standard here. What you need to do is to analyse yourself for a few days and see when you feel most alert.
The funny thing here is even if you believe you are a night person, you may find you do your best work in the morning. I found that out. I have always been a bit of a night owl and so I naturally thought I would do my best, creative work in the evenings. This was not true. I discovered that the best times of the day for me to write or create something was between 8:30am and 12:00pm. After lunch, I find it is very difficult to remain focused on a single piece of work. I find the evenings are the best time for me to study something or read a book. The afternoons are disaster zones for me. So, I schedule my exercise for the afternoons and after dinner, I do my basic admin tasks and learn something.
I started a new routine this year to study something every evening between 10:30 and 11pm. This studying can be anything I am in the mood for. So for example, after reading about Elon Musk’s passion for going to Mars, I spent a whole week watching videos and reading about Mars. Likewise a few weeks ago I went through many of Robin Sharma’s Mastery series of videos. Originally I was going to do this Sunday to Thursday and give myself Friday and Saturday nights off. However, I am enjoying it so much, I now do it 7 days week and the notes I write as I learn go straight in to my journal. My journal is filling up with so much valuable learning. It’s great fun and incredibly educational.
What you can learn from this is that once you have found when you do you best work you can then schedule the work around it. You can do this even if you work a traditional nine til five office job. If you find you do your most creative work in the mornings, then schedule creative work for mornings. Resist any meetings if you can and just focus on the work. If, like me, you find afternoons are difficult to focus, then you can do basic admin tasks, return phone calls and reply to emails in the afternoons. The non-creative tasks that just need doing.
There is something else I have learned over the years. Take a nap in the afternoon. I learnt this from Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill was famous for taking naps every afternoon. He would retire to his bedroom around 3PM and sleep until 5PM. Now, I know not many of us could get away with sleeping for ninety minutes every afternoon, but just twenty minutes can do the trick. Winston Churchill said that by taking a nap every afternoon he could get a day and a half’s worth of work done every day, and Winston Churchill was a prodigious producer of work. He wrote around 33 books in 51 volumes, he was always writing articles and he was the Prime Minister of the Britain for a total of ten years. He had time to write, paint, be a politician and have two hour lunches and 3 hour dinners. And we complain about not having enough time to socialise! He socialised for 5 hours every day, had time to nap for 90 minutes and still got a huge amount of work done without the aid of a single computer.
There is definitely something in taking a nap every day. I try to have a nap for 30 minutes every afternoon. I know I am lucky, I have complete control of my schedule, but you should try it if you can. It certainly boosts your creative energies and helps you get through the day.
The funny thing about taking naps every day is I found out that Ian Fleming, the creator and author of the James Bond novels, also used to take naps in the afternoon. Fleming would write between 8am and 12pm every day for six to eight weeks as he wrote a book. He would then have lunch and afterwards, take a nap. He would return to writing around 4pm and work until 6pm when he would stop for dinner and socialising. There seems to be a connection between taking naps and socialising every day and pushing out a huge volume of work. If you can you should try it.
The thing is, if you are serious about getting your important work done then you need to find out when you are at your most creative. Experiment with different times of the day and once you know when you are at your most energetic and can easily move into your focus zone start using your calendar to schedule you most difficult, creative work at those times in your calendar. If necessary, talk to your boss about this. I have found if you have a good boss and they are understanding they will help you. Your boss wants you to be doing your best work every day, so they are going to want to help you. I find most people never talk to their bosses about this because they don’t think their boss will understand and end up blaming them for not being able to get their work done. If it’s an issue, talk to your boss!
Your calendar is really the most powerful tool you have for getting you motivated to do the right work at the right time. I schedule all my writing tasks in my calendar because that’s when I need to be at my most focused. I also schedule my workouts and other important work in my calendar because I have a very important rule: If it’s on my calendar, it gets done. That rule enables me to treat my calendar as my time manager. It only allows me to schedule work over a period of 24 hours. This prevents me from over-scheduling and helps me to make sure I am getting enough rest between heavy workload sessions. By that I mean if I have scheduled a big writing session between 8am and 12pm, I know not to schedule more writing for the afternoon. If I did, I would not get much quality writing done and it would be a waste of time. I would be much better scheduling some physical work instead, such as a workout or house work. Then early evening, I could do some more writing work. My brain would be well rested and ready to attack another session of writing.
