The Working With... Podcast

Do you feel you have to push yourself every day just to stay on top of your work? Well, this week I'm looking at why this happens and what you can do to prevent it.    You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The 2025 Summer Sale  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 372 Hello, and welcome to episode 372 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. If you have ever watched a Formula 1 race, it can be easy to believe that from the moment the lights go out and the race starts, the cars go flat out until the end of the race.  Ah, as if it were that simple.  The truth is if a team tried to do this, they would be guaranteed to lose the race.  Even though a race may only last ninety minutes, during the race the teams will need to conserve their tyres and fuel. Going flat out to the finish would degrade the tyres too quickly, which would mean they lose essential grip in the corners, and running out of fuel would be game over for a team.  You are like that Formula 1 car. When you start your day you have a limited amount of energy and your ability to focus needs to be managed through the day.  It's not physical energy. Your body has a way to utilise your fat reserves to help keep you out of danger when necessary, physically. It's your mental energy. That is limited. And it's a lack of mental energy that results in you making mistakes, procrastinating and being unable to make a decision about what to work on next.  It your mental energy that requires careful management each day. Getting home exhausted each day won't do very much for your relationships. You won't be in the mood to do very much, and having a conversation with your partner or kids won't be a top priority.  Yet, your family may have been waiting for you to get home to talk with you, play and just have some quality time.  The good news is it doesn't have to be that way. There are things you can do to preserve your mental energies so you arrive home feeling relaxed, fulfilled and ready to engage with your family.  However, before we get to how to do that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Matt. Matt asks, Hi Carl, do you have any ideas on how to stop feeling constantly tired and using the weekends just to recover before doing it all again on a Monday?  Hi Matt, thank you for your question.  If you are constantly feeling tired, my first advise would be to go see your doctor. A constant feeling of fatigue or tiredness could have an underlying reason and it's better to get that checked out first.  If, your doctor reports there are no underlying illnesses, then it's time to look at your lifestyle.  As I wrote in Your Time, Your Way, there are three areas you need to keep in balance. These are the foundations of any productive life.  They are: Sleep, movement and diet.  Are you getting enough sleep for you? We are all different when it comes to the amount of sleep we require. Some of you may work well on six hours, while others may require eight or nine hours sleep.  If you want to operate at your best each day, finding out how much sleep you need would be a first step.  For years I thought I only needed six hours of sleep. Yet when I did the test that Matthew Walker, the sleep doctor, suggested, I discovered I actually needed seven hours twenty minutes.  What is that test? I hear you ask. What you do is sleep with no alarm for seven days and calculate how much sleep you slept each night. Then you add the total number of hours you slept and divide that number by seven.  That will give you roughly the number of hours of sleep you need.  I did this experiment while I was on holiday—when I didn't have to wake up at any particular time. That way I had no anxiety about not waking up on time.  Now I make sure I get seven hours at a minimum. Movement does not mean you have to go to the gym or out running. If you look back to a time when fewer people were overweight, the 1950s for instance, there were very few gyms—and the gyms then were centred on specialised bodybuilding or competitive sports people.  You didn't see people jogging round parks either.  Instead, people moved more. They walked, took the stairs, manually cleaned their houses and were more active in general.  The statistics are shocking. In the 1950s, around 10% of the adult US population were classified as being overweight. That number was 6% in the UK.  In 2020, those numbers had increased to over 40% in the US and 38% in the UK.  While I know convenience is wonderful, it's also destroying our health. Humans were designed to move. We are not designed to spend as much as fifteen hours a day sitting down.  Your brain needs movement. This is why often you will find you come up with solutions to difficult problems when walking down a street or exercising.  Movement does so much more for you. It gives your brain a chance to reset, relax and more importantly these days, gets your eyes off the screen.  And then there is diet.  I am sure you re familiar with how you feel after a lunch high in carbohydrates. You feel drowsy, sluggish and sleepy. It even has a name; the afternoon slump.  If your diet is a mess—full of highly processed foods, sugars and carbohydrates, you are going to struggle to focus. You'll always be feeling tired, sluggish and exhausted.  Switching your diet to a healthier one, will do wonders for your overall productivity and mental energies.  So, get those three basic fundamentals of a productive day sorted first and you will see a significant improvement in your productivity and focus.  Next, though, is how we apply ourselves each day. In other words, how we manage our workloads.  Constantly switching your attention between designing a presentation or trying to figure out how to ask Chat GPT the right prompts so it gives you the answers you are looking for while a the same time responding to Slack or Teams messages will leave you completely wiped out in no time at all.  Your brain was not designed to be switching contexts in that way all day. It's called cognitive overload and while, perhaps, in the moment you don't recognise it, what you are doing is rapidly depleting your brain's capacity to make decisions, and remain focused on the job at hand.  It's the most inefficient way to go about your work.  The danger is it becomes addictive. I've seen in recent years this called “dopamine addiction”. This is where you have become addicted to the drama of urgent deadlines, the sound of another notification and constant buzz of distractions from breaking news and short videos with flashing lights and rapid changes in context.  It destroys your focus, mental energy and leaves you feeling worn out and exhausted at the end of the day.  To improve your focus and better manage your mental energies, look for ways to group similar work together.  For example, if you find that you focus better in a morning, try to avoid having meetings at that time. Instead, perhaps start your day with a two hour session of work on a particularly difficult project or task. One that requires a fair bit of creativity or skill.  Then give yourself thirty minutes or an hour before you attempt to do another mentally challenging task.  I've found that when I suggest to clients that they use these gaps between periods of deeper focused work to get up move around and use their phones to reply to messages using the dictation feature, or return phones calls, they get an instant boost in their energy levels.  If you think about it physiologically, you've gone from hardly moving at all—sitting down and focusing on something—to getting up and moving and suddenly your blood is surging again, in a positive way.  More importantly, you're not context switching in a mentally depleting way.  A quick tip I can share with you here is to keep the first thirty minutes of your work day free. Use that time to get a heads up on your day. Clear your email inbox, have a chat with your colleagues or hold a quick team meeting to discuss the objectives for the day.  What this does is prevents that sense of FOMO (the fear of missing out). It settles your mind, gets you focused on your objectives and gives you time to deal with any unknown emergencies before you settle down to doing some difficult work.  I', currently reading a book called “In Search of C. The Biography of Mansfield Cumming”. Mansfield Cumming was the founder of the British Secret Intelligence Service, MI6. The British version of the CIA. The service was founded in 1909—five years before the start of the First World War. The majority of the UK's workforce at that time were employed either in factories or in service.  In service meant people who worked for the aristocratic landed gentry in their large mansions and palaces.  Very few people worked in offices.  Those that did, didn't work a nine till five job. It was far more flexible than that. Often the day was spent travelling between meetings. And given that most transport at that time was horse and cart, you can imagine how slow that was.  Then there was large liquid lunches, often taking up to three hours.  It was in the evenings that any work managed to get done. Mansfield Cumming, for example, would spend most of his evenings replying to letters and reading documents.  One time, when Cumming was ill and bed ridden, his superiors send over a typist so he could stay on top of his correspondence.  120 years ago, people recognised the dangers of letting correspondence get out of control on the efficiency of getting work done.  And don't be fooled into thinking things were very different then. Not only did they get an equivalent number of letters as we do emails, they also got telegrams—the equivalent of Slack or Teams messages today.  It might not have been digital, but the volume was very similar.  Today, we allow ourselves to neglect staying on top of our correspondence and admin. When we do that it creates a low level of anxiety draining our energies. The fear of not knowing what is waiting for us. And the fear that we might be missing something important.  To avoid this, find some time each day to dedicate specifically to dealing with your messages. Try to do this as late in the day as you can. This avoids you getting trapped in email ping pong. That's were when you reply you give the receiver time to reply to you the same day. That just doubles up the time you need to spend dealing with your messages.  Slowing down your response times, gives you space to get back to doing the work you have identified as being important.  So there you go, Matt. If you want to have the energy to do a days work and have enough left in the evening to spend doing the things you want to do, then first make sure you are taking care of the basics, tough sleep, movement and a healthy diet.  Then avoid getting trapped by context switching. Protect time on your calendar for doing specific types of work that is similar in nature, and allow sufficient flexibility between these sessions for moving and dealing with the inevitable message load.  I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening.  Oh and one more thing. Yesterday, saw the launch of my summer sale. If you would like to pick up a course, or a bundle of courses, or perhaps join my coaching programme, you can now save up to 25%. All you need to do is visit my Summer Sale page and get all the details. I will put the link in the show notes.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

How important is it to develop your Areas of Focus? That's the question I am answering this week.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Download the Areas of Focus Workbook Join the Areas of Focus Course   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 371 Hello, and welcome to episode 371 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Why spend time working on your areas of focus when there's already a ton of stuff to do and not enough time to do it? While very few people ever overtly ask that question, I recall asking myself that question when I was starting out on my productivity and time management journey in my twenties. It seemed such a waste of time when I had people to call, work to do and a multitude of other commitments waiting for me to deal with.  The trouble was that while I was running around dealing with all the so-called urgent things, I was neglecting what was genuinely important to me. You know things like spending time with my family, reading books, and knowing what I wanted to do with my career. Those things felt like a luxury I just didn't have time for.  But what was I really doing? I was prioritising the unimportant over the important because I was addicted to being busy. And that's not healthy.  It destroys relationships, damages your health (mentally and physically) and just leaves you feeling empty and exhausted at the end of the day. So, with that said, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Ben. Ben asks, Hi Carl, I hear you talk a lot about Areas of Focus. What advice would you give to someone who hasn't got time to write out their areas of focus? To me, that doesn't honestly seem like a good use of my time.  Thank you Ben for your question.  Let me briefly explain what your Areas of Focus are.  We all share eight areas of life. These are: Family and relationships Career or business Health and fitness Lifestyle and life experiences Finances Personal development Spirituality Life's purpose They all mean something to us. Yet, how we define them will be very individual. How we prioritise them will also be personal and will change as you go through life.  When you are young your career and business area may be high on your priority list. Once you have a career or run a business, you may find other areas such as your life's purpose and spirituality will rise up the list.  I remember when I was in my twenties, I felt I was immortal. I smoked and enjoyed a beer or six on a Friday and Saturday night. Health and fitness was not a priority.  When I reached thirty, I realised I was overweight and climbing the stairs was ridiculously hard. It left me puffing and panting embarrassingly. Something needed to change. So I reduced my drinking, eventually quit smoking and began running. Health and fitness shot up my list of priorities.  The thing is, if you do not know how important these areas are to you, you will continue to ignore them. It's surprisingly easy to develop horrible diseases such as diabetes if you have not prioritised health and fitness.  And, of course, the elephant in the room. How many relationships have been destroyed because a person's work takes over their life?  Your time is limited. According to Oliver Burkeman, you have around 4,000 weeks. That's it. And if you're 40 years old, you're around half way through those 4,000 weeks. Scary thought, right?  So spending time defining what these areas mean to you is a critical first step to building a life that leaves you feeling fulfilled, energised and in balance with what is important to you.  The way to do this is to download my free Areas of Focus workbook, which you can get from my website. That workbook will take you through the steps to dine your areas of focus and to pull out the actionable steps you can take to keep things in balance.  These will range from simple tasks such as sending an amount of money to your savings each month. A task that will likely take you less than two minutes each month. To having a date night with your partner every Friday evening.  Your health and fitness area is another one that does not require a lot of time. Twenty to thirty minutes a day. Think about that for a moment. Twenty to thirty minutes a day to protect your long-time health, keep you energised and help keep your weight down. That's a no brainer. Yet to me, the most useful part of developing your areas of focus is it makes prioritising your day easy.  If you know what is important to you, you know what your priorities are. For your work, if you know what is important to you in your career, you will be fifty percent of the way to knowing what your priorities are.  For example, if your career goal is to become the CEO or head of a department, you can develop a career path that will take you towards achieving that goal. You will be clear about what experience you need to gain in order to move to the next promotion, what skills you need to develop and which areas you need to improve.  The other fifty percent comes from knowing what your core work is. Your core work is the work you are employed to do. (Not the work you volunteer to do). The clue to this is often in your job title. A salesperson is employed to sell, not spend days in internal sales meetings. A teacher is employed to teach, not waste time dealing with student administration.  Once you are clear about these, you will find planning your days easier and prioritising your work almost automatic.  There is another way knowing what your areas of focus mean to you is it helps you to structure your week.  If you decide that maintaining your health is a priority for you, you can open up your calendar and schedule in your exercise times. Similarly, if you enjoy weekends going on adventures with your friends, that can be managed in your calendar.  With your work, once you know what your core work is, you can ensure you have sufficient time set aside for doing that work. For instance, if you are a software developer, how much time do you need to spend developing software so that you meet your deadlines?  That might equate to four hours a day of undisturbed coding. If that's the case, you can block that time out and get very strict about accepting meetings.  Yet, none of this will be obvious if you have no idea what is important to you. You'll find yourself being pulled and pushed into doing things that do not align with your values and areas.  There's a great quote from Jim Rohn which says: “If you don't have a plan for what you want, then you will probably find yourself buying into someone else's plan and later find out that was not the direction you wanted to go. You've got to be the architect of your life.” And that's what your Areas of Focus do for you. It gives you a blueprint for the life you want to live.  Once you know what your blueprint is, you can begin making changes to build the life you want to live.  It's funny because as I think about this, Ben, I'm reminded of what my life was like before I sat down to work out what I wanted for my life.  I felt I was drifting. Everything that came at me appeared urgent. I was being pushed this way and then the next day I'd be pulled in another direction. Other people were telling me how I should be living my life. Even down to what I should be wearing, the kind of car I should be driving and the career I should be following.  Yet, none of that was what I wanted. It was what other people wanted me to do. It wasn't until I read The Ten natural laws of time and life Management by Hyrun Smith that I finally woke up and realised I did have a life worth living and I could build the life I wanted to live.  And that's when I sat down and worked on my Areas of Focus. The initial ideas were reasonably easy to write out. It became a little harder when I fine tuned them and pulled out the action steps I needed to follow consistently in order to stay on track. In total it took a few weeks to come up with a set of areas I was happy with.  But it was worth it. Almost instantly my life changed. I was more focused, intentional and other people's opinions about how I should be living my life were listened to, but if they did not align with what I had identified as being important to me, quietly rejected.  Now one thing about your areas of focus is they will change. You will find yourself fine-tuning them from time to time. How you think about family and friends will be different when you have your first child or grandchild.  Your career might be important today, but less so after you retire.  You may not have discovered your purpose in life yet. I didn't know what mine was until I was in my mid-thirties. But it's worth thinking about as that one area has the potential to bring you so much joy and fulfilment.  I get to help hundreds of people every day. Nothing can beat the feeling of receiving an email or a comment from someone I have been able to help.  And that's what your areas of focus will do for you. They give you focus, they show you what to prioritise and brings purpose and fulfilment into your life.  To me establishing what your areas are is the most important part of building any time management and productivity system. Without these, you have no foundations and will be at the mercy of everyone else.  I hope that has helped, Ben. Thank you for your question. And thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

How can you preserve simplicity and work at a reasonable pace in an increasingly complex and rushed environment? That's the question I'm answering today. You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 370 Hello, and welcome to episode 370 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Two of the challenges we face today are the increasing complexity in our work life. Yet, that has been around forever. New technology requires us to learn new techniques for doing things and, perhaps, the biggest challenge of all is dealing with the speed at which things come at us.  Interestingly, the number of emails we get today is comparable to the number of letters people in the 1970s and 80s received. Yet the number of phone calls we get have dramatically dropped. That's largely due to the move towards instant messages—which were not around in the 70s and 80s.  The difference is the speed at which we are expected to respond. With a letter, there was some doubt about when the letter would arrive. It might arrive the next day, but there was always a chance it would take two or three days.  And when it did arrive, we had at least twenty four hours to respond. Today, there are some people who expect you to respond to an email immediately—no thought that you may be working on something else or in a meeting with an important customer.  So the question we should explore is how we can navigate the way we work today without letting people down, but at the same time work at a comfortable speed which minimises mistakes and leaves us feeling fulfilled at the end of the day.  So, with that stated, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Tom. Tom asks, Hi Carl, over the years, my productivity system has changed with technology. I began, like you, with a Franklin Planner in the 1990s, then I moved to Getting Things Done and managed everything digitally. These days, I am struggling to keep up, and it just seems so complicated. Do you have any thoughts on how to keep things simple? Hi Tom, thank you for your question.  One way to look at this is to remember that the basic principles of good time management and productivity will never change. Those principles are incorporated in COD—Collect, Organise and Do.  No matter how complicated or fast things get, we still need a way to collect stuff and trust that what we collect will be where we want it to be when we process it.  We need an organisation system that works for us. And that means, we can find what we need when we need it.  And finally, we want to be maximising the time we spend doing the work, so we avoid backlogs building.  It's within this framework we can evolve our systems.  Thirty years ago, we would have been collecting with pen and paper. Today, it's likely we will collect using our phones or computer. Thirty years ago we would have had stacks of file folders and a filing cabinet or two to store those folders. Today, those files will likely be held in the cloud—Google Drive, iCloud or OneDrive, for instance.  So while the tools have changed, the principles have not.  I'm a big rugby fan. I've been following Leeds Rhinos since my grandfather took me to my first game when I was five years old.  The teams that win the championships and cup games are the ones who get the basics right. In rugby, that is playing the majority of the game in the oppositions half. Being aggressive in defence and ensuring their players are disciplined—giving away silly penalties is one sure way to lose games.  The teams that lose are the ones who don't get these basics right. They try to be clever, get frustrated, and drop the ball (quite literally) and give away unnecessary penalties, which results in them giving away territory and playing the majority of the game in their own half.  The message is always the same. Get the basics right and the results will come.  This is the same for you, too, Tom. Get the basics right and that's following the principles of COD.  The problems will start when we begin trying to do multiple things at the same time. Multi-tasking is not a strategy. Sure there are some things you can do at the same time. Walking and thinking about solving a problem, listening to a podcast while doing the dishes or cleaning up the house.  But you are not going to be able to write a report, prepare a presentation and reply to your emails at the same time. These are very different types of work requiring different skills.  A report is well thought out words and conclusions. A presentation is a visual representation of your main points and writing emails is about communicating clearly in words. All requiring different parts of your brain.  This is why categorising the work you do works so well. With categorising, or chunking or batch processing—they all mean the same thing—you are grouping similar tasks together and doing them at the same time. For example, you can collect your actionable emails together and set aside thirty to sixty minutes each day for responding to them.  If you were consistent with that, you would always be on top of your mails and no one would be waiting much longer that 24 hours for a reply.  Similarly if you were responsible for sending out proposals to prospective customers, if you were to spend an hour or so on those each day, you would rarely have any backlogs and your proposals would be going out quickly without errors.  It's when we stop following these principles we become like the losing rugby teams. We've stopped following the game plan and become frustrated, which leads to mistakes which in turn means we lose the game.  Or in the world of work, we create backlogs, deadlines are missed and we feel horrible, stressed out and overwhelmed.  I've always found it fascinating to learn how productive people work. I saw recently an interview with Tim Cook, where he mentioned he wakes up at 4:00 am, and the first hour of his day is spent doing email.  I remember reading that Jack Dorsey, one of the founders of Twitter and the CEO of Square, who would schedule his days by category of work. Monday and Tuesdays were spend on marketing, Wednesdays were problem solving and Thursdays would be spent at Square and Fridays at Twitter.  They all have some structure to their days. Incidentally, this was the same for Winston Churchill and Charles Darwin. They both followed a strict structure to their days which ensured they spent time each day on the things that mattered.  While the way we work and the tools we use to do our work may change, the way we structure our days doesn't have to.  Twenty years ago, spending an hour on returning phone messages was the norm. Today, that same hour will likely be spent responding to Slack or Teams messages and email.  If you want to get control of your time and remain productive, it will be helpful to know what is important.  What is your core work? The work you are paid to do? What does that look like at a task level? Working in concepts doesn't work here. You need to go to the next level and determine what your work looks like at a task level.  An accountant will need to put numbers into a spreadsheet (or something similar) in order to get the information they need to be able to advise their clients. The question therefore becomes how much time do they need to do that each day to ensure they are on top of their work?  As a former Franklin Planner user, you will know the importance of daily and weekly planning. This is about knowing what is important today and this week. It's about allocating sufficient time to getting that work done and being strict about what you allow on your calendar.  Perhaps part of the problem we face today is the increasing demands on our time. It's easy to ask someone to jump on a Teams or Zoom call for “a few minutes” Ha! How often does five minutes turn into thirty minutes?  And because of the simplicity of doing these calls, we accept. Perhaps too readily.  I don't have Zoom or Teams on my phone. If I am not with my laptop, I cannot do a video call. It's a rule. And a non-negotiable one too.  Where are your rules? What will you accept and, more importantly, not accept?  One way you can manage this is to limit the number of meetings you have each day. If you spend seven hours of your eight hours of your work day in meetings, how will you find the time to do the work you are employed to do?  That isn't a task management issue. That's a time issue. It doesn't matter how many tasks you have to do today if you do not have the time protected for doing them. It's on you to protect that time and that doesn't matter where you are in the hierarchy chain.  If your boss expects you to be in seven hours of meetings each day and write reports, prepare presentations and respond to your emails and messages, that's an issue you need to take up with your boss. No tool or productivity system will sort that out for you.  Even with the help of AI, you will struggle to do your work with that kind of time conflict.  Now when it comes to managing your files and notes, I would say don't reinvent the wheel.  Several years ago, Microsoft and Apple's engineers released we were terrible at managing our documents. So, they began rolling out self contained folders for their professional tools such as Word and Keynote.  You no longer need to file these documents in folders you create. Instead you can save them and let your computer organise them for you. For example, if you use Word, all your word documents can be saved to the Word container folder in OneNote. Just like Google Docs. These are all kept together and you can then organise them in a variety of ways. You can do it alphabetically, the date the document was created or when it was last modified (great for when collaborating with other people). In iCloud and Google Drive, you can also organise by which documents are shared.  Your computer does the hard work so you don't have to. There's certainly no longer a need to create sophisticated file folder structures that take forever to keep organised. You don't have time for that. Let your computer do the work for you.  And not only have these companies made organising our work easier, they have been gradually improving search features too. Now as long as you know a date range, a keyword or a title, you'll be able to find any document in seconds.  There is no longer any need to manually organise your documents. The only responsibility you have is to ensure the names of the documents you have saved mean something to you. If you're downloading a document, make sure you rename it. There's some very strange file naming conventions out there.  And that's about it, Tom.  Stick to the basics of COD—Collect, Organise, Do. Be strict about what you allow on your calendar (even if that means you need to an uncomfortable talk with your boss) and let your computer do the hard work of filing for you.  I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question.  And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to with you all a very very productive week.   

