Your Time, Your Way (Carl Pullein)

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 on the humble to-do list and how to get the best out of using one.

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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, we’re entering into the realm of personal identity and how successful and productive people think and I explain why this is important. 

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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. 

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. 

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 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. 

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. 

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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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. 

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, how to manage a seemingly never-ending to-do list

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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. 

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. 

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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. 

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:

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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. 

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. 

This week’s question is on the subject of optimisation and process. Two parts of the productivity mix that rarely get talked about.

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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, 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. 

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. 

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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. 

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. 

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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. 

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.

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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. 

This week, We are looking at productivity and time management and how you can improve both areas.

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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. 

What do I do with this email? That’s what we’ll be looking at in this week’s episode.

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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. 

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, 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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Links:

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The Working With… Weekly Newsletter

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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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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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’s question is all about what is important in your time management and productivity system. 

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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. 

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.

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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. 

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. 

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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. 

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. 

Are you planning, playing and fiddling, or are you doing? That’s what I am looking at in this week’s episode. 

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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. 

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.

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Why Your System Must Start At An Area of Focus Level

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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. 

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. 

This week, I’m answering a question about how to build an achievable plan for the year. 

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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. 

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. 

This week, how do your task manager, calendar and notes fit together in a time management and productivity system?

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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, what could you change about your system to get it ready for 2023?

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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. 

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. 

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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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. 

This week’s episode is a question that came about because of my recently updated Time Sector System course.

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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. 

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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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. 

This week’s question is on how to reduce the number of tasks in your task manager. 

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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. 

Podcast 203

This week, I have a question about how to stop feeling busy all the time

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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. 

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. 

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.

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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. 

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. 

And best of all… This newsletter is completely free. All you need do is click the link in the show notes enter your details and you’re in. Doesn’t get any simpler than that. 

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, how do you decide what to work on or put another way, how do you prioritise all the stuff you need to do?

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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. 

This week, how to reset your whole productivity system during your summer holiday. 

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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. 

Podcast 264

This week, The question is all about implementing the Time Sector System using a paper-based method.

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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 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. 

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’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.

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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. 

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.

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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. 

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. 

This week’s question is all about breaking tasks down into manageable chunks and how to organise your academic studies.

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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, we’re looking at how to identify your most important thing.

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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. 

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. 

This week the question we all ask: How to be more productive

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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. 

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.

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. 

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.

Podcast 162

This week, it’s all about putting into place a plan for the new year.

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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, the question is all about how to achieve your goals when you have failed miserably before.

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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.

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. 

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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. 

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.

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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. 

On the podcast this week I answer a question about to-do lists and why they don’t always work.

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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, 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. 

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.

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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. 

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. 

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 157

This week, what can you do to stop overthinking and over planning.

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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. 

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. 

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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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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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. 

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 206 

This week’s question is about managing overwhelm and stress.

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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. 

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, why your system or process is more important than the apps you use.

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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’s podcast answers the question: where do goals fit into a task manager?

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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, 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. 

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. 

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.

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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, I talk about the best productivity system ever developed and explain how you can use it too.

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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:

1. Decide what you want. Your goals and life purpose.
2. At the end of each day, take ten minutes to write out the six most important tasks you must complete the next day.
3. Prioritise your six tasks by importance
4. 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. 
5. If you do not manage to finish your six tasks, move any unfinished tasks to the next day.
6. 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. 

This week, we’re looking at the unsexy part of becoming more productive and better with our time management.

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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. 

How complex is your system? How complex do you need it to be? That’s what we’ll be looking at today. 

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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. 

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 question is on defeating the habit of procrastination (and I have some rather brutal truths to reveal).

You can subscribe to this podcast on:

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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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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