Over the years I have learnt that by doing a weekly review on a Sunday I can see the big picture of the work I want to get done for the following week. This allows me to schedule sessions of work throughout the week based on my appointments and where I need to be on specific days. So, if I were trying to finish the preparation for an online course, I would look at my calendar for the following week and find the time where I will be able to sit down in a morning and do the outline and preparation. I would also be looking at my calendar for times when I could do the recording of the course and all the other parts involved in developing a big project like this. It’s my calendar that helps me to know when a project like this can be completed by. My to-do list manager only tells me what needs doing next. It does not tell me how much time each piece of work will take, or how much time I have to complete a piece of work. My advice is use your calendar strategically. It can really help you to make sure you are getting the important work done.
Hopefully, that has given you a few ideas to work with Sander. Remember, the best thing you could do right now is to figure out when you are at your most creative. Once you know that, you can utilise the power of your calendar to make sure you are doing your important work at those times every day. Even thirty minutes are better than no minutes.
Thank you very much for listening to this show. If you liked what you heard, please share it with as many people as you can. I want to help as many people as I can to become super-productive and get their best work done.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast 23
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
SCRIPT
In this week’s episode of The Working With… Podcast I answer a question about choosing the right productivity app for you.
Hello and welcome to episode 23 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
In this week’s show I answer a question on the thorny issue of apps and which app is best for becoming more productive. I am being very brave here as this is something that can generate a lot of emotions and loyal support for one app over another. But, I am brave and if nothing else, at least I can give my view on this topic.
Before we get into the question, though, let me remind you, you can ask me anything about productivity, time management, goal planning or self development. All you have to do is send me a DM on Twitter or Facebook or email me at carl@carlpullein.com. All the links are in the show notes.
Okay, now it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Sergey. Sergey asks: Carl, I’ve been following you for a while now and I was wondering if you have any recommendations for the best apps I can use to get myself more productive.
Thank you Sergey for your question and for putting me in the deep end.
The advice I always give to people who are starting out of the journey of getting themselves more productive and better at time management is to use the built in apps on the device you have. That means if you are using an iPhone, then I would always recommend you use Apple’s Reminders, Calendar and Notes apps. These apps are built in and are free. They are all supported by iCloud, which you also get for free (to start with) and it allows you time to find out what works best for you. Likewise, if you are in the Android or Windows ecosystem, both Google and Microsoft provide to-do lists, calendars and notes apps for free with their services.
What you need to focus on is finding out what works for you. Not necessarily the apps, but the framework and system you build. The truth is, being more productive and better at time management is not really about the apps. Getting better at productivity and time management is about the framework you put in place. A great framework or system would work even if you were using s simple pen and paper. That to me has always been the goal. If I lost all my technology tomorrow, could I reproduce my system using a simple spiral-bound notebook and a pen? If the answer is no, then it means my system is too complex. And that really should be where you begin. With pen and paper.
I put together a free online course designed to help you get started with becoming more productive, and that course will give you the basic framework. If you want to take your productivity and time management to the next level there is also my latest course—Your Digital Life 2.0. A course designed to give the complete framework to a fantastic digital system. Even though I am a huge fan of Todoist, in both those courses I do not recommend any specific app because apps are always a personal choice. Each one of us are looking for something different. I want something that is simple and easy to collect stuff when it occurs to me, I know other people who like apps that are feature rich and offers a lot of options. In this field the choice is yours.
There are of course a few things you should always be aware of when you are ready to go into the third party productivity apps world. A lot of apps appear, look great and promise a lot of things, but after a few years they go out of business or get bought out by one of the big tech companies (I’m thinking Wunderlist and Sunrise here). When that happens your whole system can be destroyed overnight or just stops working. That really is the danger of seeking out only free apps. Apps that are free are often looking to be bought by a big tech company (what we call their exit strategy) while there is nothing wrong with this business model, it can leave users high and dry if either they do not attract a big tech company or the big tech company absorbs their technology into their own. This is why I have no problem investing money in the best productivity apps because I know I am investing in something that gives me a huge return on that investment. Todoist costs me around $30.00 per year and I know that the fantastic people at Doist, the company that develops Todoist, uses my $30.00 to make sure I have an app that works, is not going to disappear over night and serves me brilliantly. The same goes for Evernote. I pay for the premium version of Evernote which is about $50.00 per year. The cost of that is nothing compared to the value I get out of Evernote every single day.
Of course, it could be argued that Microsoft’s OneNote and Apple’s Notes are better value because they are free and it is very unlikely they will disappear overnight. I would agree. But I’ve been using Evernote for close to ten years now and I know it intimately and it has never let me down. I should point out that both OneNote and Notes are fantastic apps and if I were starting out from fresh again, I might have chosen one of those apps.