Podcast 369 What's the most effective time management practice you can adopt today that will transform your productivity? You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 369 Hello, and welcome to episode 369 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. I've often answered questions on this podcast about the best or most effective time management or productivity system, but I don't think I've answered a question about the best practices before.  A practice is something you do each day. It's just what you do. You don't need to think about it. It's automatic. And there is something that the most productive people I've come across do each day, that I find people struggling with their management of time don't do.  In many ways, becoming more productive and better at managing time is a two-fold practice. It's the strict control of your calendar and being intentional about what you do each day.  Yet to get to those practices each day, takes a change in attitude and the squashing of some pre-conceived ideas.  And that is what we'll be looking at in today's episode.  Before we get to the question, just a quick heads up. The European time zone friendly Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming next weekend. Sunday the 18th and 25th May.  If you want to finally have a time management and productivity system that works for you, and have an opportunity to work with me and a group of like-minded people, then join us next Sunday. I will put the link for further information into the show notes.  Okay, let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Mark. Mark asks, Hi Carl, what do you consider to be the best daily habits for living a productive life?  Hi Mark, thank you for your question.  This is something that has always fascinated me about the way people work. What is it that the most productive people do that unproductive people don't do.  Surprisingly it's not work longer hours. That's usually the domain of unproductive people.  What the most productive people do is to have a few daily rituals that are followed every day.  Let's start with the easiest one. Have a solid morning routine. It's your morning routine that sets you up for the day.  Cast your mind back to a day in your past when you overslept and had to rush out the door to get to work. How productive were you that day? Probably not very. You will have been in a reactive state all day, treating anything and everything as urgent.  The “secret” is to use your morning routine to put you in a proactive state. That means looking at your calendar for your appointments for the day and identifying what you must get done that day.  Then mentally mapping out when you will do your work.  For instance, today I have seven hours of meetings. That does not leave me much time to write this podcast script. Yet, when I began my day, I looked at where my appointments were, saw I had an hour mid morning free and a further hour in the afternoon between 4 and 5 pm.  Two hours is enough to get the bulk of this script written. Now all I have to do is resist all demands on my time today so I can get this script written. That's the challenge. Resisting demands.  Resisting demands on my time today is reasonably easy. Seven hours of meetings is about my limit anyway. So if someone requests an additional meeting, it'll be quite easy to tell them I am fully booked today and I can offer them an alternative day and time.  And that's a mindset shift I would recommend to you. Know where your limits are and to be comfortable offering alternative days and times. If the person demanding your time insists and is in a more senior position to you (does that really happen today?), then you can decide which of your other meetings you could postpone.  If your day is full of meetings, make sure you task list reflects that. What I see a lot of people doing is having a day full of meetings and a full task list. Yeah, right. That's not going to happen.  For most of us the confirmed, committed meetings will be the priority. Tasks will not be. So, on days when you have a lot of meetings, reduce your task list. That will immediately remove anxiety and give you more focus for your meetings.  Next up, is to not use the excuse of a busy day to not do your communications.  Email and messages build up very quickly. Just one day neglecting these means tomorrow you will need double the time to get back in control.  The goal here is to protect time each day for dealing with your actionable emails and messages. If all you have is thirty minutes, take it. It's surprising how much you can do in thirty minutes. That's a lot better than having to try and find two or three hours the next day to get on top of an out-of-control inbox.  Email and messages are the things that are apt to throw you off a well planned day. Yet, it's surprisingly easy to get on top of these if you were to make it a daily practice to spend thirty minutes or more dealing with your actionable emails.  The next tip I've picked up from super-productive people is to group similar tasks together. This technique has a few different names. Batching and chunking are two of them. What you are doing is grouping similar tasks together and working on them as one task. For instance, if you have a lot of messages to respond to, you would call that your communication time and do them all at once.  This is quite easy with email as you can stay within one app to do the work. You can do this with writing proposals. If you have five or six proposals to write, then schedule time for writing proposals. Don't look at each individual proposal as a single task. See the activity of writing proposals as one task.  This way you are working with time. You could set aside an hour or two for doing your proposals and after your allocated time is up, move on to the next category. For example, a sales person, may decide that between 9:30 and 11:00 am, they will do their follow-ups and prospecting, then from 11:30 am do their appointments for the day.  Sure, there may be days when a customer can only see you early in the day, and you can move your follow-up and prospecting time to a little later in the day, but what you want to be doing is trying to set up a structure to you day. It just makes your life that little bit easier.  The problem with most to-do lists is that they are just that— a list of random things that may or may not need to be done today. If you were to allocate time for doing different types of work, you're going to be pretty much up to date with most things.  It's unlikely you will be able to avoid backlogs completely. But if you are consistently doing your important work, nothing is going to get out of control.  I think of this very much like running an airport. You've got flights taking off and landing all day. Yet, in the air traffic control centre, you can only land one plane at a time. This means around all commercial airports you will see what is called a holding pattern. This is where planes are circling waiting to be given permission to land.  Once a plane is given that permission, it comes into land.  Well, you are like that airport. You can only work one piece of work at a time. Everything else waiting for your attention needs to be held in a holding pattern.  And like an airport, aircraft in difficulties or running low on fuel will take priority over others. You too, will have little emergencies and urgencies, and you can decide which piece of work has the priority while you are working on the category you are currently working on.  This is why ultimately your calendar is your most important productivity tool. That's directing your day. It tells you where you need to be at what time. It also tells you where you have time for doing your tasks.  If you leave things open, it's likely to be stolen by low value stuff or other people. Making it a practice to plan your day using your calendar, ensures that you have the time to do what needs to be done and if you don't do it, there's only one person to blame—you.  Never ignore your calendar. Reschedule, by all means, but never ignore it. It's your calendar that will ensure you know when to leave to pick your son up from school, and what time that appointment with an important client is.  The final part is to know what your non-negotiables are. These are the things you will never miss. For example, three things I will never miss are writing my journal each morning, taking my dog for a walk and my thirty minutes of exercise each day.  Start with your personal life. What are you non-negotiables there? Then look at your professional life. What are you non-negotiables at work.  For example, with the exception of my calls days, I will ensure I spend at least two hours working content each day. If you were a designer or engineer, that could be spending a minimum of two hours designing or engineering.  Ensuring you have a few hours each day dedicated to doing the work you were hired to do, will put you ahead of most of your colleagues.  When you have non-negotiables, you find planning your day is easy. I know Louis needs his walk, I know also that when I wake up, after making my coffee, I'll be sitting down to write my journal. I don't need to think about these things. The only thing I need to decide is where Louis and I will go today. We try to go somewhere different each day.  I also find towards the end of the afternoon, I begin thinking about what exercise I will do today. There's no question about whether I will exercise or not. Exercise is a non-negotiable. All I need to decide is what I will do in my thirty minutes.  Non-negotiables can be anything that is important to you. I've had clients who would never miss their meditation session, or go to the Synagogue, or temple in the early morning. Others won't miss their Saturday morning family breakfast.  The key here is to identify what your non-negotiables are and then do them.  I hope that has helped, Mark. Thank you for your question.  And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Backlogs. We all have them. But, how do you clear them and then prevent them from happening again? That's what we're looking at today.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Getting Things Done With Linda Geerdink Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 367 Hello, and welcome to episode 368 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Organising your work, creating lists of things to do, and managing your projects in your notes are all good common-sense productivity practices. However, none of these are going to be helpful if you have huge backlogs of admin, messages, and emails creating what I call a low-level anxiety buzz.  You're going to be stressed and distracted and in no place to be at your very best.  What's more, this can become a chronic problem if those backlogs are growing. This is when critical things are going to get missed.  I'm often surprised to get an email from someone asking me if they can have a discount code for an early-bird discount that expired three or four weeks previously. I mean, come on. If it's taking you three to four weeks to get to an email—even if you consider it to be a low-value email—there's a serious problem in your system. (Or more likely, you don't have a system at all.)  So this week, I want to share with you a few ideas that can help you regain control of these backlogs and, more importantly, prevent them from happening again.  So, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Wyatt. Wyatt asks, hi Carl, how would you help someone who is backlogged beyond belief. I've got over 3,000 emails in my inbox, and my team are still waiting for me to finish their appraisals from last year! I feel so stuck. Please help.  Hi Wyatt. Thank you for your question.  Sorry to hear you feel swamped. I know it can be a horrible place to be.  Before we begin, let me explain the three types of backlogs we all have to deal with. The first is the growing backlog. This one is the worst because it's getting bigger and unless you take action immediately, it's going to overwhelm you. These kinds of backlogs will always be your priority. The next type of backlog is the static backlog. It's not growing, but it's there and it's on your mind. It needs to be dealt with, but the urgency isn't as big as a growing backlog.  And then there's the shrinking backlog. These are the best because if they are shrinking, they'll soon disappear altogether.  Now, one of the most common areas of our work that backlogs is our email. The last statistics I saw show that on average, people are getting 90+ emails a day.  If you need an average of 30 seconds to deal with each email—which I know is low—that's around forty-five minutes to deal with them.  Do you have forty-five minutes today to deal with your email?  Remember, that's a small amount of time for each email. It's likely you'll need more than thirty seconds for most of those mails.  Now the good news. If you're starting with a backlog of over 3,000 emails, many of those emails will no longer require a response. The moment's passed. What I would suggest is you take any emails older than a month, and move then to a folder called “Old In-box”. While my instinct it to tell you to delete them, I've never come across anyone courageous enough to do it.  Although, if you think about it. Deleting them gives you a perfect excuse if someone follows you up—“sorry, I don't seem to be able to find your email. Could you resend it?” Doing this means you've cut your list by a large margin. What's left can be processed. Email is a two step process. Just like we used to do with regular letters. Open your post box, take out the mail and sort it between letters you need to read or respond to and throw away or file anything you don't need to act on.  And by the way, nobody left their mail in the mail box. Why do we do that with email?  With email, it's the same process. Clear your inbox. As you clear ask yourself two questions: What is it? What do I need to do with it? If you need to read or reply to an email, then move it to a folder called “Action This Day”. If you don't need to do anything with it, either delete or archive it.  This is the processing stage. All you are doing is processing. You are not replying or reading. That comes later. This means, with practice, you'll be able to process an individual email in a second or two—ten tops.  Now, towards the end of the day, set aside some time for clearing your actionable emails. Try to do this as late in the day as possible. This prevents what is called email ping pong.  If you reply in the morning, you're going to get a reply in the afternoon. If you reply in the afternoon, even if you do get a reply, you can leave it until tomorrow to respond. Genius, yes? There are two additional things here. The first is to reverse the order of the mails in your action this day folder. This puts the oldest at the top. If you're responding to your mails once a day, you want to be working from the oldest first.  That way, no one will be waiting more than 24 hours or so for a reply from you.  The second is to follow this process every day.  I require around forty-five minutes a day for dealing with my actionable email. If I skip a day, then tomorrow I will need ninety minutes. I don't have ninety minutes to spend on emails. If I do skip a day, I've got a backlog building. Not good.  So, it's an everyday thing if you want to prevent your email from becoming backlogged.  And remember that one is greater than zero. In other words, if you don't have a great deal of time available today, still do some of your actionable mail. That keeps you in touch with what's going on in your mail box and it's surprising how much you can get done in twenty minutes.  Now, let's move on to your appraisals. You mention that your team is still waiting for their appraisals from last year. That suggests it's an annual event rather than a quarterly event. Either way, the same principle works.  For this kind of task, you need to be scheduling time for doing it. Often, with staff appraisals, you need a week to hold one-to-ones with your team before you can write anything. So, if you begin the appraisals in October, I would suggest you go into your calendar now and set up those appointments.  I know we are a good four months away from October, but by getting them in your calendar now, it's one less task to deal with and you're not going to be going back and forth trying to get these appointments scheduled into one week. You'll end up wasting time negotiating the best time. Do it now.  Then, schedule the third week in October to write your appraisals. Depending on how long, on average, this work takes, you could block a whole day—or two if you need it—to spend writing appraisals.  Getting it on your calendar means you are less likely to allow anything else to take that time away.  To deal with last year's appraisals, it's the same process. If you have not completed the one-to-ones, schedule those for next week. Make it a non-negotiable part of your week.  Then go into your calendar and block time out for writing the appraisals.  For things like this there's an element of intentionality. Things don't get done until you intentionally set aside time to do it and then get started.  Agin, this is two steps. First set aside time—that's the easy bit—then sit down and do it—that's the hard part.  Yet, as long as you begin, once you're in the flow and you know nothing else is coming up to tear you away from doing the work, you will get it done.  Clearing backlogs is one thing. Preventing backlogs from occurring is another.  Email is a good example, if you are not following the process every day, a backlog will occur. This is not something you can wish away. It doesn't go away. It's the same with Teams and Slack messages.  If you're getting a lot of notifications from these channels of communication, you're not going to get a lot done if you're responding to these messages moment they come in. It will exhaust you because of the constant cognitive load switching.  I find dealing with messages is best done between sessions of work.  Let me explain. We know about the sleep cycle—where you sleep in cycles of 90 minutes. Well, it turns out you are also awake in 90-minute cycles.  What this means is you can focus on a piece of work for around 90 minutes. After which your brain will tire, and you will need a distraction. That could be a toilet break, or the desire to get up and refresh your coffee or water.  This is your brain telling you that you need a break.  Now, if you use that to your advantage, you could schedule your focused work sessions around 90-minute blocks. For example, your first, and most important block, could be set for 9:30 to 11:00 am. Then you make sure you have a 30-minute gap before you allow anything else that requires a degree of focus.  In that thirty minutes, you could get up and go to the bathroom, refresh your water and deal with your messages. The longest anyone will be waiting for your response would be 90 minutes.  No demanding boss or client can complain at that. I know, I've dealt with some very bad, demanding bosses and clients in my time. They can be trained.  If you were to stick with these ideas and processes, I can promise you that you will get a lot more important work done, reduce your backlogs and feel a lot less exhausted at the end of the day.  You're in effect working with your brain instead of against it.  Preventing backlogs really comes down to how you structure your day. Most people are not doing that. They have no structure, so they are working on the latest and loudest thing. The problem is that the latest and loudest thing is often not the most important thing.  However, if you set aside time each day for dealing with your communications—say an hour and respect that time—and perhaps a further thirty minutes for dealing with your admin—another area that can become backlogged—you will prevent backlogs from happening.  If you run your day by the seat of your trousers, then, yes, you will have huge, growing backlogs. Responding to your email is rarely urgent, so it gets left behind on busy days. And that means you require double the amount of time tomorrow. And what happens if tomorrow is a busy day?  I hope that has helped, Wyatt. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.  