Another thing you should be very careful of are apps that try and do everything. Apps that have a calendar, notes and to-do list built in for example. I have tried many of these apps over the years and have found they end up compromising features and it can become extremely frustrating. Another thing you should watch out for are feature rich apps. I know they are very tempting because it allows you to play around with settings, colours and layouts and so much more. The problem here is that temptation to play around with the settings means you are not actually doing any work that matters. I recently tried out Notion 2 and it was a joy. There were so many things I could do. I accidentally ended up playing around with it for a whole afternoon. That evening I deleted the app simply because I knew if I used Notion 2 I would NEVER get any work done because there would always been another way to show me what I needed to do and review and that temptation to play would be irresistible. Fortunately, painful past experience has taught me to stay away from apps that have too many features and view options. I play and the temptation to play always beats me. You, of course, may be different.
In my experience though, the simpler the app, the more likely it is going to work for you. I’ve tried many of the more complicated apps and none of them have helped me get the important work done. One app I loved was Omnifocus. The issue I had with Omnifocus was with the perspectives. This gave me far too much freedom to play around and try and find the ‘perfect’ views. The truth is, there are no ‘perfect’ views. The only view you need to see in your to-do list manager is the view that tells you what you need to work on right now given the place you are in, the tools you have with you and the people or person you are with and any app, with the ability to show you lists based on your context (the place, tool or person you need to complete the task) will do that.
And that really is the point here. No app is going to be perfect for everyone. What you need to look for, Sergey, is an app that focuses your attention on getting the important work done and disappears into the background when you are doing the focused work. A good to-do list manager does make it easy to collect stuff, but apart from that it needs to be in the background waiting for you to decide you want to do the next piece of work. And this is why so many people still use the trusty pen and paper. Pen and paper does just that. You can move it away when you are doing the important work and you can move it back when you are ready to see what needs doing next.
Remember, the amount of work you do and the quality of that work is not affected by the to-do list, calendar or notes app you use. Your work and the quality of that work is affected by you, your mood, your energy level and the amount of focus you put in to that work. So my advice is focus more on your system, and when you feel your system works seamlessly, then, and only then, begin your search for apps that will support that system. Your framework and your system comes first, apps are secondary.
I hope that answers your question Sergey, apologies if I didn’t recommend any specific app. Every one is different and the best apps for me, are not necessarily going to be the best apps for you.
Thank you very much for listening to this podcast. Don’t forget if you have a question you would like me to answer, get in touch and you too could have your question answered on this show.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
In this week’s episode of the Working With… Podcast, I answer a question about creating a morning and evening routine.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course
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Script
In this week’s episode of the Working With… Podcast, I answer a question about creating a morning and evening routine.
Hello and welcome to episode 22 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I have a question about morning and evening routines. To me, these two things you do every day are the foundations of building a fantastic day. And when you string together fantastic individual days you very soon start building a fantastic life.
Before we get to the answer, don’t forget you can ask me anything about productivity, time management and goal planning, all you have to do is send your question either by email or by Dming me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes. And don’t forget, if you are serious about getting yourself better organised and more productive, then take a look at my latest online course, Your Digital Life 2.0 Online. A course that will give you the know-how and framework to build your very own, bullet proof productivity system. So go on and invest in yourself and get yourself enrolled.
Ok, now it’s time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Laura. Laura asks: I really want to get myself organised and I think the best way would be to give myself a morning and evening routine. What do you suggest would be the best way to go about this?
Thank you Laura for your great question.
I would agree with you that setting up a couple of daily routines will help you to get yourself organised because it is the routines and the habits we do every day that takes us towards achieving the goals and plans we have set for ourselves. Most people drift through their lives and never really achieve anything. By having a plan in place and a set routine that takes you closer each day towards achieving those goals, you will start seeing some huge improvements in your life.
The best way to get this mini-project started is to make a list of all the things you would like to do each day. Don’t worry at this stage when you will do them, just concentrate on listing out the things you would like to do each day. I would go for list of say ten to twelve things. This way you can divide the list up into what you would like to do in the morning and what you would like to do in the evening. One thing that should be on your list is “plan tomorrow” this is one thing that does need to go on your evening routine. Planning your day the night before allows you to have a better nights sleep because you know exactly what you will be focussing your energies on the next day. It also allows you to make sure you are getting the important things done each day. You do not want to be wasting your freshest hours of the day making plans and deciding what you want to do.
Once you have made your list of ten to twelve things and have added “plan tomorrow” to your evening list, go through your list and add the different things to either the morning list of evening list. Try to keep things even. Have 5 or 6 things on your morning list and 5 or 6 things on your evening list.
Let’s start with the morning routine. Now this depends on what kind of person you are. If you are naturally a morning person and enjoy the early mornings then you can start your routine off by making yourself a cup of your favourite tea of coffee. One of the things I have learnt over the years is if you start your day with a cup of your favourite drink, it lifts your mood immediately. I personally love Starbucks’s Breakfast blend coffee and I make that in a Braun coffee machine. It’s a simple coffee machine, but it brews a gorgeous cup of coffee. That starts my day off wonderfully.
Now the next step depends on what you want to do. You could start off by meditating for ten minutes, or you could start by writing in your journal. Other things you can do is review your calendar for the day. Reviewing your calendar for the day is different from planning your day. Reviewing is essentially a quick check to see where you need to be and with whom and with what. It is not planning.
Of course there is always the option to exercise in the morning if you want to build that in to your daily routine. The beauty of building your own morning routine is you can focus on the things you want to focus on before the stresses and strains of the day hit you. I like the Robin Sharma’s 5AM club routine. That is the 20/20/20 twenty minutes exercise, 20 minutes planning and 20 minutes learning. I would adapt the “planning” part to writing in my journal what my hopes and expectations for the day are, but you could also use it to review your goals and internalise your dreams.
There’s a lot of advice about not checking your email first thing in the morning. I ignore that advice. I never get any ‘bad news’ or demanding emails in the morning, I usually only get news and questions from my students, which I love receiving. So for me, my morning emails are a source of good news and inspiration. But if you do get a lot of work emails in overnight then I would suggest not checking your email as part of your morning routine.
For me a perfect morning routine would be something like:
- Make coffee
- Read through over night emails
- Review calendar for today
- Write my hopes and expectations for the day in my journal
- 15 minutes reading
I am nota morning person as you can probably see.
Now on to the evening routine. This one for me is the most important one. This is where I do my Golden 10 and catch up with messages and admin. I am more of a night person, so sitting down at my desk for an hour to catch up on the day, plan the next day and get everything tidied up is one of my favourite times of the day. But this could easily be the other way round for you if you were a morning person. The key here is that whatever you do as part of your evening routine it makes you feel relaxed and contented. You do not want to be finishing the day feeling stressed. Try to make sure you evening routine leaves you feeling relaxed and ready for the next day.
This year I began a 30 minutes study period between 10:30pm and 11:00pm Every evening between those times I study something. Usually it is a TED talk, or it could be something inspiring like a Jim Rohn or Tony Robbins talk. Either way I want to feel inspired and learn something new. This has become one of my favourite times of the day. That process of learning and writing what I have learnt into my journal just makes me feel so lucky that we live in such a resourceful world today.
So for me my evening routine looks like:
- do today’s admin
- Reply to all messages
- write up my thoughts for the day in my journal
- Do my Golden 10
- 30 minutes study.
This routine leaves me feeling relaxed and ready for the next day and, for me, is the perfect way to end the day.
You, of course will be different and you need to build a routine around what you enjoy doing. Both your morning routine and evening routine needs to be something you look forward to. If you do don’t enjoy doing them you will not stick with it. After a few weeks these routines begin to stick and after three months they have become a habit. Once they have become a habit, you will feel very uncomfortable when you do not do them. That is a great sign.
The thing about morning and evening routines is they have to be what you want to do. You will never get much success if you just copy other peoples. If you don’t journal, that’s okay. Don’t try and start unless you really want to start. Journalling is not for everyone. Likewise if you are not in to exercise, then don’t force yourself to exercise. This is your life, your choices and your goals. They are not anyone elses and you should be proud of what you do. Just build a set of routines that involve you doing what you want to do.
The only thing I would add to this is that when you do get your morning and evening routines set up and working for you, you start to feel a lot happier. You start to make progress on your goals, if you make sure you do something related to your goals every day, and you start of many more good days than you had before. These routines set you up for a great life and this probably why almost all the successful people in the world have some form of daily routine they follow. Tim Cook wakes up around 3:30am and goes to the gym. Satiya Nadella goes for a run every morning and Tony Robbins has an elaborate breathing and meditation ritual he does every morning.
So there you go, Laura. Go for it. Create you daily routines and make them a fundamental part of your life. You will never regret it and you will soon find yourself moving a lot closer to achieving the things you want to achieve.
Thank you very much for listing to this podcast. I hope you got a lot out of it. It just remain for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
Podcast Episode 21
In this week’s episode of the Working With... Podcast, I answer a question about getting the important work done.
Links:
Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website
The Your Digital Life 2.0 Online Course:
More details can be found here.
The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page
Script
In this week’s episode of the Working With... Podcast, I answer a question about getting the important work done.
Hello and welcome to episode 21 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a great question about managing the different types of work that gets thrown at us each day and how to make sure the important work is getting done.
Before we get in to this week’s question though, if you don’t already know, I launched a new online course last week—Your Digital Life 2.0 Online. It’s a course designed to help you to build your very own productivity system and one that works for you. If you want to learn more about this course there is a link to the course details in the show notes.