Where would you start if you were to completely redesign your productivity and time management system? That's what I'm looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Getting Things Done With Linda Geerdink Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 367 Hello, and welcome to episode 367 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One of the things that can hold you back from creating a solid time management and productivity system is the legacy of your old habits and systems.  It could be you have always done things a particular way, which may have worked well in the past, but no longer does. Yet, the hold of the familiar keeps you wedded to that old habit.  Or, your company may have adopted a new system or piece of software that has a number of possibilities that you haven't explored yet. And, of course, the elephant in the room where you have so many tools it's paralysing you when it comes to deciding what to use.  So, how would you go about doing an overhaul on your system so it's simple, easy and does not require a lot of maintenance to keep working? That's the topic of this week's question and so, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Lindsay. Lindsay asks, hi Carl, I recently took your new Time Sector System course and I love it. The trouble I am having is I have so much stuff all over the place, I don't know where to start to rebuild my system. Do you have any tips that may help? Hi Lindsay, thank you for your question.  There's a great YouTube video, where David Allen, author of Getting Things Done spends a day with Linda Geerdink, a Dutch journalist showing her how to get her life organised. (I'll put the video in the show notes) It's quite emotional at times as Linda has never had any kind of system in the past and has lived her professional and personal life by the seat of her pants.  David Allen comes across as being a little cruel at times, yet, I can understand where he is coming from. Sometimes you need to be cruel to be kind in order to help someone get to where they want to be.  What fascinated me about this video is the utter chaos the start of the process of building a system can be. When you gather everything you may or may not need to do into one central place, it can seem daunting.  And when that involves papers, documents and digital stuff, it can feel like you are drowning in an ocean of stuff that must be done.  But, it doesn't have to be that way.  So, where would I start if I was to rebuild my system? I would suggest watching that David Allen video. It starts in Dutch, but when David is introduced to the video, it continues in English.  What David gets Linda to do is exactly right. Gather everything you have into a central place. Today, that's going to be largely digital stuff. If you have notes in several notes apps, pick one and go through the process of bringing everything together into one. Which notes app you choose doesn't really matter too much, although I would choose one that is simple to use. The more complex a notes app is, the more time you will need to maintain it in the future. (Which is not a very productive way to go about it)  The good thing about notes is they are rarely urgent. Notes are support materials for meetings, projects and ideas. Most notes apps will allow you to get a URL link so you can link the important notes to tasks in your task manager.  Now with you task manager, again, if you have a few of these laying around, again, pick one—a simple one, and move any tasks from the apps you discard into the one you've chosen's inbox.  Then process your inbox. Use the three questions: What is it? What do I need to do? When will I do it? And then move the task to the appropriate folder.  Now, I know all this may take a long time. Often it can take a few days. The best way to do this is to take a day or two off and dedicate those days to getting your system sorted out. It can be fun, no really, it can be. Just be careful when you do this. We can become quite nostalgic when doing this and keep stopping to read through old notes. Now's not the time to do this. If you do find yourself doing this create a folder called “nostalgia” and drop them in there. You can then go back to that folder when you're finished.  One tip here is to think elimination not accumulation. In other words focus on deleting as much as you can. Notes can be archived, sometimes your old ideas can spark fresh ideas. With your task manager, though, be ruthless and delete as much as you can.  Your notes can hold as much as you like. You task manager needs to be clean and tight. The less in there the more effective it will be.  I've stressed the importance of keeping things simple and this is something you want to be thinking about as you process what you have in your inboxes.  Complexity is the enemy of productivity. It slows you down by adding what I call an administrative cost. That's the cost in time it takes to maintain your system.  This is why the Time Sector System is powerful. It narrows down you options to when you will do something. After all, it doesn't matter how much you have to do if you don't have the time to do it, does it?  Moving forward, you want to be quite strict about what you schedule to do this week. It's quite easy, when planning your week, to think that's it. But it isn't. Once the week begins, new stuff will be coming in daily, and some of that will need to be done this week. You do need to keep some space—white space as I've heard it called—for these tasks and appointments.  Now, what about the future? How can you prevent chaos from returning in the future and to put yourself in a position where you are in control and know what you are doing and when? First accept your human limitations.  You and I have two limitations. We can only work on one thing at a time and the number of hours we have each day.  These are human limitations and there nothing we can do to change them.  Then there is the need to sleep—although you may be able to pull an all nighter occasionally if you must, which I hope you don't need to do, ever—and eat. Both of which take time.  This means, the place to start would be your calendar. How much time do you need for your personal needs. That would be family and social time, sleep, exercise and anything else you want time for.  You don't want to be worrying about work at this point.  Your work has a fixed time—usually Monday to Friday, so you can deal with that later.  The benefit to starting with your personal life is it will help you to establish some boundaries between your personal and professional life.  Once you have your calendar of personal activities set up, and I would set these to recur in your calendar. You can always move things around when you do your weekly planning. By setting them up as recurring events, you're much more likely to stick to them.  Now look at your work.  First where are your fixed meetings? Get them on your calendar.  After that, how much time do you need, on average, to do your core work. That's the work you're employed to do.  When I was a teacher, my teaching schedule was fixed. Yet, I also needed to schedule time for class preparation and my admin duties.  When I worked as a lawyer, I required more time to work on the cases, so I made sure I had five hours a day for just working on the cases—that involved preparing court documents, requesting documents from the Land Registry and responding to letters from other lawyers.  That meant I had only three hours available for appointments.  There was no point in me believing I could fit in five hours of meetings and spend five hours on my cases—which I genuinely needed to do in order to keep my head above water—I wasn't being paid enough to work ten hours a day and sacrifice my social life and my exercise time.  Now, I did allow a little more flexibility at the end of a month, but on the whole I strictly controlled my calendar to ensure I was not trying to do the impossible.  And, for those of you who believe you cannot get control of your calendar, when I worked in a law firm, I never got fired and received my annual bonus for exemplary work each year, and I was the most junior or juniors in my time in the law office. You can do this—control your time. You're evaluated on your work, not how many meetings you attend.  This is why I always recommend you start with getting control of your calendar. It's your calendar that controls one of your limitations—available time. Now, the other limitation, only being able to work on one thing at a time, means you can group similar tasks together and focus your efforts on clearing that list. For example, if you allocate an hour a day for dealing with your communications, you're not worrying about how many emails you have to respond to, you don't need to.  All you need to do is begin with the oldest message and do as many as you can until your hour is up. If you consistently follow that process, you'll rarely have any communication backlogs.  It's not about the number of emails and messages you have to respond to, it's about how much time you have available to respond to them. Do them all at the same time and that way you won't be jumping around inside multiple different apps trying to find what to do. It's the same with your admin and project tasks. It's never about how many you have to do at anyone time. It's about how much time you have available to do them.  If you're work is largely project based, make sure you have sufficient time scheduled on your calendar for working on your project tasks each week. If you're role is mainly admin tasks—for example you're in customer support, then how much time, on average, do you need to do your work without the build up of backlogs each week?  If you're focused on how much you have to do, you will always feel overwhelmed. If you focus on how much time you have available for working on different types of work, you'll be a lot less overwhelmed and you will be getting your work done.  This also eliminates the impossible challenge of trying to estimate how long a task will take. Nobody can do that with any degree of accuracy. This comes back to you being a human being. Some days you'll be on fire and churn through a lot of work. Other days you'll be feeling exhausted and find everything you do is like trying to run through treacle.  I hope that has helped, Lindsay. Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, what does it take to be organised and productive? You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 366 Hello, and welcome to episode 366 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One thing you will discover if you begin reading around the subject of time management and productivity is the importance of planning your week and day.  Every successful person i have come across, or read about, never fails to plan their days and week. Every person who is struggling, and not achieving their goals are not.  Instead, they find excuses. “I'm too tired”, “I don't have time”, “I have more important things to do”, etc, etc.  Yet, there's more to it than that. It's not just about having a plan for the day and being clear about what needs to be done. it's also about protecting time for the important, but not urgent work, and knowing when to say no, when to push and when to pull back and take some rest. In essence, it's about understanding yourself and knowing your limits. So with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week's question. This week's question comes from Tammy. Tammy asks, hi Carl, I'm trying to understand what I need to do to become more organised and productive. I know it's holding me back, but there's so much conflicting advice out there that I am confused. Can you help? Hi Tammy, thank you for your question. As I just alluded to, the best place to begin is to understand yourself.  This means knowing when you are at your most focused, when you are prone to distractions and how much sleep you need.  The chances are, if you stop and step back, you will already know this information. Perhaps you find yourself being able to get quite a lot of work done in the morning, but struggle in the afternoons. Or, you may come alive around 3 pm and can get a lot of work done then.  This knowledge, allows you to better structure your days. You can avoid meetings, where possible, at the times you are at your most focused, and rely on human connection to keep your energy levels up by holding meetings when you are less focused—there's something about human interaction that raises our energy levels. You can also ensure you are getting enough sleep, and that means being consistent when you wake up. As I recently learned, it's not the time you go to bed that matters, it's waking up at roughly the same time each day as that starts your 24 hour sleep/wake cycle.  If you mess around with your sleep/wake cycle, you will feel dreadful, and that destroys your productivity.  Once you have the basics locked in, you can then move on to structuring your days.  A couple of years ago, I wrote quite extensively about some famous authors. This was inspired by the book Daily Rituals by Mason Curry. In that book, Mason Curry wrote about incredibly productive people and how they got their work done.  One person, not featured in the book, I wrote about was author Jeffrey Archer. He writes a book every year, and he has his year structured to allow him to take care of writing the new book, promoting the book he wrote the previous year and dealing with his publishers, book cover designers and much more.  Archer also loves cricket. So his year is structured so he can reduce his workload in the summer when the cricket season is on.  This works brilliantly. Jeffrey Archer is consistent. Everyone who works with him knows he will be in Majorca between 27th December and the beginning of March writing his next book. They also know he will be available for meetings, promotions and events between March and June. From July to October, Archer is less available, and from October he's happy to do book tours, interviews and anything else his publisher needs him to do.  It's simple, consistent and makes working with Jeffrey Archer easy. Now, I know it's unlikely you are a multi-million selling author. It's likely you work in a place where there are multiple demands coming at you each day from bosses, customers and colleagues.  Demands such as wanting to know how you're getting on with this or that. If you dig a little deeper, though, most of these demands are because people don't trust that you remember that you committed to doing something for them.  What's the most common reason you chase someone up? It's most likely because you're worried they've forgotten they said they would do something for you.  Why is that? The most common reason is because most of the people we work with are inconsistent. And, yes, sometimes things fall through the cracks and get forgotten and we need to chase them up.  So, if you want less interruptions, which equals more time to do your work, be more consistent.  Consistent with your focus work times. Don't throw your hands up in the air and say “I cannot do that in my job”. You can. You just have to figure out how to communicate your focus work times.  As I was taught, if someone else can do it, so can you. If an airline pilot or surgeon can do their focused work without allowing distractions, so can you. Find the way. What do you have to do to resist interruptions?  So how do you become consistent? You put in place a structure for your day and for your week.  How much time do you need to stay on top of your communications each day? Most people tell me if they could have an hour daily dedicated to responding to messages and emails they would be on top of it. So schedule it.  The alternative is not good, is it? If you don't spend an hour on your messages today, how much time will you need tomorrow? If you skip tomorrow as well, now, how much time will you need? I'm sure you can find one hour a day, but to find three? That's verging on the impossible.  If you were responsible for sending out proposals to clients, how much time would you need for proposal writing to prevent a backlog?  You won't be accurate with your times; you don't have to be. You are using averages. If you get five proposals to write each day, and each proposal takes around thirty minutes to write, that means to prevent backlogs from appearing you need about two-and-a-half hours each day.  The only way you will be able to take care of your responsibility to send out the proposals would be to schedule two-and-a-half hours each day for doing the work. How else will you do it?  Now look at that from your colleagues's perspective? If they know you are consistent and are getting the proposals out on time, how likely will they be chasing and interrupting you?  That's what consistency does. It builds trust with your colleagues. They know once they send you a proposal to write, it will be done. So, they don't bother you asking if you've done it, yet.  My favourite all-time rugby player is Ellery Hanley. He was the greatest player of his generation. What made him so special? You could guarantee that if you made a break, he would always be right next to you, backing you up. This is what made him so good.  Sure he was tough, as all rugby players generally are. He was also fit and strong. But what made him so good was he consistently backed up his players. You knew if you broke your opponent's line, Ellery Hanley would be right there with you to take the ball and score.  Let's say you are that person responsible for writing proposals. You need two-and-a-half hours each day for proposal writing and an hour for your communications. That's just three-and-a-half hours you need to protect each day for your important work.  That still leaves you with four to five hours for anything else you may be required for. Is that impossible?  The final part to this is to plan your week and your day.  Planning the week is about looking at what you have to do and deciding what you will work on the following week. This will be influenced by your deadlines and what you have promised to others.  It will also be influenced by your personal life and your commitments there. If you have kids, they will have a big influence on your weekly plans too.  On a daily level, how many and when are your appointments for the day? what are your must do tasks? Must do tasks are non-negotiable. They must be done. Now, this means you do not want to have too many of these. I generally advise people to have no more than two.  By not allowing more than two must do tasks for the day, you are forced to prioritise. Prioritising is a learned skill. The more you practice it, the better, and faster, you will get at it.  I would also advise using a simple set of tools. A calendar, naturally, and a task manager. If you don't have a task manager now, choose one that's built into the devices you use. That would mean Apple Reminders if you use Apple tools, or Microsoft ToDo if you use a Windows system.  Once you have these tools—a calendar and a task manager, learn to use the tools. I see a lot of people regularly switching their tools in an erroneous belief that they will find the “perfect” tool. They won't the “perfect tool” does not exist.  The real secret is not the tools. It's how you run your day.  Make sure you plan each day, you are consistent doing the work you are employed to do and you get enough sleep.  Just those simple basic practices will improve your overall productivity. I can promise you it works every time.  Thank you, Tammy for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, how to manage your team (and your boss) productively You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The YouTube Time Sector System Playlist Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 365 Hello, and welcome to episode 365 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. I work a lot with managers and business leaders, where a part of their job is to manage teams of people. This kind of work can be quite different from a self-employed graphic designer, for example, whose main work each day is designing.  There's an interesting interplay going on in a team environment. Managers need information from their people. To get that information, they need to stop their team from doing their work. Then there is the team who need less distraction in order to get their work done to the highest quality and on time.  In my experience, the most productive teams are the ones who have found a happy balance between the manager's need for information and the team's need to work undisturbed.  So, the question is, how do you find that balance and if you are a member of a team with a boss who is interrupting you a little too much how do you retrain your boss?  Two questions from one wonderful listener who has sent in a question. And with that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Sam. Sam asks, hi Carl, do you have any tips and ideas for managing a team productively (I manage a team of eight) and how to manage a boss who is disorganised and never remembers what she's asked us to do. Any help will be greatly appreciated. Hi Sam, thank you for your question. It sounds like you're caught in the middle of a productivity nightmare. A boss who has no idea how to get the most out of their team and as a consequence you are unable to help your team work productively. Let's start with the easier of the two. Managing a team.  To help you get to the right place, we need to step back a little. A manager's role is to support their team. To provide them with clear instructions and the right tools, and then to keep out of the way and let them get on and do what they were employed to do.  At a strategic level that means clear communication—what do you want, how do you want it and when do you want it delivered?  And then to step back and let them get on and do it.  Let me give you an example of this in play.  I record my YouTube videos on a Wednesday. I then create the timeline of the video in Adobe Premiere Pro and send everything to my video editor to do the animations, clean things up and get it ready for publication.  In a Google Doc, I write out what I want—where I want split screen effects and other animations. I also add the date I need the finished video for.  That's communication part.  I then step back and let my video editor get on and do her thing. I don't care how she does the animations or what tools she uses—she likes to use something called CapCut, for example. Once I hand it over to my video editor, the task is in her hands and as long as she gets the edited video back to me by the deadline. I'm happy.  If she has any questions, we use a messaging service called Twist—similar to Microsoft Teams and Slack but a lot less distracting—she will message me.  And that's the support part.  It's simple, effective and allows my video editor the time and space to get on and do the work without me constantly chasing her.  Now there is another element going on here. I trust my video editor. She's never let me down and on those rare occasions when she thinks she will be late, she will message me immediately and inform me.  If you don't trust your team, who's at fault?  If you want to build a productive team, you must trust your team. It's that trust that enables you to leave your team alone to get on and do the work you employ them to do. Constantly interrupting them for updates destroys their productivity.  It's the same if you ask them to fill out activity reports and update statuses on complex software systems.  I've worked with companies that required their sales teams to maintain a Salesforce CRM system. This meant many of them stop selling on Friday afternoons to update these complex systems which often took them two or three hours.  When I was in sales, I found the best time to sell was Friday afternoons. People are more willing to close out a sale before the end of the week. Yet, in that company, they were missing out on so much business because management wanted their sales teams to update overly complex information management systems.  Every person you work with is a different person. Trying to shoehorn people into your system can be counterproductive to the overall productivity of the team.  As a manager, it's your responsibility to find out the best way to support you team members so they can work in the most effective and efficient way. That way you avoid stress building up in the team which will undermine any efforts to improve the team's productivity.  I recently heard Toto Wolf—the CEO and Team Principal of Mercedes Benz's Formula 1 team talking about how he manages his team. He implemented a policy of no meetings before 10:00 am.  What this does is allows all people to have at least an hour of undisturbed quiet time each day for doing important work.  Now, he's the leader—the CEO—yet he understands that the managers reporting to him still need time to do their work before spending most of their days in meetings.  I like another leader from the Formula 1's world, Red Bull's Christian Horner's approach. He doesn't have an engineering degree or understand the complexities of aerodynamics. He has a team of people who are brilliant at that stuff.  He sees his roll as the barrier remover. While he's the boss, and needs to know what's going on, he knows he must protect his team from the board of directors' demands and if any department requires something, it's his job to find a way to provide it for them.  Productive teams are built from the top. That means the manager must communicate clearly what they want, how they want it and by when. Then step back and let the team get on and do the work.  I remember another company I once worked for. The director was a highly intelligent person in her field. Yet, she had somehow developed a managerial arrogance where she believed she did not need to learn how to use the company's database because her project managers could tell her what she needed to know when she needed to know something.  This led to her project managers dropping everything to find the information she wanted whenever she asked for it. It created a horrible atmosphere in the company and the team was very unproductive.  She would hold five hour team meetings every Friday, where everyone was expected to attend. This further undermined the teams productivity and they were often late in completing projects which meant project managers had to work late and into the weekend to catch up.  This director's staff turnover rate was the highest in the company, worldwide, and it was all created by this one individual who did nothing to support her team.  The solution was to go back to the basics. Communicate what you want, clearly and concisely—you don't need weekly five hour meetings to do that—and then to step back and let your team get on and do their work. The work they were employed to do.  Never, as a manager, believe that your team is there to support you. It's not. You are there to support them.  Now, if you are not the manager but have a manager who is destroying your productivity what can you do?  This goes to managing expectations.  It's very easy to fall into line and say yes to your boss whenever they ask you to do something. Yet, doing so is distorting expectations. Saying “yes I will get this task done today as you ask, boss,” will do nothing for your productivity if on the same day you have six hours of meetings and a proposal to get out before 4:30 pm.  You have to stand your ground and inform your boss of your schedule for the day and explain that you will not be able to do it today.  I understand, if you have always said yes to your boss, doing this will be difficult at first, but how will you change anything if you do not challenge your boss's instructions when you already know what they are asking you to do will be practically impossible?  In effect you need to retrain your boss and set more realistic expectations.  One tip I often share is to challenge deadlines. If your boss asks you to send them something, reply and tell them you will get it to them by the end of the week (or early next week).  The worst thing that will happen is your boss will push back and tell you they need it right now. That's great because they've saved you a decision. You need to do it right now. So do it.  However, in the majority of cases, your boss will accept your timeline. They're busy too, after all.  However, the critical part of this is you follow through and deliver what they asked for when you said you will do it. If you don't, you lose trust. You want your boss to trust you. And if, for whatever reason, you find you cannot do what you said you would do, when you said you would do it, you must inform them as soon as you know—something my video editor will do.  And incidentally, you should be doing this with your customers and clients too. This can be another area where some preconceived ideas about customers and clients can lead to productivity issues.  Be clear when you are communicating with your customers and clients. Set realistic expectations—and telling them that you will always be available if they ever need you is not a realistic expectation. What happens if you're giving birth when they call (as happened to one of my clients), or you're in a meeting with another client?  Tell your customers how best to get in touch with you and that if you cannot respond immediately you will get back to them as soon as you can.  I hope that has helped, Sam. Thank you for your question and thank you for listening.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week. 

Podcast 364 What are the solid basics of becoming more productive that anyone can use today? That's the question I'm answering this week.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The YouTube Time Sector System Playlist Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 364 Hello, and welcome to episode 364 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. When I was little, a police officer lived in our village. The police service provided his home, and his job was to look after the local community. Sargeant Morris was my first introduction to the police, and he taught me some valuable lessons—not least about the importance of being a law-abiding citizen.  Yet, a lesson he taught me that I never realised how important it was until later was the power of daily routines. Each morning at 8:00 am, Sergeant Morris would walk up and down the main street in our village, ensuring that the schoolchildren got to school safely.  He was also there when we returned from school at the end of the day. I'm sure there were days he was unable to be there, but all I remember is his presence on the street when I went and came back from school.  He would wear his hi-viz jacket, chat with the parents and children, and make sure we crossed the road at the pedestrian crossing and that the traffic didn't drive too fast down the street.  I also remember because of his presence, seemingly day and night, crime was almost non-existent in our village.  It was the simple things—things that did not require a lot of effort or knowledge—that made Sergeant Morris a part of my childhood I will never forget.  And that is the same for you and me today. It's the little things repeated that make the biggest difference to our productivity.  And so, with that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Mike. Mike asks, hi Carl. What would you say are the basics of becoming more productive?  Hi Mike, thank you for your question. It's funny you've asked this question as it's something I have been thinking a lot about recently. What are the absolute basics of being productive? I would first start with something I wrote extensively about in Your Time, Your Way, and those are the three foundations:  Sleep, exercise, and diet.  How do you feel when you've had a bad night's sleep? Perhaps you only get two or three hours of sleep. How does your day go?  Probably not very well at all. You may be able to get through the morning, but when the afternoon comes around, you're going to slump.  If that poor sleep continues for a few days, and you're going to get sick.  Now let's flip that. How do you feel when you get a solid night's sleep? What does that do to your productivity?  The difference between the two is huge. On the days you get enough sleep, you'll focus better and for longer. You'll make less mistakes and, something rarely talked about, you'll make better decisions.  That helps you as it ensures that when you decide what to work on next it will more likely be the right thing. When you're sleep deprived, your decision making abilities sink. You'll pick up the easy, low-value tasks—because you feel you're doing something—but it will have little value and the important work will be left until another day.  And then you have a backlog of important stuff to do, stuff that's probably going To have deadlines which means you put yourself under pressure and a low level of anxiety sets in, distracting you and leaving you feeling exhausted at the end of the day.  Exercise, or as I prefer to call it “movement” is another of those simple productivity enhancers often overlooked.  Sitting at a table staring at a screen all day is not good for you. You know that don't you? You're a living, breathing organism that was designed to move. We know that exercise, and when I say exercise I don't mean going to a gym or out for a run, I mean some walking, chores around the house or some light stretching in your home or office, helps your thinking and creativity. It also helps to reduce stress and resets your brain after a hard session of focused work.  One of the best things you can do if you're working from home is to do some of your chores in-between sessions of sit-down work.  For example, do two hours of project work, then stop, and take your laundry to the washing machine or vacuum your living room. Then sit down and do another session of deep work.  You'll be amazed at how much work you get done with that little tip.  You don't need to buy expensive standing desks. Just make sure you get up every ninety-minutes to two hours and walk around. Make the bed, tidy up the kids' toys, wash the dishes, or water your plants.  Firstly you're getting away from the screen and secondly you're stirring your energy tanks, elevating your blood flow and engaging your lymph glands, which work to clear your body of harmful bacteria and toxins—which build up alarmingly if you're not moving.  But the most important part of that movement is it resets your brain so you come back to your work refreshed and focused.  And then there is diet.  I'm sure I don't have to remind you how you feel after your Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. You eat all that food, then sit down on the sofa and within a few minutes you're falling asleep.  All those carbohydrates causes your pancreas to go into overdrive producing vast amounts of insulin which in the short term (say twenty-minutes) is a good thing. It's what comes next that depresses your energy levels—what we call the afternoon slump.  Yet it can be avoided if you keep the carbs to a minimum and choose a healthier option.  The Japanese have a wonderful eating culture called “Hara hachi bu” which translates to “eat until 80% full”. By not over-eating, the Japanese have learned that their energy levels remain reasonably consistent throughout the day, and of course another benefit is you are less likely to gain weight.  And while we're on the topic of food, I'm not a fan of pre-preparing your meals for the week. You may think this saves you time, but the act of cooking each evening is a great way to give you some movement, and take your mind away from the work you left behind.  That meal break is a great way to reset your brain and if you're doing it in the evening, you can use it to draw a line under your work for the day and prepare you for family or friends time.  So, Mike, if I was asked to give advice on how to improve productivity, those three things would be first piece of advice. Get these three things right, and your productivity will improve massively.  Yet, there are a few other little things you could do, all of which are simple and anyone can do. The first would be to plan the day the day before. In other words before you finish your work day, you stop for five to ten minutes and decide what the most important things you need to do tomorrow are.  We're not talking about reviewing all your projects and going through all your tasks on your to-do list.  If you're reasonably engaged with your work, you will know what's important. Write these down somewhere where you will see them when you start the next day and start with the item at the top of your list.  You can do this digitally or use a pen and piece of paper. It doesn't really matter. What matters is the list is short—no more than five or six things and that it's the first thing you see when you start your day.  This does three things for you. The first is it prevents you from procrastinating by giving you a list of tasks to get on with that need to be done. It also avoids you wasting your most focused time trying to decide what to work on and then getting pulled into other people's urgencies and emergencies.  Thirdly, it allows your subconscious brain to do what it's good at—mixing your education and experience together to come up with the most effective way to do something.  There is also the fourth benefit, which is you will find you relax more in the evening knowing there's not likely to be any unwelcome emergencies when you begin the day.  Another one I've found helpful is to protect time each day for your communications. Now, this one comes from my life-long love of history—particularly 20th century history.  When I read about some the 20th century's most iconic people, whether that be Winston Churchill, Nelson Mandela, Agatha Christie, General Eisenhower or Charles De Gaulle, you'' find that we know so much about what they thought and felt about things because they wrote letters.  It was a habit in the early to mid 20th century for people to spend some time each day writing letters. It's true they didn't have the distractions we have today—no TV (or very limited channels), internet or social media so there was time to write.  Today, we don't protect time for communications, and that's lead to overwhelming backlogs of emails and messages to respond to. If you were to protect some time each day for your communications, while you may not be able to eliminate your message backlog entirely, you will prevent it from growing out of control.  And we don't want to be fooling ourselves in to believing people received less communications in those days. That's not true. They received more. There were telegrams arriving where a telegram boy would wait for you to read the message and then take your reply back to the telegram office.  And on top of that, we had to handwrite our responses, put the letter in an envelope, stick a stamp on it and take it to the post box. It was far more time consuming, yet people did it without complaint.  Sp there you go, Mike. I hope that has given you some ideas. I would strongly recommend focusing on your sleep, movement and diet—it's there where you'll find some quick results. The daily planning, and protecting time for communications and admin, will give you results, but will take a little longer to feel the benefits. Thank you for your question and thank you to your too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