Okay, without further ado, let me hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Alan. Alan asks, every day I feel I am swamped with work and I feel I get a lot done. The trouble is when I look and see what I have done for the day, none of it is really important. Is there anything I can do that will help me to get more important work done?
Hi Alan, thank you for your wonderful question. The situation you describe is very common. I too find the same thing happening from time to time and it can be very disheartening to get to the end of the day, feel exhausted and yet realise that you haven’t done anything important all day. You’ve spent the day fighting fires and have had no time to do any of that important fire preventing work.
So what can you do to make sure you are doing the important work each day? Well the first thing to understand is you will always have to take care of the fires. The unimportant, but urgent work that gets thrown at us everyday. That’s just part of life and is never going to change. A couple of years ago I analysed the work I was doing in details and discovered that no matter how hard I tried, there was no way I could avoid the busy work. It’s there, it comes at us through email, meetings and other people’s requests. It just has to be done. What I discovered is that around 70% of my work was busy work. It still is. So for me I realised I needed to be very clear on how I would spend the other 30% of my work time. It’s the 30% for me that really matters each day.
These numbers are very close to the 80/20 principle. For work that means 20% of your work will bring 80% of your positive results. The other 80% of you work will have no real impact on your work. I would guess this is pretty much the same for everyone. So the big question is, what are you going to do with the 20%?
The thing is, we do not have to spend all our working time doing the unimportant, but urgent work. If we take some time at the end of everyday and look at what we should be working on, the work that really matters and the work that will take us forward and grow us as individuals and select one or two tasks that will move us forward on those projects or goals each day, then each day you will have a focus. These tasks or goals do not have to be big, they can be little twenty minute tasks. Exercise is a good example. If you decided that no matter what, you were going to do at least twenty minutes exercise tomorrow, when you wake up in the morning, you will actively seek out those twenty minutes to make sure it happens. Likewise, if you know you need to work on the important report or essay, you can make sure you spend one or two hours on writing the report or essay.
I’ve just launched a new online course and each morning, when I wake up, there are a lot of admin tasks that came in overnight associated with that course. Student questions, enrolment issues etc. Although I don’t consider these to be busy work tasks, answering student questions is a very important part of my work, they are tasks that were not on my to-to list for the day. Yet, no matter what, the two objectives I set for myself the evening before do not get changed. I might change other, less important tasks so I have time to deal with the course work, there is no way I will allow anything to get in the way of doing the two important tasks I set myself for the day.
Setting those two important tasks is part of my Golden 10 evening schedule. This is where I take ten minutes at the end of the day to process my inboxes, review my calendar for the next day and set my objectives and focus for the next day. It only takes ten minutes, but it is one of the most important parts of the day for me. Without those ten minutes, I know my life would drift and I would be spending all my time doing the busy work tasks that come in on a day to day basis.
Why just ten minutes? Well, I have found if I limit the time I have to make a decision about what I want to focus on tomorrow I choose the focus that means the most to me at that moment. Likewise with my two objectives. If I spend too long thinking about what I want to accomplish tomorrow I end up choosing things that sound nice, but do not have a very big impact on my life. When I restrict the time for thinking, the things that are most important to me right now come immediately to mind and I put them down on my list. And of course, everyone can find ten minutes at the end of the day to plan the next day.
In order to get control of what you are working on, you do need to know what the important things are and what the unimportant is. For me, the important things are related to creating content. It is content that keeps me moving forward and it is content that I enjoy doing the most. I have never liked admin, but I know it does need doing. Like almost everyone else, I also get a lot of email each day, some of it I enjoy dealing with—student questions for example—other stuff I don’t enjoy dealing with—paying bills, sending attendance records and having to reschedule my English students’ classes. But this work still has to be done. For the stuff I do not enjoy doing, I have tried to automate as much as possible. Keeping track of student attendance records for example is done in the most automated way I can do it using my phone, calendar and Apple’s Numbers.
I also restrict the time I spend on admin tasks. I allocate thirty minutes after my dinner to sit down at my computer and update all the day’s admin. If I left it all until it was required—usually the end of the month—it would take me hours of work. I can manage thirty minutes each day. I even clock watch it. I note the time I start and I calculate when I need to stop. That way my brain knows it’s on a deadline and the work always seems to get done in the time frame.
The thing about all this unimportant, but necessary work is we will never be able to escape it. Whether you are a student, an office worker, doctor or construction worker, you will still get it. And, it is likely to take up the majority of the time you spend working. The key is to develop methods to deal with it, without you letting it interfere with the work that is important.