How flexible are you? That's what we're looking at this week.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived The Time Sector System 5th Year Anniversary The YouTube Time Sector System Playlist Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes Subscribe to my Substack  The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 363 Hello, and welcome to episode 363 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. You may have heard this week that my Time Sector System is five years old. And to celebrate, I updated the whole course.  Now, before I start to update a course, I go into Evernote and review all the comments I have collected from students and see if there are any common issues or difficulties that I could improve or explain better.  The Time Sector System works. It's based on timeless principles that have been used by some of the most productive people who have ever lived. As with all solid principles, there needs to be a degree of flexibility to accommodate the different ways we all work and the type of work we do. The way authors, for example, will protect three to four hours a day for writing might not be practical for a customer support assistant or a manager managing a team of twenty salespeople. Similarly, an architect will work differently from a doctor in an emergency room.  Yet, there are still some timeless principles that work no matter what role you have.  For example, it doesn't matter how much you have to do if you don't have the time to do it. Makes sense, right?  I could decide to write my next book today. That's the easy part. The difficult part is finding the time to write the book. I'm not sure how many hours I spent writing Your Time, Your Way, but from the first day I sat down to begin writing the first draft to when it was published in May last year, it was three years and I know every week, I spend at least ten hours on it— so roughly 2,000 hours.  Given that each week only has 168 hours, it would not be possible to write a book in a week.  One of the most productive companies I worked for was an advertising agency in Korea. The manager, Patrick, was smart. He realised that for his team to get the campaigns completed on time, he had to protect the time of his copywriters and graphic designers. They needed quiet, undisturbed time to do their work.  Yet the account managers and social media planners needed to be talking with each other and external companies to arrange space for the billboards, and media companies.  The account managers and planners generally had a meeting with each other each day.  The creative team only had two meetings per week. The Monday planning meeting where they planned out the work to be completed that week and the Friday morning team meeting where everything was discussed.  This meant the creatives (as they were called) had the quiet time to focus on their work.  In the four years I worked with that team, I never recall a time where they missed a deadline or even felt under pressure to complete a campaign. I'm sure there were occasions when they were under pressure—clients can be very demanding—but it was never noticeable.  What made this team so productive was that each person knew the objectives for the week. They knew what needed to be finished and ensured that they had the space and time to get on and complete the work. Patrick, as the boss, protected the time of his team.  He knew if he was constantly asking his creatives for updates, he would be slowing them down. He trusted his team and they trusted him. If they had a difficulty, or discovered that a piece of work would take longer to complete than initially anticipated, they could go to Patrick and tell him.  This comes back to something I learned from Brian Tracy—one of the world's best self-development teachers—that if you want to be successful at anything, you first need to establish what you need to do to be successful at it.  Once you know that, you can dedicate enough time to doing that and eliminating everything else.  There's the famous advice that Warren Buffett gives about managing your work. Write down the twenty-five things you feel you should do, then put a star next to the five most important, delete the rest and focus all your time and effort on completing those five.  So, where does flexibility come into this? Well, if you have an overflowing inbox with emails and messages piling up by the hour, you are constantly interrupted by people asking you questions about this and that, and you have no idea what needs to be completed this week, you lose all flexibility.  There's too much for your brain to decide what to work on next. You're overloaded and stress and anxiety will freeze you—slowing you down even further.  Take a copywriter working for Patrick. She knew what needed to be completed that week—it was agreed at the Monday meeting—and she had the freedom and flexibility to get on and do the work in her own way.  And that all came down to knowing from the beginning of the week what was required. Next week wasn't important. That could be discussed at the Friday meeting.  And that's one of the strongest concepts of the Time Sector System. Only focus on what needs to be done this week and not worry about next week until you do your weekly planning session at the end of the week.  We need to be flexible enough to modify things for the way we work. One aspect of the Time Sector System I recommend is working with projects.  Task managers, or todo lists, are not the best places to manage projects. Projects are information hubs. There's likely to be emails, plans, meetings, deadlines and what is called conditional tasks—where something cannot be completed until something else is completed first. Then there's likely to be files and documents being worked on which need to be accessed from time to time.  Projects are best managed in your notes apps. Notes apps have greater flexibility to store all this information. You can also create checklists which do not remove completed tasks which makes it easier to quickly see what has been completed and what remains to be done.  I recommend that you add a single task in your task manager saying “Work on project X” and connect that task to your project note. Some people mentioned that this seems cumbersome if the task is simply to follow up with someone.  I agree, and in these situations, I would suggest adding the follow-up task to your task manager. Be flexible.  Similarly, some projects are simple and easy to do. I have a project right now to get the terrace outside the office ready for the spring. When I come to do that project, the most effective way to complete it would be to schedule an afternoon on my calendar to go outside with the jet washer and get on and do it.  I do not need to create a project note for this. I just need to find some time on my calendar. This “project” doesn't even need to be on my task list. It's two or three hours protected on my calendar when it's not raining.  The principle to work from, is if something needs doing, then it will require time. So the questions is when will you do it?  Once you know what needs to be done, and are clear about what the desired outcome is, and you know when you will do it, the how will largely take care of itself. And it's how flexibility is your best friend.  Another area where I found people struggle is with the daily planning session. Daily planning is a critical part of being more focused and productive. When you have a plan for the day, you more likely to get the right things done. With no plan, you'll end up drifting through the day doing this and that and getting caught up in everyone else's crises and urgencies.  But not accomplishing very much.  Daily planning is five to ten minutes at the end of the day, deciding what you need to do the next day. Doing it the evening before allows you to let go of the day so you can relax and enjoy the evening.  Sounds simple, right? So why do so many people struggle to do it? Exhaustion. They are exhausted at the end of the day and cannot bring themselves to do it, so it doesn't get done.  And guess what happens the next day? They drift and get caught up in everyone else's work. And what does that do to them? It leaves them exhausted at the end of the day.  However, some people are early birds and like to wake up early. If you are an early bird, planning in the morning before the day begins works perfectly well.  This is another example of being flexible. Work to the way you work.  I remember when I used to wake up at 5:00 am (I did that for 18 months), and I would plan my day as part of my morning routine. It was only when waking up at 5:00 am became unsustainable after my coaching programme grew and I needed to be doing coaching sessions late into the evening that I stopped and started doing my daily planning in the evening after I finished my coaching sessions.  Different circumstances require different approaches, yet the principles remain. Plan your week so you know what's important at a higher level, then give yourself five to ten minutes to adjust your plan each day to allow for the unknowns that will inevitably have come in as the week progresses.  Protect time for doing your important work. If you need to prepare a proposal for an important client and you know it will require three to four hours to complete, then protect that time on your calendar and don't let anyone steal it from you.  If you allow someone steal that time from you and you find yourself under enormous time pressure at the end of the week, whose fault is that?  There was something I once heard Brian Tracy say and that was “take responsibility”. He was talking in terms of your life—take responsibility for your life. You can easily adopt that same approach for your time. Take responsibility for it. Be ruthless, yet flexible when you need to be so you can get your important work done.  I'm reminded of the East Asian saying: “be like bamboo”. It's strong, yet flexible enough to adapt to the wind, the snow and the rain and still not break. That should be your approach to your management of time. Be strong—say no when necessary—yet be flexible enough to adapt to the conditions.  I hope you found this helpful. Thank you for listening.  Don't forget, if you want to build a time management system like bamboo, then the new Time Sector System course is now available. The link is in the show notes. And if you are already enrolled, this is a free update for you and it's waiting for you in your Learning Centre dashboard.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

This week, I'm exploring where much of our overwhelm comes from and how to sharpen up your inbox processing.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 362 Hello, and welcome to episode 362 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. How often do you feel overwhelmed? It's a good question to ask because some of that overwhelm is caused by what has been called “open loops” or in other words stuff to do that has not been looked at to see what is involved.  A lot of this will come from your inboxes. We throw all sorts of things in there without much thought about what needs to be done. With our email and messaging inboxes, we don't have any control over what arrives in there—that's out of our control.  The issue here is we have it collected, and that's often a weight off our minds, but there's a sense of anxiety because we don't know for sure what needs to be done and how long it will take us to do it.  If we are not processing what we collected frequently and correctly, then there is a gaping hole in the system that needs filling in. If not, there will be a lot of things that need to be done that gets missed. And that then leads to a distrust in your system which creates its own set of issues.  This week's question is how to develop the right habits and processes to make sure that our inboxes are cleared and what gets into our system is clear, actionable and with realistic timelines. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week's question. This week's question comes from Stephen. Stephen asks, Hi Carl, could you walk us through how to best clear a task manager's inbox as well as some “best practices” for clearing email and other inboxes? Hi Stephen, yes I can and thank you for your question.  This is a place that I feel I must tread very carefully. On the one hand I want to encourage you to stop trying to remember everything in your head and to externalise it so you reduce the stress of trying to remember everything.  On the other hand, I also want to encourage you to maintain a clean and tight task management system. By that I mean that your task manager only contains genuine things you either must or should do and anything you think you'd like to do can be put into your notes app.  Email and messaging services are reasonably straightforward.  There's a two step process. The first is to clear the inboxes. This part is about speed. The faster you can do that the better.  When processing your inboxes here you want to get into the habit of asking the questions: What is it and what do I need to do about it? An email rom a customer asking for some information about their account, for example, would give you the answers; it's an email from a customer that requires me to answer a question.  So, it's actionable and you would then send it to your Action This Day folder for action later in the day.  The temptation is to deal with it immediately. It's from a customer! I must reply immediately. I get it. I know there's a sense that anything from a customer must be dealt with instantly.  Unfortunately, doing so will create challenges for you in the long-term. The first is you set an expectation. Instantly replying to a customer means they expect you to reply instantly next time too. And next time may not be as convenient as it is now. You might be at your son's sports day, or having a romantic lunch with your partner.  It's not very romantic if you have to pause the conversation while you respond to your customer is it? The second challenge is it rarely ever is just one. It's often several emails or messages like that. Each one will likely take you five to ten minutes. Just six of those and you've eaten up forty-five minutes of your processing time. What about the six other emails you need to clear from your inbox.  This is how inboxes fill up and become overwhelming. If you have sixty to seventy emails in your inbox you should be able to clear those in around twenty to twenty-five minutes. Stopping and dealing with individual emails because you think it will only take a few minutes to deal with them lengthens the processing time, which means you won't have time to clear it.  Your customers are in the same place as you. Swamped with stuff to do with a shortage of time to do it. The chances are they're going to hate you for responding instantly. Now you've given them more work to do.  And let's get real here, if something's genuinely urgent, they're not going to email you are they? They'll call you.  The second part of this process is to set aside time each day for dealing with your actionable messages.  This is where you open up your email's Action This Day folder and begin with the oldest one and work you way down the list. It's at this point you will thank yourself for not responding to all those quick and easy emails.  If all you have in your Action This Day folder are emails that require a lot of thinking and work, it'll be a painful experience. If instead you have a wide variety of emails to deal with you build momentum and and plough through them quickly.  And that's it. A two step process. Through out the day, between sessions of work, clear your inbox by asking two simple questions: What is it, what do I need to do with it. If you need to reply, read or review something, throw it into your action this day folder.  Then later in the day, settle down and go through your Action This Day folder and clear as many as you can. As long as you are starting with the oldest first, you'll never be very far behind.  Next up is your tasks inbox.  This is a little different from your messages or email inbox because you control what's put there. Unlike emails and messages where you have no control. You cannot control who is sending messages to you.  The challenge here is to be ruthless about what gets into your system.  Throughout the day, it's easy to throw all sorts of things into this inbox. You may have heard someone recommend a book that sounded interesting, so you throw that in there. You may have seen someone with a colourful umbrella and you decide it's time for you to get yourself one.  Then there are all those ideas about redesigning your kitchen, or cleaning up your notes app or a thought about getting some Christmas cards printed with your name on them--I'm not sure if that's still a thing.  Your inbox is the gateway to your system, so it's perfectly fine to throw anything and everything in there. Where you want to be ruthless is what you allow into your system.  Processing your task manager's inbox again has a few questions. The first is: what is it? Then, what do you need to do with it?  For example, you may have realised that your passport expires in the next ten months. So you have a task in there that says “renew passport”. That's good. But is it enough. I know if I come to a task that says renew passport I'm going to ignore it. Why? Because behind that simple “renew passport” is a lot of stuff I don't know about. The last time I renewed my passport was ten years ago. The passport office will undoubtedly changed the system since then. So what's the real task here? It's to find out what I need to renew my passport.  So, I would change the task to “find out what I need to renew my passport” and then decide when I will do that. Do I need to do it this week? Next week? Or perhaps next month?  And that's the third question, when will I do it?  Once decided, I drop it into its appropriate folder.  You will often have some obvious tasks in there too. It could be something like sending a quote to a prospective customer. So you add a task “send quote to Drax Enterprises into your inbox.  Yet, is it that simple? This might be a potential big multi-million dollar contract. One you need to discuss with your boss first. So, what is the task? It's to talk with your boss about what discounts to offer. So you can change the task to “Discuss with boss Drax Enterprises quotation”, add a date you will do it—perhaps tomorrow—and place the task into your This Week folder.  The danger of not rewriting tasks with the real next step is you will ignore the task because you are unclear about what really needs to happen next. When you process your inbox, you have an opportunity to get clear about what needs to happen next.  Once you know that, you will be less likely to skip it.  I know this all sounds complex, but if you step back and look what you are doing, you are asking yourself three simple questions. What is it? What do I need to do with it? And when will I do it?  I've found that if you apply these questions every time you are in an inbox, it quickly becomes natural.  You also get better at triaging your task manager's inbox. This helps you to keep your task manager clean and tight. The less you allow in there, the more focused you will be and much less susceptible to picking the easy tasks leaving yourself with only the more time consuming ones later in the day. (Something you want to reverse—remember “Eat The Frog”) And that's it, Stephen. Keep things simple, run through the questions and be ruthless about what gets into your task management system.  Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me no to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This year, the Time Sector System is five years old! For thousands of people it has changed their relationship with tasks and time in so many positive ways. Today's question concerns the basics of the Time Sector System and its philosophy.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The YouTube Time Sector System Playlist Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 361 Hello, and welcome to episode 361 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. I still remember the day that the Time Sector concept came to me. I was walking to the gym one sunny afternoon and was reflecting on my overwhelming task list waiting for me at home. I remember thinking to myself that all these tasks hitting me day after day was not sustainable.  I was organised and knew where everything was, but I felt trapped in a cycle of never-ending tasks and emails. Whenever I feel this way about anything I always tell myself that there must be a better way.  And then it hit me.  I think it was the word “unsustainable”. The number of emails I was getting was never going to reduce. It was going to increase. The amount of work I had to do was equally never going to reduce. At some point I would reach breaking point.  It wasn't the work itself. It was time. I just didn't have enough time. That was the clue.  You cannot control the number of tasks, messages, and emails you receive. It's a random number. Yet, the one constant—a constant not controlled by you or me, but by science, and in particular physics, is time. Time is our constraint.  If I could allocate time for doing the different categories of work I had to do and decide when to do the tasks in those categories, it would not matter how much work I had coming in. Everything would get done in due course.  And that was the seed that sprouted into the Time Sector System five years ago.  So, with the history told, it's time now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Elaine. Elaine asks, “Hi Carl, I recently came across one of your videos where you talk about the Time Sector System. Could you explain its philosophy and how it differs from other time management systems?”  Hi Elaine, Thank you for your question.  The thinking behind the Time Sector System is that we are limited not by what we can do—we can do a lot—but by how much time we have to do things. We need to eat, sleep and move (exercise), at our basic level. On top of that we likely have family commitments, school runs, doctor appointments and friends that need seeing. Then we have our work to do.  The limiting factor is time. It's fixed. We only get 24 hours a day.  Now you can manipulate time by hiring people to do stuff for you. For example, you may be fortunate to be able to afford a nanny to take care of your kids when you are at work. Or, you may be able to hire an assistant. But no matter how you manipulate time, it's still only 24 hours.  So the philosophy behind the Time Sector System is, it's not about what you have to do, it's about when you will do it. After all, that's the only thing you have control over.  At a wider level, that means organising your tasks into tasks that need to be done this week, next week, this month, next month or long-term or on hold.  When you divide your tasks up into when you will do them you narrow down the decisions you need to make on a day to day basis. When a new task comes in, you only need three questions: What is it? What do I need to do to complete it? When will I do it? So, for example, imagine I get a notification from my health insurance provider informing me I need to book myself in for a medical check-up.  What is it? It's a request for me to make an appointment with the doctor. What do I need to do? I need to make an appointment with the doctor. When am I going to do it? That depends.  It depends, in my case, on when is convenient for my wife. We go together to the clinic for our annual check-up. In Korea it's a six-hour ordeal, some turn it into a family outing. So, before I can make the appointment I need to consult with my wife.  So, back to question 2. What do I need to do? Consult with my wife. So, there's the task. When do I need to do it? This week would be good because if I don't it will sink to the bottom of my list/ So. I choose today when I see my wife.  When you are processing your inbox, that's the process. What is it? What do I need to do? When am I going to do it? Another example might be I have a project that is due for completion at the end of the month. As I am looking at the project, I know what it is—it's a project. What do I need to do? I need to talk with my colleague about how she is getting on with the graphics for the landing page. That will give me an estimate on when I can finish the landing page. So, when am I going to do it? I'll send her a message on Monday, so I can add that task to my This week folder.  It could be that as I return from a business trip, I notice my passport will expire in eight month's time. Now, I know the government won't be reminding me that my passport needs renewing, so it's something I need to do.  What is it: It's a passport renewal. What do I need to do? I'm not sure. The last time I renewed my passport was nine years ago. The system's probably changed since then. What can I do about that? Go to the government's website and find out the process.  Okay, I need to do some research. When will I do it? I'm busy this week, so I can drop the task: find out how to renew my passport into my next week folder.  I don't need to add a date to it at this stage because I will be doing a weekly planning session on Saturday and I decide then.  It's brilliantly simple, and takes next to no time to develop the habit of asking these three questions.  There are a few other little things you can do to make this seamless.  For instance, have separate folders for your routines and critical recurring tasks. Routines are those little things that just need to be done. Watering the house plants, cleaning actionable emails, and basic admin tasks. Your Recurring Critical tasks are those tasks that come from your Areas of Focus and your core work. I won't go into the Areas of Focus here. These are your life level tasks such as planning your exercise, staying in touch with family and friends and self improvement.  Your core work tasks are the tasks you are employed to do. At a basic level, these would be things like talking with customers if you're a salesperson, preparing materials and teaching if you are a teacher, etc.  What you do is pull out the tasks you need to perform each day, week or month, and se them to recur as frequently as they need to.  Another one is when you first adopt the Time Sector System, the temptation will be to throw everything into your This Week and Next Week folders. This results in them filling up which causes overwhelm.  When you first begin using the Time Sector System, you want to be learning what is realistic and what is not. This involves monitoring what you can and cannot get done each week.  For example, I know my limit, when I begin the week, is thirty tasks in my This Week folder. Any more than that and I won't be completing the excess. This does not include my routines and Recurring Critical Tasks.  If I am to get my most important work done each week, anything more than thirty tasks in my This Week folder and something will break.  It will take you a few weeks to find your limit.  And then it all comes down to your daily planning. While you can plan the week, you will find that you are picking up tasks that need to be done in the week you are in. Before you end your day, you should look at your calendar for the next day. Look to see how much time you have available to do your tasks.  You're going to have a very challenging day if you have seven hours of meetings and thirty tasks to complete. Something's not going to get done.  It's during the daily Planning Sequence that you plan out a realistic day. Perhaps you can move some meetings, or reduce your task list.  And to finish, you select your two most important tasks, flag them and make sure they are your must-do tasks.  And that's it.  As I go through this, it sounds complex, but when you are doing it, it is not.  New tasks go through the three questions—what is it? What do I need to do? When will I do it? And you can then move those tasks from your inbox to their appropriate folder.  Then, on a daily basis, you check to see how much time you have for tasks, based on how many meetings you have, and create a prioritised, realistic list.  At the end of the week, you get to look at your other folders—next week, this month, next month and long-term and on hold to see what can be brought forward to your this week folder.  The good news is, this approach, helps you to delete tasks that no longer need to be done.  Now what about projects? If they are not in your task manager, where are they?  You manage your projects from your notes app. That could be Apple Notes, Evernote, Notion, OneNote or any kind of notes app that allows you to create links to documents, articles, images and emails.  You notes is a natural place to manage your projects. After all, a project is a big hairy thing that needs managing. You will likely have documents and meeting notes to keep together.  So, keep them together in a notes app. That way, when you're working on a project you're not distracted by all the little, easy tasks you could be doing. You can get yourself focused on the project and work from your project notes.  All you then need is a single task in your task manager telling you to work on a specific project. Depending on what tools you are using, you will also likely be able to create a link directly from the task to the project note.  Now the good news. If you are curious about the Time Sector System, I am in the process of updating the online course. It's the fifth anniversary and it's a big update. We are in the final editing stage and I hope to get launch the update in the next ten to fourteen days.  I've also done a lot of YouTube videos on this—you can see the playlist on my YouTube channel.  Thank you Elaine for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Is self-discipline overrated? That's what we're looking at this week.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 360 Hello, and welcome to episode 360 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. We hear a lot about self-discipline and how we should develop our discipline to achieve our goals or become more productive. But is this true?  Self-discipline is hard—more so these days with all the instant gratification distractions—and anything that is hard is going to be tough to do consistently. Whether you are trying to accomplish a goal or become better organised, if you rely on self-discipline to get you through there's going to be a good chance you will fail.  There are some people who thrive on self-discipline. The most famous being David Goggins—he's a tough cookie. Pain, discipline and a never die mindset are what he appears to live for. But, people with that mindset are rare and you don't need it.  There is a better way. It's not easy—nothing worthwhile ever is—but with practice, a little determination, persistence, and consistency, you soon find you don't need discipline to achieve these things.  Now, before we get to the question, Here's a little reminder about this week's Ultimate Productivity Workshop.  If you have not yet registered, you can still do so, there's a link in the show notes or you can visit my website—carlpullein.com— to register.  The workshop will cover how to transition from an unsustainable task-based productivity system to a more sustainable time-based one. I will show you how to manage your work, how to time block effectively and how to prioritise your work so you know you are always working on the right things at the right time.  For those of you already registered, I will be sending out the first workbook in the next day or two so keep an eye out for that. I will also include the joining instructions.  If you want a less hectic and overwhelming life, then this workshop is a must. It's your chance to create a time management and productivity system that works for you.  Okay, on with the show and that means it's time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Ryan. Ryan asks, hi Carl, do you have any tips on getting better with self-discipline? I've never been very good at being disciplined but as I get older, I feel I need to do better at this. Hi Ryan, Thank you for your question.  I've always found the concept of “living a disciplined life” interesting. You see, the word discipline suggests “punishment” of some kind. When we're at school if we do something wrong, we are “disciplined”. That was my first introduction to the word. (Or perhaps my parents disciplining me for whatever reason.)  And yet, when we talk about living a “disciplined life” it's often spoken of in positive terms. Yet, there's that underlying sense that it's bad.  I recently wrote about Charles Aznavour, the prolific French singer/songwriter. Aznavour wrote over a 1,000 songs and recorded many more. He lived until he was 94, exercised every day and was still touring when he passed away in 2018.  In interviews he was frequently asked about his productivity and how he created such a disciplined life. Yet Aznavour never thought he was disciplined.  He woke early every day, and spent his mornings writing songs. For him it wasn't discipline, it was his passion, his purpose. He couldn't wait to get started each day. And on those rare days he wasn't in the mood to write, he still wrote.  Why? He didn't need to. He wrote because that was what he did. It was a habit.  Have you ever tried starting your day without your morning coffee or not brushing your teeth? How did you feel? Probably uncomfortable and little self-conscious.  You don't need discipline to brush your teeth or make your coffee in the morning do you? It's just what you do.  And there is where you will find the answer to living with a little more discipline. Don't think of it as discipline. It isn't. It's just what you do.  Take planning your day at the end of the day.  Last night, I spent three hours in a recording studio recording the audiobook of Your Time Your Way. That was after a full day recording and editing videos. I was exhausted. My voice was ragged. Yet, after getting home, I got my Franklin Planner (Yes, I'm still using it), sat on the sofa and planned today.  There was no discipline involved. I also had a great excuse. I'd been on the go since 8:30 am and it was 11:45 pm. I could easily have skipped it. Yet I didn't. Why? Because that is what I do in the evening. I give myself five to ten minutes to plan the day.  I love the quote from Jim Rohn: “each day you get to choose between two pains. The pain of regret or the pain of discipline”. I know what happens if I don't plan the day—the next day starts out of control. I have no focus and anything loud and “urgent” becomes the priority—even when it isn't a priority.  Most people's problems with time management and productivity is because they skip the five to ten minutes planning the day. If you don't have a plan for the day, you will end up on someone else's plan and they don't care about how you feel—a bit harsh, I know, but it's true.  For most things you don't need discipline. It's a choice. Do you scroll social media or read a book? Do you sit on the sofa watching TV or go out for a walk? Do you eat a chocolate bar or a banana? That's nothing to do with discipline. It's a choice. Reading a book is easy. Get a physical book, not an ebook, and place it on the coffee table near your favourite armchair or sofa. Then give yourself ten minutes each day to sit and read it. If you place a bookmark in the book, you can see the bookmark gradually falling to the bottom (the end of the book).  And as the book is on your coffee table, you will see it every time you sit down. More often than not, you will read more than ten minutes.  Ultimately, those people you think are living a “disciplined life” just have certain habits. Getting up early and writing a journal is a habit. It doesn't need discipline if it's a habit.  My wife writes her journal every evening before she goes to bed. She uses Day One, the digital journal, and writes on her laptop. She sits on the sofa, opens her laptop and writes. Some days she'll only write for five minutes. Other days she'll write of over an hour. For her she sees it as winding down at the end of the day. Absolutely no discipline is involved.  It would be strange not seeing her on the sofa writing a journal. Yet for many sitting down to write a journal requires discipline. Ask my wife if writing her journal requires discipline and she'll laugh at you.  You don't need discipline if you have the right habits.  How do you develop habits. Well, firstly I would recommend you read James Clear's Atomic Habits. It's a brilliant book.  Secondly, identify the habit you want to develop. I always suggest your morning routines are a good place to e to start. These are the easiest kind of habits to develop. What would you like to do first thing in the morning?  You may want to read, meditate, exercise or write a journal. Pick one thing.  For example, if you choose to write a journal, start by making yourself your favourite morning drink, then sit down somewhere comfortable and begin writing. Give yourself five to ten minutes to write.  You can help yourself by putting your journal next to your kettle or coffee maker before you go to bed. That way when you wake up, turn on the kettle you see your journal there waiting for you.  Something James Clear mentions in Atomic Habits is to reduce the friction. This is akin to those who wish to exercise in the morning, putting out their exercise clothes next to their bed before going to bed. It reduces the friction of choosing what to wear. I think of this as minimising the risk of finding an excuse.  These are all great tips. Yet, the disciplined life that Charles Aznavour lived didn't need tricks. It appeared disciplined, yet it was just how he lived his life. And that's the goal here; to build daily habits that are effortless because that is what you do.  Most people eat their breakfast, lunch and dinner at the same time? Why? It's because that's what they do. When I commuted to the office, I would catch the 8:05 bus each morning. I knew what time to leave the house because I knew how long it would take to walk to the bus stop. It was simply what I did.  I should give you one little tip I've used in the past. If, say, I want to read a book each evening but find myself watching TV instead, what I will do is tell myself I must read for ten minutes before rewarding myself with turning on the TV. The advantage of this little trick is you still get to do the thing you want to do—watch TV—but you also get to do the other thing you struggle doing. Eventually, it just becomes a habit. Watching TV without reading becomes uncomfortable.  So there you go, Ryan. It's not really about being disciplined. It's more about choosing what you want to do and carrying it through.  Your calendar can help you there. Remember the saying, what goes on your calendar gets done. With this, the key is if you don't or cannot do something you must remove it from your calendar. That act of moving it from your calendar reminds you about you haven't done. It acts a good incentive.  If, for example, you schedule going for a walk after lunch, but keep skipping it, because you are removing it every day, you will begin asking yourself what's wrong and re-assess things. Perhaps you will be more consistent if you go for your walk in the morning or evening.  I hope that has helped, Ryan. Think about what you want to do, when you want to do it and do it. Sooner rather later it will be just what you do.  Don't forget to get yourself registered for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop. The first session is on Friday evening, it will be something you will never regret.  Thank you for your question Ryan and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

In this week's episode, what's the best way to manage projects?  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 359 Hello, and welcome to episode 359 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. From time to time, something comes along that sounds great when first described but then turns nasty.  In the productivity world, that something is Getting Things Done and in particular the definition of what a project is.  This is not the fault of David Allen, Getting Things Done's author; this is how his description of a project has been horribly misinterpreted.  At its essence, Getting Things Done is about categorising your work into contexts. That could be work you can do on your computer or phone. In your office or at home. It is, and never was about “projects”. Projects, at best, are a sideshow. A simple way to organise your work. Nothing more. Yet for some reason, a few early readers misunderstood GTD, wrote about it and now there's a whole generation of people believing anything that involves two steps or more is a project and must be organised as such.  And there, is the source of overwhelm, time wasted to organising stuff instead of doing stuff and huge backlogs of things to do. Before we get to the heart of today's podcast, it's important that I clear this misunderstanding up.  If you ever bought one the fantastic GTD setup guides that was, and may still be, sold on the GTD website, you will notice that whatever task manager you are using, you set up the lists, folders or projects (depending on which task manager you are using) as contexts. Those contexts usually related to people, places or things. For example, your home, or office. Your computer, printer or car. Or your partner, boss or colleagues.  You then dropped any task related to these contexts into its appropriate context.  Your projects were organised in a file folder system that you kept in a filing cabinet. Current projects—the things you were working on this week or month—were kept on or near your desk for quick access.  In those folders you kept all the details of the project. Notes, documents, outlines, etc. Perhaps you also had a checklist of what needed to happen next.  Today, you can use your digital note app for that purpose.  The key thing about GTD was it was task context driven—ie, you could only do something if you were in the right place, with the right tool and with the right people. It was never about projects.  So, now you have the background, I think it's time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Benjamin. Benjamin asks, How do you best manage projects using your task manager, notes app, and calendar together? Hi Benjamin, thank you for your question.  I think the first place to start is to avoid looking for a way to treat any new input as a project. Most things are not.  Theoretically, this podcast is a project. I need to choose the question, write the script, set up the studio, record the podcast, edit it, then publish it and hand it over to the my marketing manager for sharing on social media.  That's seven steps. Well within the definition of a GTD project. Yet, if I were to treat each podcast episode as a project, I'd waste hours just organising it.  A podcast episode is something I do every week. It's not a project. It's just part of my work.  Usually, on Thursday I will write the script. That means I go into my list of questions which is in a single note in Evernote, select a question, then begin writing the script.  Then on Sunday morning, after my coaching calls have finished, I set up my little studio, and record the podcast. Once recorded, I edit it and then publish it.  The only tasks on my task manager are a task on Thursday that reminds me I need to write my script and a task on Sunday that reminds me to record the podcast. Two tasks. That's it.  I don't need a project folder for any of this.  There is one other thing I do that relates to your question, Benjamin. I have a two hour writing block on my calendar on a Thursday for writing the script and a two hour block on Sunday for recording it.  So, there in essence you have all three tools working together.  I have a single note in my notes app with the title “podcast questions”. That makes it easy to search for.  My task manager reminds me when I need to write the script and record the podcast. My calendar protects enough time each week to ensure I get each part of the process completed.  If you want to simplify things I would suggest looking at how you define a project.  In my eyes, a project is something unique, something you either have not done before or rarely ever do. Typical projects would be: Moving house Buying a new car Planning a vacation Setting up a new payroll system Starting a business Finding a new job Doing the work you are employed to do is not a project—well not unless you are a project manager. An advertising agency isn't going to treat each new client as a “project”. An advertising agency creates advertising campaigns every day.  The graphic designer has a list of designs they are working on and when they begin their day they only need to choose which campaign they will work on that day.  Designing is their job.  The same goes for the copywriter. When they begin their day they choose which campaign to work on and that is dictated by when the next client meeting is. What is the work you are employed to do?  A teacher doesn't treat each new class as a project. They have a process or system for preparing their materials and when the teaching time begins they teach.  It's possible that a lot of your work does require a place to keep meeting notes, plans and links to documents you may be working on. That's what your notes app is for.  Your notes app has replaced the filing cabinet today. Filing cabinets were static—they never moved. Your digital notes app can go with you wherever you go.  If you do have any projects, that is where the information and resources go.  All your task manager needs to do is tell you what you should be working on today.  You may have tasks like: Work on new payroll system project Finish proposal for Universal Exports Follow up Mr Oddjob at Auric Enterprises Clear Action This Day folder Your calendar tells you if your task list for the day is realistic. If you have six hours of meetings today and you plan to work on your payroll project and finish the proposal for Universal Exports, you're likely being a little ambitious.  You calendar tells you if you have time to do the things you'd like to do that day.  You can go further, though and use your calendar to protect time for doing your key work.  If, for example, you want to (or need to) spend two hours working on the Universal Exports proposal, then you can block time on your calendar for doing that work. There might be some time sensitivity involved there. Getting the proposal to Universal Exports might be the most important thing you need to do that day. That would be flagged in your task manager as a non-negotiable task that day.  The daily and weekly planning is where I would decide what I will be working on that day or week.  The planning sessions are where you can step back and look at the bigger landscape of what you have to do and decide where you will put your time that day.  Right now, I do have a project. I am in the process of recording the audiobook version of Your Time Your Way. This is not something I can sit down a real off as a single task.  I need to book the recording studio and sound engineer and my voice will only last for around 3 hours before I begin sounding like an out of tune frog.  The only thing I need in my system each week is when I need to be at the recording studio. Currently that is Wednesday nights at 7:30. We record until 10:30 pm. I don't need a task for any of that. That's on my calendar.  The next day, the sound engineer sends me the recordings and I go through them to make sure everything sounds right. I have a task in my task manager that pops up each Thursday reminding me to review that previous day's recordings.  I have a project folder for the Your Time, Your Way book. That contains all my notes, meeting notes and any information I may need. Right now, though, I don't need to reference that. I just need to turn up at the recording studio on Wednesday nights, record the audiobook and review the recordings the next day.  The important thing is not to confuse your core work with projects. Core work is the work you are employed to do. Designers design, teachers teach, managers manage, truck drivers drive a truck.  All you need is a list of tasks you want to complete each day and get on and complete as many as you can. The majority of those tasks will be related to your core work. A project, on the other hand, is something unique, often outside of your core work, that needs additional time for doing. You may need to utilise your unique skills to complete that project, you may only have a small say in the project. Either way, on a day to day basis, the only thing you need to decide is what your next task is and do that.  This year is the fifth anniversary of the Time Sector System course. I am currently in the process of re-recording and updating that course.  Is it a project or just part of my core work.  I know from experience that if I treat it as a project things will get complicated.  Yet, I've create many courses over the years. I know the process.  For an update, it's to review and update the course outline. Then schedule time on my calendar for recording and editing it. There will be some additional tasks related to marketing, but I am not there yet. I'm recording, so the driver is my calendar.  Hopefully that has helped, Benjamin. The key is to simplify things as much as possible. Try to avoid creating projects and instead ask if there is a process you can follow. Most things you frequently do has a process.  Processes speed everything up. As the Formula 1 season is about to start, I'm reminded of one of the sports best leaders, Ross Brawn's comment on running a team.  The new car for the new season is never considered a project. It's a process. There's a time to begin work on the new car, there's a time to test the new car, etc. Yet none of that is considered a project. Aerodynamicists do the aerodynamics. Engineers work on the chassis and engine and the logistics people work on the logistics. It's what they do every day.  Yet, building a new wind tunnel, or engineering factory, that would be a project. These “projects” are rare and need specialist inputs.  Don't forget, we're two weeks away from the first Ultimate Productivity Workshop of 2025. This is your opportunity to take a live workshop with me where I help you to create and build your very own productivity system, A system that works for you.  Thank you Benjamin for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Where are you spending most of your time? Are you planning or doing? That's what we are looking at this week.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 358 Hello, and welcome to episode 358 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Podcaster Chris Williamson has recently caused a bit of a stir in the productivity world with the phrase “the productivity rain dance”. Cal Newport picked this up and it's something I've written and spoken about for many years.  If you are obsessing about productivity tools—apps, techniques and systems—you're not doing the work. You're doing the productivity rain dance. It's organising, planning and searching for new tools in the hope that somehow the work will get done.  It won't. And while you are wasting all that time planning, and playing, the work continues to pile up.  This week's question is linked to this in that it's about tools and organising work and I hope, my answer will help you find the balance between collecting, organising and doing.  Before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week's question, I'd like to mention that the first Ultimate Productivity Workshop of 2025 is coming.  On Fridays 14th and 21st March I invite you to spend two hours with me learning how to create a time management and productivity system that's focused on doing the work so you have time for the things you want time for.  In the workshop, we will cover getting control of your calendar and task manager . Then in week two, I will show you some simple techniques to get control of, and more importantly, stay in control of your communications—email, Slack/Teams messages AND the all important daily and weekly planning sessions.  Places are limited so, if you would like to develop a personal productivity system that is focused on doing rather than organising and planning, get yourself registered today. The link to register is in the show notes.  Okay, back to this episode. Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Alastair. Alastair asks, hi Carl. I recently came across your work and wonder how you avoid getting caught up in the wonderful world of productivity apps. I never seem to able to stick to anything and I know I am wasting time.   Hi Alastair, thank you for sending in your question.  I'm not sure you are necessarily wasting time looking for the right tools. If you are at the start of your productivity journey, finding the right tools is inevitable and yes, it can be confusing. There are so many.  However, there comes a point when you need to stop and settle down with a set of tools.  Those tools are: A calendar, a notes app and a task manager.  The good news is the built in tools that comes with your computer will do. You don't need expensive subscriptions to so called AI enabled tools or collaborative project management tools.  What are you trying to do when you decide it's time to get organised and be “productive”?  It's not about getting more work done. That's a bit of a misnomer about productivity. It's about getting the important stuff done and eliminating the less important.  Getting your kids up, dressed, fed and ready for school each morning is important at 7:30 am. Checking email and messages is not. There's a time and place for those messages, but 7:30 am is not the time.  The world we live in today has made communication incredible fast and easy. Forty years ago, the only forms of communication were letters and telephone calls. (Although some offices had fax machines too). If you were not next to a telephone, no one could contact you. And if you were not in the office, you didn't know what surprises were contained in the correspondence waiting for you.  It was therefore easier to compartmentalise your days. Today, it's much more difficult because you can be alerted to problems instantly, and those problems can derail your day very quickly.  The challenge therefore is to be able to quickly sift through all the stuff coming at us and to decide what is important and what is not.  When things are coming at us all day, they appear loud and urgent. But urgent is not necessarily important.  If you have a thousand emails backlogged in your email system and your boss is demanding you send in your employee evaluations by the end of the week, your employee evaluations are the more important task. The backlog will have to wait.  And let's be honest, if someone's been waiting three months for you to reply to their email they're not going to be bothered if they have to wait a further week.  If you consider that scenario for a moment, your productivity tools are not going to help you.  The only thing you need to know is that writing your employee evaluations must be done. Shuffling that task around your productivity tools won't do that for you. You are, in effect, procrastinating. I like the analogy to the rain dance here. A rain dance is performed to persuade God or the gods to bring rain to water the crops. Yet, the dance doesn't produce the rain. You can dance as much as you like, you can wear elaborate costumes and involve other people. None of that will give you what you want—water to feed the crops.  You can download as many productivity tools as you like. You can organise your notes in such a way that finding stuff is quick and easy and you can spend hours curating your notes and tasks so they look pretty. Yet, none of that gets the work done.  Doing the work is the only way the work will get done. So, all you need each day is a list of things you have decided are important and you get done and do them.  For that, you don't need expensive apps. A single sheet of paper would do that.  I've always found it interesting how productive people get their work done. The common thread is they do the work, not organise it.  If you Google Albert Einstein's desk you will see a mess. Papers and books strewn all over the place. If you search for Jeff Bezos' desk from the early days of Amazon, you'll see something very similar.  These guys got a tremendous amount of work done without the need for clean and tidy systems. They got on with doing the work that mattered and cleaned up when they were finished.  Sadly, unproductive people don't achieve very much so we cannot see their workspaces, but I'll bet they were beautifully neat and tidy with bookshelves of neatly organised books and papers lined up perfectly on their desks.  A few years ago I got into watching YouTube videos of minimalist desk set ups. (Weirdly, these videos are still popular!). I remember at the time wondering how they ever got any work done. It must have taken hours to keep their workspace so clean.  The key to all of this is knowing what is important and what is not. This is why I recommend doing two exercises before you begin developing any kind of system.  The first is to establish what your areas of focus are. These eight areas around your family and relationships, career, finances, health and fitness, lifestyle and personal development are important because they define what is important to you as an individual.  The next is to get clear what your core work is. This is the work you are employed to do and directly effects your promotional prospects and ultimately your income.  Being quick to answer your phone, respond to a message or email or being on time to every meeting is not your core work. Well, not unless you work in customer support.  Once you know what your areas of focus are and your core work is, you have a pre-defined set of priorities on which to base your decisions about what you should be doing each day.  For example, one of my areas of focus related to my work (career) is to help as many people as I can become more productive and less stressed. To do that, I produce several pieces of content each week.  Creating and publishing that content is always a priority for me.  I don't need a lot of tools to to do that.  A calendar protects time each week for creating that content—I have twelve hours a week protected for this.  I have a very disorganised list of content ideas in a single note in Evernote—a notes app I've been using for almost 16 years now.  And, of course, I have an app for writing and producing that content.  Are there better calendars, notes apps and writing tools out there? Possibly, but how much faster would I be able to create content with those new tools? Probably no faster because using them would be unfamiliar to me.  The tools I use I've used for over ten years. I know them inside out and they are boring. And that's good because I'm not tempted to organise them, or even look for new apps. They do the job I need them to do and I can focus on creating the content.  If you want to become more productive and get the important things done on time every time, the only way you will do that is to do the work. There are no shortcuts and no productivity tool will do it for you. Only you can do that.  If you need to write a report, open up Microsoft Work or Google Docs and write the first paragraph. If you need to prepare a presentation, open up PowerPoint or Keynote and create the first slide.  If you need to wash your car, go to the car wash centre and wash your car.  If you need to do your taxes, download the documents and write in your name and national insurance number.  Funny how none of those things requires you to add a task into a task manager. You just need to decide when you will do them and do them.  So there you go, Alastair. Focus less on the tools and more on what you need to do to get the job done. You really don't need elaborate apps, complex organisational structures or a minimalist desk.  You just need time protected to get the work done.  Thank you, Alastair for your question and thank you for listening. Don't forget to get yourself registered for the Ultimate Productivity Workshop where will cover many of these concepts (and much more). It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, why managing your time is better than managing tasks.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 356 Hello, and welcome to episode 356 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. There is a scene in the movie Apollo 13 where astronaut Ken Mattingley, played by Gary Sinese, is trying to find a way to power up the Command Service Module to bring the three in danger astronauts through the earth's atmosphere and safely back to earth.  All they had to play with was 16 amps; that's it. Sixteen amps isn't enough to boil a kettle. And we're talking about life support systems and navigation that was critical to bring Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise back to earth safely. In the scene, we see Ken Mattingley testing every switch in every possible combination so they do not exceed 16 amps . It's painstaking; it takes a lot of time, but eventually, they devise a sequence that the astronauts can use to power up the command service module within the 16-amp limit. We know that Apollo 13 landed, or splashed down, safely to earth after five days. Each day, you, too, are dealing with a similar situation. You have a limited resource—time—and that's it. You get the same 24 hours every day that everybody else gets. How you use that time is entirely up to you. The problem is you don't have 24 hours because some critical life support measures require some of that time, including sleep. If you don't get enough sleep, that will have a subsequent effect on your performance that day; you won't be operating at your most productive.  This is one of the reasons why it is crucial to have a plan. No flight ever takes off without a flight plan. They know precisely how much weight they are carrying. They can estimate to some degree of accuracy the weight of the passengers, and they know precisely where they're going and what weather conditions to expect. Yet many people start their day without a plan; they turn up at work and email messages. Bosses, customers, and colleagues dictate what they do all day, and they end up exhausted, having felt they've done nothing important at all. And that will be very true. Well, not important to them.  This week's question is about getting control of your time. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Tina. Tina asks, Hi Carl, I am swamped with all the stuff I have to do at work and home. It's never-ending and I don't have time to do it all. Do you have any tips on getting control of everything? Hi Tina, thank you for your question.  There's an issue when we focus on everything that we have to do. We forget that ultimately, whether we can or cannot do something will come back to time. Time is the limiting factor.  There are other resources—money, ability, energy, etc but if you have all those resources, and you don't have time, it's not going to get done.  Things get even more messy when we consider that as humans we are terrible at estimating how long something will take to do. There are too many variables.  For instance, as I am writing this script, my wife is messaging me and Louis, my little dog, is looking at me expectantly, hoping I will give him his evening chewy stick early.  When I began writing, I thought it would take me a couple of hours, I've already spent an hour on it and I am nowhere near finishing it.  One place to start is to allocate what you have to do by when you will do it. This helps to reduce your daily lists which in turn reduces that sense of overwhelm.  I recommend starting with a simple folder structure of: This Week Next Week This Month Next Month Long-Term and on Hold.  When something new comes in, ask yourself: What is it? What do I need to do and when can I do it?  The questions what is it and what do I need to do will help you to classify the task.  Classifying a task is helpful because it will allow you to group similar tasks together.  For example, if you walk into your living room and notice the windows are looking dirty, you may decide to create a task to clean the windows.  The next question is when will you do it? The best time to do this kind of task is when you do your other cleaning.  Grouping similar tasks together work to prevent procrastination.  When I was growing up, my grandmothers and my mother all had what they called “cleaning days”. This was a day, once a week when they did the big clean. Vacuuming, dusting and laundry. It was a non-negotiable part of their week.  And if you think about it, you don't pop out to the supermarket to buy food individually. It's not like you run out of broccoli and go to the supermarket to buy only broccoli. You would add broccoli to your shopping list and buy it when you do your grocery shopping.  Well, we can adopt the same principle here.  Like most people, I get email every day. The problem is, you and I have no idea how many emails we will get. It's a random number. This makes it practically impossible to know before the day starts what you will need to do.  However, what you can do is have a set amount of time to deal with your actionable email each day.  I have a process. Before the day starts I clear my inbox, filtering out the stuff I don't need and archiving things I may need. The actionable email goes into an Action This Day folder in my email app and later in the day I dedicate an hour for clearing that folder.  I have my Action This Day folder set up so the oldest email is at the top of the list and I start there. It doesn't matter if I have fifty or eighty actionable emails. I give myself an hour work on it and once the hour is up I stop.  I repeat this every day, so my emails are not backlogging. Most days I can clear them all, some days I cannot. But as I always begin with the oldest email, nobody will be waiting more than 24 hours for a reply.  This means it really doesn't matter how many messages I get each day. While I can't predict how many I will get each day, I have been able to pin down how long I spend on it each day (around an hour and twenty minutes) and that's it.  Another thing you can do is to default all new tasks to next week, not this week. It's tempting to throw everything into this week, but if everything goes into this week, you're going to be swamped.  Much of what we are asked to do doesn't need to be done straight away. It can wait. The advantage of waiting is many things end up sorting themselves out.  There's a story about former Israel Prime Minister Yikzak Shamir, who would take every letter, memo and document he received and put it on a pile on a side table. He wouldn't look at it for a week or ten days.  When he did go through the pile, he found 90% of what he was being asked to sort out had sorted itself out and the remaining 10% needed his attention.  Of course, today not touching something for a week to ten days might not be practical, but it does highlight another issue we find ourselves in—rushing to do something that if left alone will sort itself out.  The final piece of this puzzle, is how you organise your day. This is where your calendar takes priority and where the time limit comes to play.  We have twenty-four hours. From that we need to sleep, eat and take care of our personal hygiene. That's going to take up around nine to ten hours of your day. So, in reality you have around fourteen hours to play with.  Where will you do your most important work? This is where your calendar comes in.  Most of us have meetings and often we have no control over when those will be. However, what you can do is block your calendar for doing your most important work.  For example, you could protect two hours in the morning for doing your critical work. And then an hour in the afternoon for dealing with your communications—the action this day folder.  That's only three hours. If you're working a typical eight hour day, that still leaves you with five hours for meetings snd other stuff that may need to be done.  If you can consistently follow that practice, you'll soon see a lot of that work that's piling up getting done.  One thing to keep in mind is the work will never stop.  There's a story that on Queen Elizabeth's final day, she still had to deal with her official documents and messages. It's likely you will too. Stuff to do will never stop coming.  All you have are your resources and of those time is the most limited. The question is—how much time are you will to give to those tasks?  So, Tina, the best advice I can give you is to sort your tasks by when you will do them. This week, next week, later this month or next month.  From there, categorise your tasks into the type of work involved. That could be Writing time, communications, admin, chores etc.  Then. Look at your calendar and see where you can protect time for doing that work.  And that's it. If you are consistent in following your calendar, you will find the right things are getting done on time and you'll feel a lot less frazzled and overwhelmed.  Thank you, Tina for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all very very productive week.   