One final part to making sure you are focused on the important work is to do a weekly review. This is where you sit down, usually on a weekend when there is little being thrown at you, and review all your open projects and make sure you are moving forward on your goals. When you do a weekly review it helps you to focus on what you want to work on, what you want to get completed the following week and make sure you are on track with your goals. A weekly review takes anywhere between 45 and 90 minutes to complete. I sit down at my desk, put on some relaxing music, have a nice cup of tea and go though my calendar, to-do list and make sure I have collected everything from my various inboxes and notebooks. It allows me quiet time to make sure I am doing the work that matters and that the busy work hasn’t overtaken my life.
So there you go. That’s how you can make sure you are doing the important work and not getting tied up in unimportant busy work. Set yourself two objectives for the day the night before, make sure you have a focus for the day and accept that busy, unimportant work still needs to be done and just get it done. There will be days where you spend all day on busy work, that just the nature of things, but the important thing to do is to make sure that those days do not become the majority of days.
Thank you very much for listen to this podcast. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like answering on productivity, time management, GTD or goal planning, then please get in touch. All the various way to contact me are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, I answer a question about how to develop the habit of better productivity and time management
LINKS
Email me at carl@carlpullein.com
Website | Twitter | Facebook
More details on the Your Digitial Life 2.0 Online course can be found here:
SCRIPT:
Podcast Episode 20
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about getting into the habit of using a productivity system.
Hello and welcome to episode 20 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week I have a great question about getting into the habit of using a productivity system. I think this is a problem many people face when they make that initial decision to get themselves better organised and more productive.
Before I get into the question, I want to let you all know that my Your Digital Life 2.0 online course has just launched. This course has taken four months to design and create and compliments the book I published late last year. If you have already bought the book you can enrol in this course for just $19.99. For everyone else, the course is at a super low price of $39.99. I’ve set the course at a low price because I want to help as many people as I can discover the benefits of building a time management and productivity system that works and can get set you up for a fantastic life. I’ll put a link to the course in the show notes. This is something that can really help you get super productive.
Okay, now it time for me to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question.
This week’s question comes from Rebecca. Rebecca asks, Carl, I’ve watched most of your Todoist videos on YouTube and I’ve set up my Todoist like yours. The problem I have sticking to using it. I can go few days, but then work and other commitments get in the way and I end up not looking at Todoist for a few days. Is there anything I can do to get better at using Todoist?
Thank you, Rebecca, for this wonderful question. This really a question about developing habits. And when it comes to developing habits what you must do is to focus your attention on what it is you want to achieve. This is one of the reasons new years resolutions don’t work. People set too many resolutions and then have great difficulty focusing on the various habits or behaviours they want to change. Now sometimes it can work. Losing weight and exercising compliment each other for example. When you start a programme of exercise, the new healthy routine you set for yourself also focuses your attention on the food you are eating each day. But losing weight and spending more time with your friends do not compliment each other. What you would be best doing it focusing on one of those resolutions in the first quarter of the year and then in the second quarter (when spring comes for many of us) focusing on the other resolution.
Now when it comes to developing a productivity system, there are quite a lot of parts to it. There is the habit of collecting everything, then organising what you collected into its rightful place and then, of course, there’s the doing. Doing the work that matters. My advice would be to focus your attention on the collecting first. If you’re not collecting then you are not getting the right stuff into your system and that results in you not having the right stuff to organise. So focus your attention on collecting. As you develop the habit of collecting all your stuff, you will be pushing yourself to organise all that collected stuff anyway.
Focusing on collecting also enables you to learn the fastest ways to collect. You can experiment, you can try different apps. I use an app called Drafts to collect a lot of my stuff because it is so fast. I also have the IFTTT Note extension on my phone so I can also collect stuff quickly into Todoist from wherever I am on my phone or iPad. On Android phones, you have widgets, which can really speed up the process of collecting and on iOS you have the share sheet. All of these little pieces, when playing around with will teach you the fastest way to collect stuff into your system. To me, this is the fun part of creating your own system.
Once you are in the habit of collecting, then you want to be developing the habit of the Golden 10. This is where you spend ten minutes at the end of the day organising everything you collected. At first, this is likely to take more than ten minutes because you will be slow. Again, what you are looking to do is to get faster at organising. Making sure that when you see something in your inbox you immediately ask the question: “What is it?” then moving it into its rightful place or dealing with it there and then if you have time. Now if you can focus your attention on collecting and organising at the same time, the doing part will obviously take care of itself.
One great tip is to use your calendar. Many of us are programmed to only put appointments and events on our calendar and to leave to-dos and tasks on a to-do list. If you adopt a policy of ‘what’s on my calendar gets done’, then the first thing you look at in the morning is your calendar. What you can do is put the Golden 10 on your calendar as a set, recurring time every day. It is only ten-minutes and everybody should be able to find ten-minutes every day to do some reflecting and planning.
I schedule all sorts of things on my calendar. Preparing this podcast is scheduled for every Tuesday morning. My blog post writing is scheduled for Monday mornings and recording and editing my YouTube videos are scheduled every Saturday afternoon. What’s on my calendar gets done and is non-negotiable no matter what I feel like doing at that time. Your calendar is a great way to develop positive habits. You can put things like your morning routine on there. If you are a part of Robin Sharma’s 5 AM Club, you can schedule the 20/20/20 for 5 AM every morning. This is a great way to motivate yourself and is also a wonderful way to keep a record of what you have done. Exercise is another great addition to your calendar too. If it’s on your calendar, it gets done. There are no mind-negotiations about it. It’s on your calendar, you do it.
That leads me to another key part of this. That is self-discipline. It is very easy to go to bed at night saying to yourself you will start tomorrow. The trouble is of course when tomorrow arrives, you might wake up late, rush into the shower, grab your coffee and rush to catch your bus. The twenty minutes you planned to review your calendar for the day is already forgotten about and the moment you walk into the office you are inundated with emails, meetings and other people’s urgent tasks. This is why you need self-discipline. You need to make sure that when those little urges, we all get them, to not write something down, or skip the Golden ten in the evening you can stop yourself and make sure you do collect the ideas, tasks and commitments and that you do get yourself up off the sofa to sit down with your Todoist and calendar open and organise everything you collected that day.
And okay, if you do wake up late and miss your twenty-minutes planning and reflection time (if that is something you choose to do) cut your lunch-hour by twenty-minutes and use that time to do your planning and reflection. In my experience, if you miss a time like that, all is not lost you can always find the time later in the day.
But the best way to get into the habit of using your productivity tools consistently is to start small and focus on developing the habits one step at a time. Start by getting into the habit of collecting first, then add the Golden Ten. Once you have those two parts tied down, you will soon find everything else falls into place. The doing should be happening naturally anyway. The key part is to make sure you are doing the work that matters and not wasting time on those little routines that don’t improve your life or take you closer to achieving your goals. That’s why the Golden Ten is there. To keep you focused on the important things in your life.
So, if you are really struggling to get into the habit of being more productive, take advantage of the power of your calendar. Make it a strict policy that any that goes on your calendar gets done and make sure that your calendar is easily accessible on all your devices. As I prepare this podcast episode, the only thing open on my computer is my writing app. I don’t need anything else to prepare this podcast. My calendar told me that right now I should be preparing next week’s podcast and that is exactly what I am doing. My calendar also told that in twenty-minutes time I should be going outside for a run—yes I put my exercise schedule on my calendar too—and at 9:30pm I am scheduled to do my Golden Ten. What goes on my calendar, gets done.
Thank you very much for listening to this episode of the Working With… Podcast. Don’t forget, if you have a question you would like me to answer, please get in touch either by email, or by DMing me on Twitter or Facebook.
It just remains for me now, to wish you all a very very productive week.
This week, I answer a question about procrastination and offer some tips on beating it.
LINKS
Email me at carl@carlpullein.com
Website | Twitter | Facebook
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Cafe Del Mar Apple Music Playlist
The Complete Guide To Creating A Successful Life Online Course
SCRIPT
Podcast Episode 19
In this week’s episode of the Working With Podcast, I answer a question about overcoming the bad habit of procrastination.
Hello and welcome to episode 19 of my Working With Podcast. A podcast created to answer all your questions about productivity, GTD, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein and I am your host for this show.
This week, I have a question about procrastination and how to stop yourself from procrastinating when there are important things that need doing. I think this is a problem many people face and I too, from time to time, fall into the procrastination trap.
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Okay, now it is time to hand you over to the mystery podcast voice for this week’s question:
This week’s question comes from Anatoly who asks:
I have a bad habit of putting important things off and instead watching videos on YouTube or just watching TV for hours even though I know I have to finish some important work. Do you have any suggestions on how I can stop myself from doing this?
Thank you do much for your question, Anatoly. This is a question I am sure many people would ask. How to stop procrastination from interfering with getting the important stuff done in your life.
I believe not all procrastination is bad. We need procrastination to allow our creativity to flow and develop ideas, so we should not be trying to cut out procrastination completely. Often it is when we are lost in some form of procrastination that we come up with some amazing ideas or brilliant solutions to problems we are facing. What we need to be able to do is to prevent procrastination from stopping us from getting important work done when that work needs doing. How do we do that?