This week, Dr. Kourosh Dini returns to the podcast to discuss how we can ensure that the goals we set are achieved.    Here's how you can learn more about Dr Dini's work. Newsletter: https://wavesoffocus.com/Your-First-Step-to-Breaking-Free-from-Force-Based%20Work/ Waves of Focus https://wavesoffocus.com/ on SMART goals https://www.kouroshdini.com/lay-off-the-goals-a-bit-would-you/

Should you take up journaling, and if you do, will it help you with your time management and productivity? That's what we're exploring this week.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 355 Hello, and welcome to episode 355 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. This year is the 10th anniversary since I took up consistent journaling. And it's been one of the best things I've ever taken up.  Not only is it one of the most therapeutic things you can do, it's also one of the best ways to organise your thoughts, work your way through problems and vent your anger towards those who really wind you up.  Over the years, I've also found that journaling has helped me to achieve my goals because each day I am writing about how I am doing and if I find myself making excusing, the act of writing out my excuses exposes them for what they really are—excuses.  So, this week, I've chosen a question related to journaling and I hope it will inspire you to invest in a quality notebook and pen and start doing it yourself. And if I can inspire just one of you to take it up and become a Samuel Pepys, I'll be very happy.  So, to kick ups off, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Tom. Tom asks, hi Carl, I've heard you talk about your journaling habit numerous times. Do you think writing a journal has helped or hindered your productivity?  Hi Tom, thank you for your question.  To answer your question directly, I can say with certainty that journaling has contributed to my overall productivity.  To explain further, I write in my journal every morning, no matter where I am. And one of the things I always write down is my two objective tasks for the day. Those objectives are the two non-negotiable tasks for the day and by writing them down at the top of my journal entry, I have a way of ensuring I did them when I write my journal the next day,  But more powerfully, writing them down each morning focuses my mind on what needs to be done and how and when I will do them.  Those tasks are also in my task manager, but it's the act of writing them out by hand that gives me the focus.  Writing a journal is much more than being an aid to productivity. It's also a form of therapy.  Like most people, I feel frustrated, overwhelmed and stressed at times. Those feelings need an outlet. A negative way to do that is to get angry, shout, and scream. Sure, that blows off steam, but it also transfers your negative feelings to others—your colleagues and family. Not great.  Instead, if you have a way to write about these things, you start to find ways to solve whatever the underlying issues are. Writing slows down your thinking, and if you were to step back and analyse why you sometimes feel stressed, frustrated and overwhelmed, it is because you feel—incorrectly—everything has to be done right now.  That slowing down helps to bring back some perspective and you can decide when you will do something and what can be left until another day.  When it comes to achieving your goals, a journal is perhaps the best way to track progress. It can also help you establish new, positive habits. When I developed my morning routines around eight years ago, I chose to track them in my journal. I always draw a margin on left of the page, and I list out the six items I do as part of my morning routine: make coffee, wash face and teeth, drink lemon water, write my journal, clear my email inbox and do my shoulder stretches.  I write them down at the top of my journal entry for the day in the margin. And, for the dopamine hit, I check them off too.  I exercise in the late afternoon and, again, I will write out what I did in the margin of my journal.  Now, I could spend a lot of money on habit-tracking apps, but with my journal, I've found no need. I have my record and can review it at any time.  Over the years, I've been asked what I write about and if I use any prompts. The answer is no. Well, apart from writing out my objectives for the day.  Now, prompts can be helpful when you first start—you can think about them as those little stabilisers we put on kids' bikes to help them learn to ride. Sooner or later you want to take them off so you can experience the freedom of riding freely.  I write whatever's on my mind that morning. If everything's going great I write about that. If things are not so great I write about it and why I think things are not going as well as I want them to. I often find as I am writing about an issue, a solution begins to form in my mind and I will continue writing.  If a task comes from that solution, I can put that in its appropriate place later.  As a general rule, I will write for around fifteen minutes. However, if I don't have much to write about, I will give it ten minutes. The weather's a good subject to write about when you have little to write.  If there's a lot on my mind, I'll keep going until I've emptied my thoughts. That's very rarely more than thirty minutes, though. Over the years, I've tried both analogue journaling—with pen and paper and digital journaling using an app called Day One.  On balance, I've found that pen and paper journaling works best.  I spend most of my working time in front of a screen. I type a lot. So, opening up a nice notebook and picking up a fountain pen is a lovely break from the constant screen time. It also feels a lot less rushed and more relaxing.  One thing I noticed when I was writing my journal in Day One—a popular digital journal—was I never went back to my old entries. I read enough typed documents on screen all day. I have no desire to read through more, even if it's my journal.  I keep my old paper journals on my bookshelf and often skim through pages when waiting for a call to start. It's incredibly nostalgic and leaves you realising you have accomplished a lot.  I was recently asked if I am worried about people reading my journals. Hahaha, that's the point.  One of the inspirations for me to start writing a journal was how the journals of people like Samuel Pepys, Charles Darwin and Isaac Newton are still around.  These journals were written hundreds of years ago and, in the case of Samuel Pepys, are a snapshot of how we lived in the 17th Century.  Pepys was very open about what he did. Some good things and a lot of bad things. But does he care we are reading them today? Of course not. He's been dead for 320 years.  I have the same attitude. I've nothing to hide from my wife, and the journals are kept in my study—home office. If I lost my journal when travelling, so be it. There's nothing scandalous in there—well, not yet anyway hahaha. There are a few tips I would share with you if you are thinking about journaling. Start on paper. Buy yourself a nice notebook. You'll find bound notebooks with a hard cover are best. Choose A5 or B5 size. You'll find an A4 notebook a little daunting at first.  Hardback notebooks will last a long time, and the hardcover will protect the pages better than a soft cover.  I would also suggest investing in a fountain pen. You can pick up a refillable one for less than $20 these days. Lamy Safaris are excellent pens, and so are the Pilot Metropolitans and Platinum Preppys.  If you invest in a fountain pen, ensure the paper you buy is fountain pen-friendly. Rhodia Web-books and Clairefontaine notebooks are good choices, as are many Japanese notebooks such as Midori's MD notebooks.  When you start journaling, think of it as if you were meeting a stranger for the first time. You will naturally be a little reserved at first. You might only write about the weather and perhaps what you did yesterday.  As long as you remain consistent with it, you will soon open up. You'll start writing a few thoughts and feelings after a few weeks. Let it roll and don't hold back.  I would also recommend writing in the morning. You will likely be much more consistent that way. Evening times can be difficult because you will sometimes be tired. You may even have had a few too many G'nTs, and you won't write.  Tie writing your journal to your morning routines. You don't have to write for long. Give yourself ten minutes.  And if you want to be more focused, after writing the date at the top, write out your two must-do tasks for the day. That way, you have a method to hold yourself accountable. If, for whatever reason, you didn't do your must-do tasks, dedicate a sentence or two to writing about why you didn't do them.  This helps you because over time you may see a pattern developing. You might discover that afternoons are terrible for doing your focused work because your boss always wants to have meetings then. You can then use that information to change your structure.  If you draw a margin on the page, you can use the margin to track other data such as a food log, exercise and even your energy levels. I track my weight there. Each Wednesday, I weigh myself and write my weight in the margin (in a different coloured ink).  And there you go, Tom. Yes, journaling has helped me to be more productive. It slows me down and gets me to think better, leading to better focus on the day ahead. It also gives me a place to consider new ideas and play around with possible solutions.  I hope this episode has inspired some of you to start journaling. It's a fantastic way to bring perspective on chaotic days and weeks. It also slows you down—always a good thing in a fast-paced world, and gives you a place to express your thoughts.  And who knows, you may be the next Samuel Pepys or Leonardo Da Vinci in three-hundred years or so.  Thank you, Tom, for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very, very productive week.   

Do you feel you are rushing from one task to another while not getting anything important done? Well, this week, I'm going to share with you a few ways to change that.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 353 Hello, and welcome to episode 354 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. What's the rush? This is one of those powerful questions you can ask yourself when processing the things you have collected in your inboxes.  It's easy today to feel that everything you are asked to do must be done immediately. While there is a category of tasks that require quick action, most of what comes across your desk (or pops up on your screen) does not fall into that category.  The trick, of course, is knowing which is which. This is where developing confidence in your judgement and abilities helps. But that can only come from establishing some “rules”. In a way, automating your decision-making. I recently heard an interview with President J F Kennedy, in which he said as president, the kind of decisions you make are always high-level. Anything smaller will be dealt with at a lower level and rarely reach your desk.  That's an example of government in action. The president or Prime Minister cannot decide everything. Lower-level, less urgent things can and should be handled at a department level.  That's the same for you. Most of your decisions should be automated. What kind of emails are actionable, and what can be archived or deleted, for example.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Edward. Edward asks, Hi Carl, I recently read your newsletter in which you wrote about slowing down. Could you explain a little more how to slow down and still be productive? Hi Richard, thank you for your question. One of the disadvantages of technology and how it has advanced over the last twenty years is the speed at which tasks can now be done.  While technology has speeded up incredibly, our human brains have not. That causes us many issues.  The biggest issue is because everyone knows how quickly we can reply to an email, they expect almost instant replies which ignores the fact we might being doing something else.  For example, when I am driving or in a meeting or on a call, I cannot reply to an “urgent” email or message. I am doing something else.  In the days before email, there was a natural delay. I remember when I was working in a law firm, email was very new and lawyers didn't trust it. So, we continued writing letters. This meant, if we received a letter in the morning, we had until 4 pm to reply—that was when the mail went to the post office. If we missed the post, that was okay, we could blame the post office. And that was accepted.  Other lawyers knew this as did our clients and the clients of the other lawyers.  This also meant we had time to think about our response, talk to a colleague if necessary or escalate to our boss if the issue was complex.  Today, we often don't feel we have that time. The truth is you do.  One thing I've learned is when someone sends you something they are secretly hoping you do not respond quickly. They're snowed under with work too. If you reply quickly, you've just given them more work to do today. You're not going to be their favourite person.  One of the easiest ways to reduce some of this anxiety is to put in place some rules.  Let me give you an example. I receive around 100 to 150 emails a day. Most of the mail I receive comes through the night. I therefore process my inbox each morning before I start my work. The goal of processing my inbox is to clear it as fast as possible.  There's no time for applying the legendary two-minute rule (where anything that can be done in two minutes or less should be done). All I need is ten emails where I could apply the two-minute rule and I've lost twenty minutes.  No thank you. I want a cleared inbox as quickly as possible. I've applied this rule for over ten years now and can clear 150 emails in less than twenty minutes. My record is 380 (ish) emails cleared in 36 minutes.  Then around 4 pm, I will go to my email's Action This Day folder. Begin with the oldest email and work my way through that for an hour. I aim to respond to any actionable email within 24 hours. And I would say I have a 95% success rate with that “rule”.  It's a process I repeat every day, and it's ensured I never have an overwhelming backlog in email at any time.  Now, I do have some rules. For example, anything involving money, whether that is issuing a refund, or sorting out a discount code, I will deal with as soon as I see the issue—people are sensitive when it comes to money.  Also, questions from my Membership Community have priority as well as people who may have forgotten their password or are experiencing other difficulties getting into their learning centre dashboard.  Fortunately, these instances are rare. Perhaps three or four a month.  You can also apply rules for your core work—the work you are employed to do. Because your core work is work you have to do regularly, it's easy to set up processes to do the work.  Once you have a process set up, you can protect the time on your calendar to ensure you have the time to do the work.  Because a process is something you repeat, you soon get fast at doing it. It's a human form of automation. If you can fix it for the same time and day, it gets even better because you can start to accurately predict how long it will take you. And your colleagues learn your routines and will leave you alone.  My wife knows that between 9:30 and 11:30 every morning, I am doing my creative work and to leave me alone. That took a lot of training hahaha. There is a trick I learned from former Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Shamir was Prime Minister between 1986 and 1992, so before the proliferation of email and instant messages.  Whenever a letter or memo came into his office, he would move it to the side and leave it there for a week or ten days. What he discovered was that 90% of what had come in had resolved itself. The ten percent that was left was where he needed to apply his attention.  Rushing to respond or complete a piece of work often leads to unnecessary work. How many times have you responded to an email a few days after receiving it, only to be told the issue has been resolved?  Now you may not be able to sit on something today for a week, but it is possible to pause for 24 hours. All you need is a little confidence in yourself.  Slowing down is a great way to reduce the amount of work you have.  I remember when I used to pounce on an email from a student asking for help logging into their account, only to find a subsequent email come in telling me they had resolved their issue.  Now I wait an hour before responding. That way if a student does resolve their issue I am not wasting precious time resetting passwords that don't need to be done.  I'm reminded of this question: What the rush? With 2025 goals.  It doesn't matter what you have done on the 31st January. A 2025 goal is about what you have accomplished on the 31st December. The start will always be messy and inconsistent.  It's likely you original ideas don't work, but with a little patience and a few adjustments you will find the right strategy. The result you want will come on 31st December, not 31 January. You have plenty of time.  This idea of slowing down is at the heart of the Time Sector System. In the course, I recommend you default all new inputs to your Next Week folder. Something would have to be genuinely urgent to go into the This Week folder.  By applying the default to your Next Week folder, when you do the weekly planning it's fantastic to discover that thirty to forty percent of what's in there no longer needs to be done.  My wife is a get it done now person. Everything is urgent, even when it's not. Out accountant in Korea is the opposite. Our accountant will ask us for the bank and credit card statements around six weeks before she needs them. When my wife receives that message, everything stops, and she rushes around trying to collect everything together in one afternoon. It leaves her exhausted, and inevitably, something's missed, and she then has to repeat the stress the following week.  You want to be like our accountant. Work from your calendar, and ensure that you give yourself sufficient time to collect information. You don't need to rush around panicking then.  Slow down, protect sufficient time for the bigger tasks and default all new tasks to next week. You will find you have less to do, and what you do have to do can be done slowly, more meticulously and with fewer mistakes.  Thank you, Edward, for your question. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