Well, as with all bad habits we first need to identify when we are doing it. What are we doing and where are we when we slip in to the bad form of procrastination. For example, do you find yourself procrastinating when you are trying to do work in your local coffee shop? What is happening here is your environment is telling your brain that this place is a good place to procrastinate. If that is the case, what you should do is find another coffee shop and only do important work in that coffee shop. Your local coffee shop can be used for browsing YouTube, chatting with friends online and reading magazines. The second coffee shop is for work only and you only ever go there to do focussed work. This is a trick I use all the time. I move around Seoul pretty much every day and I have a number of select coffee shops I use for only doing focussed work. I also have a few coffee shops around the city for what I call “creative play” I use these when I am brainstorming ideas or just want to do some non-essential research or reply to messages.
The coffee shops I use for doing focussed work are places that the moment I walk in I go into a focussed state and I can lose myself completely in the work I have to do. My phone is on do not disturb and all I have on the table is the work I am working on. It’s a simple, yet very effective way of preventing negative procrastination from creeping in.
Another trick, and somewhat related to the previous one, is your normal work environment. I do a lot of my work from home and my desk is where I write and plan out my videos and courses. My desk is incredibly minimal. I do not have anything on my desk except for things that are essential. Computer, lamp, water bottle and my journal. There is nothing else. This means there is nothing around to distract me and cause me to procrastinate. Once again, I do not have notifications turned on, so there are no popup windows distracting me. It means I can just sit down and focus on my work. The same can apply at your office, if you find you procrastinate when sat at your desk, then look around you environment. If there are a lot of distractions, files, books, phones, tablets and so on, remove them from your desk. Only have the essential items on there. Don’t allow anything to come between you and your work.
Still on your working environment, I find music is a good way to stop me from procrastinating. If I am at play, or doing something that is not important I listen to 80s/90s pop music or uplifting dance tunes from the music festivals I have been to. This music brings back wonderful memories for me and it’s just great fun to listen to.
However, when I want to do some focused work, I change the music. I listen to music from Cafe Del Mar or the Anjunadeep podcast which is all slow, deep, electronic music. This music is incredibly relaxing and does wonders for my focus. (a link to a Cafe Del Mar Apple Music playlist and the Anjunadeep podcast is in the show notes)
The scientific side to this music idea is when your brain recognises a type of music it knows you want to focus. Of course, this is not going to happen overnight. You need to train your brain to understand that slow, deep electronic music means focused deep work. You can also do this with the lighting. Change the lighting in your workspace when you want to do focused work. For example, if you want to get some focused work done, turn on your lamp. This way you are subconsciously telling your brain it’s time to focus. All other times, when you are watching videos on YouTube or in Facebook, turn it off.
Other ways to beat procrastination are to use your calendar to assign times to do focused work. Lets say between 10 and 11:30am you rarely have any meetings or lectures. Then schedule focussed work for these times. What you need to do is be specific about the work you want to do. For example, if you have an important presentation to prepare, you write in your calendar “Work on next week’s presentation” for 10 to 11:30am on the specific day. Then on that day, when you see you calendar you see “work on next week’s presentation” and you subconsciously tell your brain it’s time to do focused work. This might seem a bit simple, but it really does work.
Part of the reason we procrastinate is because we are not being specific about what we want to do. If you are not specific, you are giving your brain an excuse to procrastinate. You need to be very specific about what it is you want to accomplish. If you write something on your to-do list or calendar like “do some work” I can guarantee you will procrastinate. “Do some work” is not specific. What work? That’s the question your brain asks and then it goes off into all sorts of different places and before you know it, you’ve lost an hour. Be specific.
Last week, I did a video on the Golden Ten minutes, a practice you should follow every evening before you finish. I’ll put a link to this video in the show notes. What the Golden Ten minutes does is prepares you for the next day so you can get the important work done. It keeps you in control of your projects and deadlines and allows you to plan what you will do for the day. This means you are being very specific about what you want to accomplish and does not give your brain any chance to procrastinate. It’s very powerful and it only takes ten minutes. If you really struggle with procrastination, then I strongly suggest you start making the Golden ten minutes a part of your everyday routine.
Bad procrastination is caused because you are being unclear about what you intend to do. To overcome procrastination all you need to do is to become more specific about what your intention is. So if you have a piece of work that needs completing by Friday, then schedule the time to sit down in a place that focuses your brain on work and make sure you are specific about the outcome you want for that period of time. Repeat this process and you will soon be training your brain to focus on the work that needs doing and not cute puppies on YouTube or your Facebook newsfeed. There are times for YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat, but when you have important work that needs doing, then that’s not the time.
And don’t forget to create a specific work environment. This simple trick does work and is very easy to implement.
Thank you very much for listening to this podcast. If you have a question you would like answering about productivity, time management or goal planning, then please email me at carl@carlpullein.com or DM me on Facebook or Twitter. All the links are in the show notes.
It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.