This week, how to reduce procrastination and why you don't want to completely remove it.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 353 Hello, and welcome to episode 353 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. We recently asked what's the biggest thing that ruins your productivity on my YouTube community page. 58% of participants said procrastination.  In a way, that doesn't surprise me. When you see the statistics on how many people spend time planning their days and weeks, I am actually surprised that the number isn't higher. I'll explain shortly. Now, procrastination has been around for a very long time. Leonardo Da Vinci only managed to finish a small number of paintings. Of the twenty paintings attributed to him, around five were finished.  Leonardo was a serial procrastinator. Yet, it was that procrastination that led to many of his inventions. If he had not procrastinated as much as he did, we would have many more of his paintings but very few of his notebooks full of drawings and diagrams.  The good news is, there are a few practices you can do that will reduce procrastination and enable you to be more internal about your days.  To get us started, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Carlos. Carlos asks, Hi Carl, what advice do you have for overcoming procrastination? Hi Carlos, thank you for your question.  As I alluded to, procrastination and daily and weekly planning are linked. When you are clear about what needs to be accomplished you will procrastinate less.  The problem when you have no plan is you waste a lot of time trying to decide what needs to be done. And then, it's likely you will pick the easiest thing to do in the hope it will get you started.  It's true, you will get started, but you will be doing low value tasks leaving behind the higher value ones. The ones you don't know what needs to be done or what the first action is because you don't have a plan.  And that leaves you at the end of the day looking at a list of important, high value things you didn't do.  One way to overcome this is to be very clear about what the next action is. In my next YouTube video, coming out on Thursday, I explain why “think about” tasks are not really tasks and will be the ones you will sacrifice the moment your day becomes busy.  The reason why these get put off is because it's not clear what the real action is. For example, if I had a task like “think about what to buy mum for her birthday”, I would procrastinate. It's too much effort and is not the real task.  The real task might be to talk to my brother and sister about what they re getting my mum. Or I could talk to my father and ask him what he thinks she would like.  Which task would you most likely do: Think about what to buy mum for her birthday, or, call my brother and ask him what he's getting mum for her birthday?  One is actionable the other is wishy washy. The wishy washy task is the one you will procrastinate on.  You will procrastinate because it's not clear what needs to be done.  This is where planning comes in. When you have a plan for the day and are clear about what needs to be done, you will be less likely to procrastinate because your brain is subconsciously planning ahead for you. You're doing one task and your brain is thinking, subconsciously, about what you will do next and how to complete the task.  This prevents your brain from going offline and procrastinating.  However, when you don't have a plan for the day, none of that happens. Instead, you procrastinate. You are always on the lookout for something interesting to do, and anything that does not fit the mood you're in will be skipped for something more interesting.  So, the first practice to develop is to plan your day. This does not take a long time. It can be done in five minutes. And the ideal time for maximum procrastination protection is to do it before you finish the day.  There's something more intentional about starting your day knowing exactly what it is you want to get accomplished.  Now, there is a caveat here. If you are an early riser, you can do your planning for the day as part of your morning routine. After all, it's only five minutes.  So how do you effectively plan your day? Step one. Look at your appointments for the day. How much time do you have left after your meetings and meal breaks? Step two is to look at your task list and choose actionable tasks that you can do in the time you have available.  Step three is to prioritise those tasks. Which ones are your non-negotiables? The ones that must be done today?  And that's it.  To give you an example, Today, I have six hours of meetings. I also need to take Louis to his groomers for his haircut. In total, I have around seven and a half hours of commitments today.  That leaves me with around two hours for everything else. This means, the only task I can confidently complete today is this podcast script. So that's what I have on my list of tasks.  There's no point in me having twenty tasks on my to-do list. It would be impossible to do them all in two hours.  Now if I began the day with twenty tasks and seven and half hours of commitments, I would waste so much time trying to decide what to do—ie procrastinate. No! The only thing that matters is getting this script completed.  So, that's my plan for the day.  Now there are other factors involved in procrastination. If you are sleep deprived, for example, you're not going to be focused and you will procrastinate. All those shiny objects, social media feeds and click bait news will be attractive. Your brain's tired and it won't want to be doing anything that requires thought or creativity.  Similarly, if you eat a high carbohydrate lunch, you're going to find staying on task in the afternoon challenging. The insulin spike that results in you feeling groggy and tired will cause you to procrastinate.  I would also add that if you are not moving enough you will catch yourself procrastinating. A good tip here is to get up after each session of work or meeting and go for a walk around your workplace for ten minutes.  While you're walking, think about your next task and how you will do it. You will find when you settle down to get back to work, you are more focused and ready to go.  None of these reasons mean you are a serial procrastinator. It just means you're tired. Fix that issue first. Get enough sleep, be careful what you eat at lunch time and make sure you move for ten minutes between sessions of work.  Do those four things: plan you day, get enough sleep, avoid carbs for lunch and move and you will see a significant reduction in the procrastination.  Now when talking about procrastination, we do have to be careful. Sometimes procrastination can be a good thing.  I mentioned Leonardo Da Vinci earlier. His procrastination is what led him to invent things hundreds of years before anyone else thought about them.  You see procrastination is really all about exploring ideas. The trouble today is there are far too many things we can procrastinate on.  You're thinking about your summer holidays and remember you need to buy a new suitcase. So, you head online and search luggage. Yet, it's eight months before you go on your holiday. You don't need to buy or research new luggage now. Yet, that's more interesting than whatever else you should be doing.  And because it's so easy to do a Google search, you do that.  Now, had you added a task to research new luggage and added it to your long-term and on hold folder, it's unlikely you would be thinking about luggage today. It collected, processed and in your system.  There's a time for procrastination—the exploration of ideas, but it needs to be controlled.  A tip here is to keep a part of your day as free as you can. For instance, you could try to keep your afternoons as free as possible so if you do slip into procrastination, you've got your most important work done in the morning and your procrastination can be made useful.  This means when you plan your day, you make sure your most important work gets done in the morning.  Which comes back to ensuring you have a plan for your day.  So you don't want to be eliminating procrastination completely. It's your creative brain wanting to explore. It's more a case of controlling it.  Which means it's a good idea to monitor when you procrastinate. When I've done this, I find I procrastinate most in the early afternoons. Knowing this, I have designed my schedule to allow me time to take Louis for his walk. I know my brain wants to explore ideas at that time. What better way to do it than to be walking in nature and thinking about all these distractions and ideas?  What it comes down to is having a realistic plan for the day. If you find yourself staring at an impossible day, you will inevitably procrastinate. Then you will get annoyed with yourself. Yet, you can fix it. Be very clear about what your non-negotiable tasks for the day are.  Your brain will then take over and give you that sense of urgency to get the non-negotiable tasks done.  I've never been a fan of website blockers or forcing yourself to turn off your devices. I find those become a distraction in themselves because you are now worried about what you are missing.  What I've found works for my clients is to have that plan, be aware of how tired you are and if you are tired, take a nap, if you can, or get up and go for a walk. That way you softly remove the temptation to procrastinate and once back you can get on with your high-value work. I hope that has helped, Carlos. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.  

What happened to my 2020/21 minimalist project, and where am I today? That's the question I am answering today. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 352 Hello, and welcome to episode 352 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Towards the end of 2019, I decided that in 2020, I would go all in on a minimalist project. I had played around with it for a number of years, but it wasn't until 2020 that I formally turned it into a project and began the process of clearing out a lot of stuff I had collected that was no longer benefiting me.  And yes, four or five years ago, minimalism was a thing. Everyone was talking about it, and there were thousands of videos of people showcasing how bare and minimal their workspaces were.  It was a trend, and while that trend appears to be forgotten, I learned many things that I still practice today.  So, it was a nice surprise to find a question about it in my inbox a few weeks ago. I realised it was a good time to tell you about what I learned and what I am still practising today.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question… Which I realise I've already told you.  This week's question comes from Milos. Milos asks, hi Carl, I remember a few years ago, you mentioned that you were about to start a minimalist project. How did it go, and are you still a minimalist? Hi Milos, thank you for your wonderful question.  Like most projects, or goals, designed to change how you do things, once you complete them, it's easy to forget you ever did them. My minimalist project was such a project.  I changed a lot of things that I do automatically today, so your question caused me to reminisce on how things used to be.  I should point out that I wasn't into extreme consumerism. I would replace my phone, iPads and computers when they stopped functioning in a way I needed them to do.  For example, my old Intel computer became very slow over a year when Apple switched from Intel chips to their M series. So much so that it took up to an hour to render a fifteen-minute YouTube video. When I changed my computer to an M series one, that time came down to around six minutes.  However, I think I am a bit of a hoarder, and I had boxes of old papers from my teaching days I no longer needed. I was always reluctant to throw away old clothes, believing one day I might regain the weight I had lost and would require those bigger sizes again.  My wardrobe, drawers and other cupboards were full of stuff I no longer needed and would never need again.  So that was where the project began. Clearing out old clothes and papers I no longer needed.  As with all endeavours like this, I did go a little extreme. My desk, for instance, was stripped of its soul—well, it felt like it. All I had on there was my computer, keyboard and trackpad. I found it became an uninspiring place to work.  So, gradually, I added some things back. An analogue clock—a tool I use to prevent time blindness when I get into a focused zone and a few little mementoes to bring some character back.  The biggest part of the project was clearing out drawers, cupboards and my wardrobe. That was liberating and I was surprised how much space I had once everything was cleared and either thrown away or taken to the recycling.  I moved house at the end of 2021, and that was an opportunity to complete the project—well, the clearing out of the old part of the project. However, the biggest change was in the way I approached purchasing.  I stopped buying electronic gadgets. I am in the Apple ecosystem and Apple's products, on the whole, last a long time. For example, I have an iPad mini for reading ebooks, magazines and the newspaper. I've had the same iPad mini for the last five years. And I have no intention of replacing it any time soon.  Another change was to apply some rules to my purchasing. This was inspired from how the British gentry in the early 1900s approached buying clothes and personal consumption items.  In the 1920s (and 30s), aristocrats bought clothes and necessities once. For instance, a young aristocrat would purchase a set of luggage that would last a lifetime.  If something broke or the leather tore, they would fix it. A new suitcase was not necessary.  These repairs added character and gave these items a unique look. It was also a much more environmentally friendly way to treat possessions than we do today—throwing away items once they are either out of date or have a minor problem and buying new ones.  It's easy to tell ourselves that life was much simpler in those days. It wasn't. People had just as many problems as we do today. They did not have the conveniences we have: no food delivery services, no Google or ChatGTP to find something out instantly, and no technology to make doing our work better and faster.  The clothing rule I applied was built around the principle of less is better. This translated into buying better quality and less of it. It also allowed me to apply a rule of only buying natural fibres. So that meant mainly cotton and wool.  I do have some un-natural fibre clothing. My exercise gear and a heavy winter coat, for example—it gets very cold in Korea. But apart from that, I stick to natural fibres.  Much of what I do today is inspired by the pre-consumerism days. Only buy what you need and buy the best quality you can afford.  I also learned something from Winston Churchill. Choose your suppliers. What this means is you use the same stores to buy your clothes and anything else you may need.  Winston Churchill, for instance bought all his suits from H W Poole—a London tailor in Savile Row. His shirts were bought at Turnbull and Asser, and his iconic cigars came from James Fox.  If you think about that for a moment, if you use the same suppliers for all your clothing and other things, you know your sizes and precisely what you want, which means you don't need to research or waste a lot of time trying to find what you want. You reduce the paradox of choice and get back to living life.  Now, I cannot afford to buy suits from H W Poole or shirts from Turnbull and Asser, but I do have my own favourite suppliers.  I buy socks from Peper Harow, my sweaters from N Peal and Cordings of Piccadilly and coats from Barbour. Yes, they are expensive, but the clothing last a very long time and are all made from either cotton or wool.  Another lesson I learned from my minimalist project was the importance of rules and routines.  If you've read Around The World In Eighty Days or the books by P G Wodehouse and his characters Jeeves and Wooster, you may have noticed the main characters had strict rules and routines. Wake up times and when they expected their morning cup of tea. Dinner time was a social occasion with pre-dinner drinks and formal clothing.  Perhaps part of the reason for the increase in mental health issues today is because we no longer have these important daily rituals. It's all go go go. No time to stop and appreciate sitting around a table with family and friends or going out for a daily walk, or even doing what in Around The World in Eighty days is called your “toilet”—which means washing and bathing.  These were deliberate activities, not rushed or forced. It was just what you naturally did each day.  There was a time for everything.  Another area of this period that has fascinated me was the way people approached writing and replying to letters. This was considered a joy and most people spent time each day doing it.  And there was a mix of personal and business letters that needed to be done and the volume was comparable to what we receive in emails and messages today.  The biggest difference was rather feeling they had to reply to everything each day, they focused on the amount of time they had available to write. I have adopted this approach myself. I don't look at how many emails I need to reply to, I look at how much time I have and once that time is up, I stop.  If you do that every day, you will remain on top of your communications reasonably consistently.  I often hear about people doing a digital detox. One change I made, was to again take inspiration from the 1920s and 30s. In those days people bought their favourite newspaper and read the whole paper.  Now, many successful people still do this today. Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase Bank and Warren Buffett for instance. They subscribe to their favourite newspapers and allocate time each day to read them.  This stops you from getting caught up in clip bait headlines and being “triggered” by low quality reporting.  So now I read the same newspaper every day and only look through my social media later in the evening when I have finished my day.  So the lessons I learned was to buy less stuff but better quality. That's ensured my wardrobe is clean and not over-stuffed with clothes I won't wear.  I have also structured my days better. There's a time for doing my communications, eating with family and friends, and my favourite of all, going out for what we call our family walk. That's with my wife and little Louis. He loves it, and my wife and I get some quality time most days.  All of this was inspired from reading history books and biographies and realising that minimalism isn't about stripping everything out of your life so all you are left with is a soulless screen. It's about removing things that no longer serve you, and leaving the things that mean something to you and living life by a set of rules you set yourself.  I hope that has answered your question, Milos. Thank you for asking it and thank you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all very very productive week.   

What one thing could you do this month that would transform your productivity? That's what I'm answering this week.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 351 Hello, and welcome to episode 351 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. It's one of the strange quirks of human nature to overcomplicate things. This is particularly so when things start to go wrong.  In my favourite sport, rugby league—as in most team-based ball sports—the basics of winning a game are possession of the ball and territory. If you can consistently complete your sets in your opponent's half of the field, you will likely win the game.  Drop the ball or give away silly penalties by overcomplicating moves, and you'll make it very difficult to win the game.  Teams that lack confidence are particularly guilty of these mistakes. Watch any winning team, and you will see they stick to the basics and never panic when they go a try or goal behind.  You can see this in any workplace, too. Those people who rarely appear stressed or overwhelmed stick to the basics. They have processes for getting their core work done—the work they are employed to do.  Top salespeople dedicate time daily to prospecting and following up with their customers. CEOs ensure they have time for meeting with their leadership team weekly so they are aware of what's going on and know where the potential issues are.  So, what can you do to ensure you stick to the basics each day to avoid those pernicious backlogs?  Well, before I answer that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from George. George asks, hi Carl, are there any strategies you know of that guarantees someone will always be on top of their work? Hi George, thank you for your question. I've always found it fascinating to look at occupations where mistakes can lead to a loss of life—airline pilots and surgeons, for example.  Before any flight, a pilot goes through a checklist to ensure the plane is in working order. They check the weather and the weight of the cargo—both of which can affect how the aircraft will fly.  They calculate the speed they need to reach before taking off and plot their flight path to avoid storms or dangerous weather fronts.  No pilot would ever consider not doing these checks. Indeed, not doing them would be an act of gross negligence and could potentially be career-ending.  Similarly, surgeons follow a checklist. They check the patient's name, the type of surgery being carried out, and, if necessary, which side they will be operating on. They also check the patient's blood pressure and other measurements.  Again, failure to do so would be considered gross negligence, and a doctor could be fired for not doing them.  Now, perhaps lives do not depend on you doing your job correctly, but approaching your work in the same way a pilot or surgeon does can ensure that your work gets done without missing essential tasks.  The first step is to identify your core work. The work you are employed to do at a micro-level. For example, if you manage a team of people, what do you need to do at a task level to manage your team?  That could be to prepare for and hold a weekly team meeting. It may involve setting aside time each month for a thirty-minute one-to-one session with each team member. That would translate into weekly tasks for preparing for the team meeting and scheduling appointments with your team.  A journalist's core work may be to research a story and then write the story before the deadline. Imagine their deadline is 1 pm on Thursday; then the journalist could ensure sufficient time is protected before Thursday to get the story written and submitted before the deadline.  What are your core work tasks?  Next comes the all important communications and admin tasks. We all have them. The problem with these tasks is we cannot accurately estimate how much will come in.  Each morning, when I start my day, I have no idea how many emails I will have. Some days, it's 80; other days, it can be as high as 150. Yet, one thing I can guarantee is that I will have email to deal with.  So, I protect an hour a day for dealing with communications. This way, I know that no backlogs will ever build, and nobody is waiting longer than 24 hours for my response.  Somedays, I need the whole hour; I may only need thirty minutes on other days. Yet I still protect an hour.  It's no good “hoping” you will find the time to respond to your communications. You won't find the time, and if you do not have a consistent amount of time to do it, backlogs will soon build.  You mentioned strategies, George, and the strategy is ensuring you have enough time protected for the key work you need to do.  This may mean you need to cap your meetings each week. Now, I know whenever I mention this, people recoil in fear. Yet, if you work an average of forty hours a week and spend thirty hours in meetings, how will you ever get your work done? How will you prevent backlogs?  Let me give you an example how being strategic with your time. I limit my coaching hours to twenty each week. Think of my coaching sessions as meetings. Following each session, I write feedback, which takes an average of twenty minutes to write.  I know I can dedicate an hour each day to writing feedback, so my limit is three feedbacks per day. That works out at twenty-one per week.  If I allow more than twenty hours for coaching sessions in a week, I will either have to reduce my other work or work longer hours. It would not be sustainable. While the money would be good, my health and effectiveness would suffer. So, it would only be a short-term benefit.  I've learned over the years that the only thing you control is what you do in the time you have each day. You cannot control time itself. That is fixed. When you realise that you see that you can only build strategies around what you do, that means getting comfortable saying no. You cannot say no to your boss and your customers, right? Well, yes and no.  You see, it comes back to that time issue. Twenty-four hours. That's it. Now, if you are happy using all twenty-four hours running around for your boss and customers, that's fine. But if you accept that, I would suggest you gain some self-respect.  I know that might be a bit harsh. But you are a valuable person. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, has the right to demand all twenty-four hours of your time.  Sometimes, you do need to say no. You cannot do everything because everything takes time. The question then becomes how much time are you willing to to give to your boss and customers?  Let me give you an example. I protect two hours each day doing my focused work. Work that ultimately benefits my clients and customers. I also protect an hour for communications and thirty minutes for admin. In total, I protect three-and-a-half hours a day for meaningful work.  If I were working a typical eight-hour day, that means I still have four-and-a-half hours available for my boss, customers and clients.  Would four and a half hours be enough for you?  The “guarantee” that puts you on top of your work is consistency with your strategy.  Over the last few days, I've travelled back to Korea from Ireland. Door to door, it's a thirty-hour trip. We set off at 2:00 am on Sunday from the west coast of Ireland and arrived back at our home around 30 hours later.  Between checking in, waiting for flights and flying, I stayed on top of my email and admin. The last thing I wanted when I got back home was a backlog of stuff to do.  Then, after some sleep, I went into my office and spent around three hours catching up with everything else.  Had I ignored my messages and admin, I could have lost a whole day trying to catch up. No, thank you. I'll take advantage of the downtime when travelling to stay consistent.  By the way, a quick tip David Allen (author of Getting Things Done) gave me a few years ago is to block the whole of your first day back to catch up. If it's a short trip, you can get away with half a day, but a whole day is always better.  Whatever work you do, there will always be tasks that are core to what you do. Those tasks need to be embedded into your days and weeks as must-do tasks. Must-do tasks are non-negotiable. Because they are non-negotiable, you allow no one—not your boss or customers—to steal that time from you.  Offer alternative times and days, but never negotiate on your core work times.  That's the only strategy that's ever worked and will be the only one that will work in the future.  Whatever industry you look at, the top performers know this and stick to it. It's not just industries either. Top athletes, elite soldiers, and entertainers remain at the top of their field by being consistent with the basics—their core work.  So, spend a little time establishing your core work—the micro-level tasks you need to perform to stay on top of your work. Then, protect time for doing that work. Fix it in your calendar, and never ever let anyone steal that time away from you.  I hope that helps, George. Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive New Year.   

This week, I've delved into my archive to bring you an episode first published on the 1st of January this year. This will help you prepare yourself for an outstanding 2025.    ----more----   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The CP Learning Centre Membership Programme The Working With… Weekly Newsletter The FREE Beginners Guide To Building Your Own COD System Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 305 Welcome to episode 305 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host for this show. So, 2024 is here. A New Year with a lot of potential new opportunities and plans. The challenge you will face (because we all face this challenge) is executing on all the ideas and plans you have for this year without a loss of enthusiasm or energy.  And that will happen because no matter how well you have planned the year, things will not work out as you imagine. Some things will go exactly how you expect them to, but most will not. And that's the same for everyone. If you deliver all your plans and projects exactly as conceived, you are not ambitious enough to move forward. You're making things too easy.  So how do you avoid the loss of enthusiasm and energy that you will need to see you through the year? Well, that's the topic of this week's question, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for the question. This week's question comes from Carrie. Carrie asks, hi Carl, every year I get excited about all the things I want to do, and when it gets to February or March, I lose all my enthusiasm because I haven't done anything I had planned to do. Do you have any advice on avoiding this?  Hi Carrie, thank you for your question and Happy New Year to you too. One thing I can tell you straight up is you are not alone. It turns out 92% of those who set New Year goals or resolutions have given up by 16th February. Only 8% manage to achieve some of their goals.  This means we need to learn what those eight percent do that is different from the 92%.  The first thing I discovered about the 8% is they have no more than three goals for the year. And those three are very specific. For example, they may have a financial, a physical and perhaps a career goal. And that's it. If we use these as an example, the financial goal is possibly the easiest. Imagine your financial goal is to save $5,000 this year. You can break that down into twelve months and send $417.00 per month to your savings account. On the 31st of December, you will have a little over $5,000 in it.  On a task level, this is a 30-second task once a month where you send the $417.00 to your account.  Now, if your finances are tight, you may have to review what you are spending money on and make some changes to what you spend, but the action to take is just thirty seconds per month.  Physical goals can be a little more complex. Not everyone does exercise to lose weight. Some just want to improve their overall health; others would like to challenge themselves physically by running a marathon or climbing a big mountain. However, whatever the purpose or “what” the goal is, physical goals mean you need to find time for regular exercise. The essence of the goal is to find the time and do the exercise, and that will almost certainly achieve your goal.  The difficulty with these types of goals is the starting point. If you have not exercised for a number of years and are not in great shape, it is going to be hard. This is like pulling a large truck. The hardest part of pulling a truck is the start. When the rope you are attached to takes the strain to get the truck moving, it takes an inordinate amount of strength. However, once the truck begins to move, it gets easier and easier. The difficulty then becomes stopping the truck.  Starting an exercise programme is the same. It's incredibly hard to begin with. The first session's never that bad until you wake up the following morning. When you step out of bed, your muscles scream out in pain, and you'll wonder how on earth you will be able to repeat your exercise again today.  The thing is, getting fit and staying fit is the same. It's all about turning up and doing the exercise. But it doesn't have to be the same exercise each day. Jog one day, walk the next. Then perhaps go for a swim or do some light weights in the gym on other days. Fitness is all about movement, so find time each day for movement.  What I've discovered about fitness is that it's all about routine. It needs to be built into your day, and the time of day you do it needs to work for you. Once it becomes a routine and you get through the first fourteen days, it becomes much easier, and there's rarely any muscle soreness (and when you do get sore, you feel a sense of achievement because you know you had a good session the day before). What about a career goal? This is likely to be the most complex of goals. There are likely to be multiple different parts to it. Skills acquisition, experience and time are all involved. So, finding out what skills you need to move up the corporate ladder would be one task. Arranging a meeting with your boss or HR to discuss your goal would be a first step.  Once you know what you need to do, you can then formulate a plan to make it happen. If you need to go back to school, then you can research how best to do that. Then you will need to find the time to study. Again, like exercise, this needs to be scheduled. You won't achieve educational goals by winging it. You need to set aside dedicated time for studying.  A number of my coaching clients have dedicated days for learning. Two of my clients use the weekends for studying and taking courses or having coaching sessions. Saturday mornings seem to be the most common time for this, but it will depend on your own schedule.  Just one piece of advice here, avoid Sunday nights. These are not the best times for studying. You'll be distracted by what you have to do next week and likely be tired from all your social activities. The thought of sitting down to study after an eventful weekend would be off-putting for most.  Ultimately, if you want to successfully achieve your goals in 2024, then you will need to establish some habits and routines. This does not need to be overwhelming. You can do as much or as little as you feel capable of. For example, if you plan to read twenty-five books in 2024, that's one book every two weeks. If you spent an average of forty-five minutes reading each day, you would easily accomplish that goal. This means the only question you need to answer is, when? When will you do your reading?  Perhaps you could include this as part of your morning routine, or instead of watching TV late at night, you read a book.  I will confess that in the last six months, I have spent far too much time watching TV in the evenings. In 2024, instead of watching TV, I intend to read. I have already prepared a comfortable corner to read. It's a place Louis, my little dog, likes to cuddle up to me in the evenings, and I'm already looking forward to it.  I will still watch TV. However, I have created a list of TV shows and YouTube videos to watch, and I have allocated Saturday evenings to TV watching. If I find I have the urge to watch something, I will add it to the list, and then on Saturday, I can open the list and choose from that list.  What about daily and weekly planning? This is something that will bring you so many rewards. Having a plan for the week is a no-brainer for me. I know what happens when I don't have a plan. The week goes south very quickly and then I am in overwhelm territory just trying to keep up with silly little things.  When I have a plan for the week, I am more focused. The right things get done, and I have the mental space to deal with the unknowns and urgencies of others without losing focus.  This is something I would recommend to everyone. Make it a habit in 2024 to do both the weekly and daily planning sessions. This one habit will do so much for you when it comes to achieving your goals in 2024.  One thing I must stress, though, is to keep your list of goals as short as you can. Two or three goals is about the right number. Any more than that, and you will be overwhelmed and unable to stay focused on what needs to be done.  Remember, we are all a work in progress. You do not have to change everything in twelve months. Pick the two or three things that are most on your mind right now.  I neglected my fitness in 2023, and regaining my fitness is my number one goal in 2024. Today, I will be heading out for a run, no matter what the weather is. It's the first day of the year, and it's not about how well or far I run; it's about re-establishing the habit of exercising each day. Get the 1st of January in the bag, and tomorrow I can do a few push-ups or go for a long walk.  My goal in January is to do some form of exercise every day. I'm not worried about February right now. If I get through January having done exercise on 25 or more days, that's a result I will accept. It's not perfect, but it's 25 days of exercise—that's something to celebrate! I can then decide what I will do in February to maintain my momentum.  And that's what setting and achieving goals is all about. You are not going to be perfect every day or week. But that does not mean you failed. It just means you had a bad day. You can pick it back up the next day or week. It's not what you achieve in one day; it's what you have accomplished over 365 days. (Or 366 days this year)  So there you go, Carrie. Keep your list of goals short, and look for habits and routines you can build so that the action you need to take becomes automatic. And remember, just because you had a bad day or week doesn't mean you failed. You can pick yourself up at any time and get moving again.  Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive 2024.  

This week, why it's important to know what kind of person you are.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 350 Hello, and welcome to episode 350 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. WOW! 350 episodes. I never thought this podcast would still be going strong after six years. Thank you to all of you for following me and this podcast and to everyone who has sent in questions. Please keep them coming in—they are the fuel of this podcast.  So, back to this episode.  One way to destroy your efforts to become better organised and more productive is to fight against yourself. This can manifest itself when you are a deadline-driven person trying to be a carefully planned out person.  Let me give you an example: if you struggle to find the motivation to begin a project because the deadline is six months away, yet you pressure yourself to start now. You'll likely find yourself losing interest and giving up after a few weeks.  Then you beat yourself up.  But, perhaps you're not doing anything wrong; you're just trying to do something you are not wired to do.  That's why it's important to know what kind of person you are and to figure and what works and what doesn't. Okay, before we go further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Matthew. Matthew asks, Hi Carl, What do you recommend to someone who finds it difficult to get motivated unless there the deadline is right on top of them? Ho Matthew. Thank you for your question.  I've witnessed something like this very close to home.  My wife struggles to start work on a project or a task until the deadline is right in front of her. She then pulls out all the stops pulling all nighters if necessary. Yet, she always meets her deadlines.  In the twenty + years I've known her, I cannot recall a time she missed a deadline. Ever.  My mother, on the other-hand is the complete opposite. She will begin getting her holiday items together sever months before she travels. I know, when we travel to visit my family over the Christmas holidays, he will be wanting to plan her next trip to Korea with me. Six months before she's likely to travel. She even gets her suitcase ready. It would be fruitless to encourage my wife to be more like my mother or vice versa.  My mother hates stress—it gives her a headache. My wife doesn't see the point in over preparing.  Yet, we shouldn't be looking at the methods, instead look at the results. Neither my wife nor my mother miss deadlines. They have different approaches, but still achieve the same results.  Some of my coaching clients wake up very early 4:30 - 5:30 am and like to plan their day before they finish their morning routines end. Others find it more beneficial to plan the day the evening before. Yet, as long as you begin your day with a clear idea of what needs to be accomplished that day, does it really matter when you do your daily planning?  I recommend if you are an early bird, do your planning in the morning. If you are more of a night owl, do it the evening before. What matters is you plan the day. The benefits of having a clear idea of what you want to get accomplished that day, far outweighs the timing of your planning.  I have clients who see Ali Abdaal's productivity recommendations and wonder how he gets any work done with so many tools being used to organise something as simple as what to do and when. Yet, I have other clients who love using the tools Ali recommends. There's no right or wrong way to do this as long as you are getting the results you want.  In your case, Matthew, the productivity tool that you should master is your calendar. If you are motivated by deadlines, you will need to be very clear about when you deadlines are. Having your deadlines on your calendar in the all-day section and in a colour you cannot fail to see will ensure you know when your deadlines are. All my project deadlines are in my calendar in red. These are hard deadlines and when I am planning my week, all I need to do is look ahead two or three weeks to see what's coming up.  You may also find it helpful to have a Master Projects list in your notes app so when you are planning the week you have a central place where all the information you need is. On your Master Projects list you can have the deadlines, and what needs to happen next. That way you can judge how much work is still required to meet your deadline.  That's something I've learned from my wife. While on the surface she looks a disorganised mess, underneath that disguise is someone who's looking at the calendar on her phone every evening to see what's coming up over the next few days.  Last Monday, while we were sitting on the sofa, my wife reminded me that Louis had a grooming appointment on Thursday and she wanted to check I was sill okay to take him.  And there I was thinking she was scrolling social media, yet, she was looking at her calendar for the week to see if she needed to to do something.  Did she need to know about that last week? No.  I did, though. My system's different from hers. Yet both our systems produced the same result. Louis arrived for his grooming appointment on time.  However despite having very different methods for getting our work done, there are some principles that will never change. Writing your commitments down somewhere you trust is critical.  While my wife does not use any kind of task manager, she does use, and trusts, her calendar. And I've seen this with many other people who don't use a task manager—they still use something they trust.  A former boss of mine, would have his secretary print out his Outlook calendar for the week each Monday morning. He would then fold that calendar up into his pocket diary.  Throughout the week, he would add to-dos and appointments to that printed calendar as required and on Friday afternoon update his Outlook calendar so the up-to-date version would be ready for him the following Monday morning.  Again, he never forgot anything as far as I could tell. It was an unorthodox system, but it worked.  This is why it can be dangerous to copy other people's systems. They are not you.  Earlier, I published my latest Todoist setup on YouTube. I do this twice a year, and I suspect I do it more for me than for anyone else. I have been doing this since around 2019, so now I have five years of set-ups I can refer back to and see my evolution. The biggest change came in May 2020 when I launched the Time Sector System. That was a result of struggling to make Getting Things Done work for me in the digital age. I remember walking to the gym one day and being hit be a sudden realisation that really the only thing that mattered was “when” I would do a task, not what I needed to do.  It doesn't matter how much you have to do if you don't have time to do it. What matters is what you do when you do have time.  This realisation solved so many struggles for me. It caused me to limit the number of meetings I was available for each week, and if I could not restrict my meetings, then I had to restrict the number of tasks I was trying to do.  Perhaps I am more aware of the limits time imposes on us than others, or others knew all this before I became aware of it. Either way, it helped me to begin working to my strengths rather than fighting against them.  This also applies to when you are at your most focused. Most people will find they are at their most focused in the mornings but not everyone is.  Some people will find they are at their best in the evenings. This is one reason why flexible working times work for some and not for others.  If you are more a night owl, working for a company that allows you to work to your own schedule will help you thrive. Working for a company that keeps strict 9 till 5 hours will create all sorts of difficulties for you. Doist, the parent company of Todoist, works flexible hours. Because they are a 100% remote company, their team is spread throughout the world. They have people on the west coast of America, and people here in Korea. That's a seventeen hour time difference. Insisting everyone worked a 9 till 5 day would not work.  Doist has an unenviable staff turnover level. I believe over the last ten years only four or five people have left the company. That's incredible for a company that employs over one hundred people.  I've discovered more on this with my pen and paper experiment this year—well, it began as an experiment. It's hard to call it an experiment now.  Returning to pen and paper has helped me to rediscover the art of thinking and the importance of slowing down from time to time.  Digital tools are great, they make storing and finding documents easy. They all help manage quick notes and ideas. Paper, though is different, there's no batteries and if you grab an A4 pad of paper, and a Bic ball pen, and disappear to a cafe, you could spend all day there and never have to worry about recharging your device. That bit ball pen will draw a 3 kilometre (about 2 miles) line before it runs out. And of course, there's no notifications or beeps and buzzes.  Yet, pen and paper doesn't work for everyone. There's a lot of people who do love them, there's also a lot of people who hate them. And that's fine.  So, Matthew, look at how you prefer to work. If you need deadlines to motivate you, the only thing that matters is you meet your deadlines. If that causes you to have to work later than you want to, perhaps you could create a false deadline. You could say this piece of work must be finished tomorrow by 5PM so I can hand it in the next day.  False deadlines are great. I generally have most of my projects finish at the end of the month, so my “fake” end of the month is the 25th. This gives me around a week before the real deadline hits and ensures I am not scrambling to finish things late into the night.  I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Matthew. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, the question is on how to reduce the time it takes to complete a solid weekly planning session.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 349 Hello, and welcome to episode 349 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One issue that frequently comes up in my YouTube video comments and email messages is the subject of weekly planning and it taking too long. It's taken me a while to see how this might be happening, but a recent coaching call pointed me in the right direction.  The issue is the difference between what David Allen calls the Weekly Review and planning a week.  The Getting Things Done Weekly Review is, about looking backwards. You spend a lot of time looking at what you have done on individual projects.  Given that in GTD, anything requiring two or more steps is a project and that by following that definition, you are going to have between, and I quote from the Getting Things Done book, thirty and hundred and fifty projects at any one time, is it any wonder weekly reviews take so long.  This is why I do not call my planning session a weekly review. Instead, I am planning the week, not reviewing my work. The word “review”, at least to me, suggests looking at something that happened in the past.  Yet, planning is about looking ahead. What's happened has happened. What matters is what you do in the following seven days, and that will be contingent on appointments and commitments you have in those seven days. So, without further ado, let me turn you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Greg. Greg asks, hi Carl, I'm struggling with doing my weekly plan. I've taken your advice to do it on a Saturday morning, but it still takes me almost two hours. Are there any secrets to getting it down to less than an hour? Hi Greg, thank you for your question. The question I would start with is, “Are you planning the week or looking back at the week just gone? If you are following the Time Sector System, one routine task I recommend is to give yourself ten minutes before you close out the day to process your task manager's inbox.  Processing your inbox is about asking three questions: What is it? What do I need to do? When will I do it? The second question, What do I need to do? May give you the answer, nothing. In that case, you can delete the task altogether.  When you do a task, will depend on its urgency. It may be something that doesn't need to be done this week, in which case you can move it directly to your next week, this month or next month folder.  If it does need to be done this week, when will you do it this week? You then add the date.  Doing this routine task everyday, means when you sit down to do your weekly planning on Saturday morning, you only need look at your next week and this month folders and move anything to your This Week folder if you must or want to do it in the next seven days.  In my experience, that only takes ten minutes.  Now what about all those projects?  Well, if you are still trying to manage you projects in a task manager, good luck. Weekly planning is going to take a long time. You will have to go through each project and make sure nothing has been missed. That's going to take a long time if you have between thirty and 150 projects.  However, if you manage your projects in your notes app, then these won't need reviewing. Every time you touch a project you update the project note. You can, if you wish, move the next task to your task manager, although if you create tasks that tell you to work on a given project, you should not need to do that.  I don't define a project in the same way as David Allen does. A project for me is something that will take at least three months to complete and will have a lot of tasks to complete.  In the Getting Things Done world. My upcoming trip to Europe is a project. Yet, for me, it's a single task. Book flights. Once that task has been done, I will know exactly what needs to happen next. Do I need to book a hotel? This year, no, but I will need to book bus tickets once I arrive in Dublin. So the next action is to book the bus tickets. The thing is, I didn't know if I needed to book a hotel or a bus ticket because that depended on what time we arrived at Dublin airport. And I didn't know that until I had booked the flights.  I do have a note in my notes app called “Ireland 2024” and in there, I have my packing list and a list of things I want to purchase while there. I also save my flight tickets and anything else I may need.  Another way to look at it is if you were a HR manager, and a colleague asked you to hire a new team member, that would not necessarily be a project. As a HR manager, hiring people is a part of what you do. It's probable you will be hiring many different team members, and managing the process of hiring is just a part of your core work.  Yet if you were tasked to overhaul the payroll system or to organise the seamless move of all employees to a new location, given that you wouldn't ordinarily do that kind of work, they would be projects.  When would you review those projects? Perhaps when you know you have a management meeting coming up, or you have a one to one with your boss.  But, reviewing is not planning. Reviewing is a task by itself.  Planning is about deciding what you will do. A weekly plan is about setting yourself objectives for the week. Daily planning is setting objectives for the day.  Last night, as I planned today, I made writing this script an objective. Once I knew that I would be writing this script, I checked my calendar for my committed events for today, and mentally decided when I would write it.  It did not mean I had to go through all my previous scripts or review the list of questions I keep. That was a task I set on for Saturday afternoon—decide what topics I will create content around next week.  When I was writing Your Time, Your Way, it was obvious what needed to be done each week—set aside one or two hours a day to write the book. How much reviewing was needed for that? Zilch, nada, zero. To complete that project required me to sit down and write the book five days a week.  Every two weeks I had a meeting with my publisher. These were usually Friday evenings for me. This meant I had a task on Friday to review what I had written over the previous two weeks and to add any questions I had for the publisher.  Often my publisher would ask me to do something. Perhaps he wanted me to send him a profile picture, approve the cover designs, or update the chapter list. During the meeting I added those tasks to the meeting note and afterwards, transferred the tasks to my task list.  This meant, when I did my weekly planning, I did not need to go and review the whole project. What needed to be done was already in my Next Week list. All I needed to do was to decide when I would get the information requested together and send it.  The reason planning the week takes so long is likely because you are not planning, you're reviewing and cleaning up. Cleaning up your task list, your notes or anything else is not planning. It's cleaning up. That's a completely different category of task.  If you're spending five or ten minutes at the end of the day clearing your task manager's inbox, deciding what something is, what you need to do, and when you will do it, you won't have very much cleaning up to do at the end of the week.  When the special forces plan a mission, they start with the objective—take that hill—they then set about working out how they will get to the top of the hill. They don't waste time looking at what they did or didn't do this week or how they got to where they are.  They focus their attention on getting from where they are now to where they need to be.  And that's the approach you want to take when planning your week. You have seven days to accomplish a set number of objectives. The question is what do you need to do to get there?  And just like the special forces, your plan will break—it always does. It's at that point you pause, look at where you are, and figure out what needs to happen for you to reach your target.  And for us, that's what we do when we do the daily planning.  I should have written half of that report by now, but I haven't started yet. What do I need to do in the remaining 48 hours to complete the report by the deadline. Perhaps I need to cancel two meetings tomorrow, so I can use that time to write and get myself back on track?  It's not going through the project again, and finding excuses for not accomplishing your task. You're behind, what do you need to do to get back on track? That's planning.  If you are putting deadlines on your calendar in the all-day section, when you are planning the week, you can quickly see what deadlines you have coming up over the next two or three weeks and that can guide you towards what you should be working on.  If you use task start and due dates in your task manager, then, of course your weekly planning is going to take you longer. You will need to review all your tasks to ensure you haven't missed anything. Good luck with that approach.  So, when do you review you projects? Personally, I review my projects when I work on them. I have a master projects list table on my notes app that shows me all my projects, their deadlines and what needs to happen next.  Every time I finish working on a project, I update that table with what I did and what I need to do next.  Going back to writing Your Time, Your Way, there was very little updating required. I had five two-hour writing blocks in my calendar each week for writing the book. The next action was easy—continue writing my book.  Now, if a project becomes a complete mess and you don't know where you are or what needs to happen next, the task is to review the project. That will then help you to get it back on track. But that's not part of the weekly planning. That's just a task you need to do, and you may add it as a task to do next week.  Another question, I get asked is what about follow-ups and waiting for's? Again, that's not part of your weekly planning. That's a separate task. Personally, I check my follow-ups folders once a week or when I am working on a project and I can see I am waiting for something. It's certainly not part of my weekly planning.  So, if when you sit down to set out your weekly plan, you are also reviewing all your tasks and projects, yes, it's going to take you a long time. But you are not planning. You're reviewing.  If you've read Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People or any time management book prior to 2001, none of them had you reviewing “open loops” and “projects”. That's regressive and means you waste a lot of time focused on the past.  These books—books that helped millions of people—focused planning on what you will do next week, this month, quarter or year. They were forward thinking. That's what planning the day and week is all about.  What will you accomplish next week? What needs to be done? And when will you do it? That's it.  And if you are consistent with this, you will find weekly planning will take you between thirty and forty minutes.  I hope that helps, Greg. Thank you for your question.  And thank you to too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week, I'm going to show you how to design your “perfect” day. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 348 Hello, and welcome to episode 348 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. What would a perfect day look like for you? I'm not talking about drinking sangria in a park, feeding animals in the zoo, and later, a movie.  I'm talking about how a typical day would go.  What time would you like to wake up? What would you enjoy doing for the first hour of your day? What would you like to do in the evenings? And what time would you like to go to bed? These questions are all part of what I call designing your perfect week. It's an exercise that helps you to bring some structure into your day. Once implemented, this reduces the number of decisions you need to make each day and makes planning less demanding and a lot faster.  Not taking control of your calendar means others will take control of it. If not your boss or customers, it'll be your family and friends. This leaves you being pushed and pulled all over the place.  When you wake up in the morning, you have no idea what will happen or where you will end up. More dangerously, you will have no idea whether you can get your work done, and inevitably, you'll find yourself with huge backlogs and a lot of accumulated stress.  Not a great place to be if you want to be better organised and more productive.  So, let me show you how you can regain control of your calendar and start putting what you want first.  This means it's time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Megan. Megan asks, hi Carl, I've tried designing a “perfect” week but found I don't have enough time to do everything I need to do. Do you have any tips to fit everything in?  Hi Megan, thank you for your question.  That you have discovered you don't have enough time for everything you want to do is part of why I recommend people do the Perfect Week calendar exercise. The purpose is to help you see what you do and don't have time for.  But first, how do you set up the Perfect Week calendar? First, open up your calendar—it doesn't matter whether it's a Google, Outlook or Apple Calendar. What you are going to do is create a new calendar and call it “Perfect Week”. I recommend you do this on a larger screen. It is possible to do it on a phone, but you won't see the bigger picture of the week. A laptop or tablet works better when you do this. Now, begin with your personal life. How much sleep do you want? What time will you go to bed? Block those times in first. For instance, if, in your perfect world, you go to bed at 11:00 pm and want seven hours of sleep, then you would block 11:00 pm to 6:30 am. (Allow yourself thirty minutes to fall asleep). Now, how long do you want for your morning routine? Perhaps you want the first hour of your day dedicated to you. To exercise, read, plan, meditate and/or write a journal. All you need to do in your perfect week calendar is block the time you want for these activities on your calendar. Call it your Morning routine time. (The details of what you do in that time can be added as a checklist in your notes later.) Next look at the evening. What would you like to do?  Be careful here; you may wish to block time out for family and friends. When you do this, you are involving other people, and they will have a different agenda to you.  You could, for instance, protect 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm for family time, but be flexible. Your teenage daughter will unlikely want to spend much time with you. Your partner, on the other hand, may wish you to sit with them and talk or watch their favourite TV show.  Consider “family time” as being flexible. If no one wants to spend time with you, be available. Perhaps you could read in the same room as your family or do some chores around the house.  Next, what would you like to do later in the evening before you go to bed? Put that on your calendar. Many of my clients enjoy playing a musical instrument, others use that time for self-study and some go out for an evening walk. Whatever you want to do, put it on your calendar.  Now, your work.  A couple of questions you can ask here are: how much time do you need to do focused work? Work that if you are consistent with will prevent backlogs and ensure you meet your deadlines.  And how much time will you allow per week for meetings?  Limiting your available meeting time is a great way to control time.  Imagine you work a forty-hour week and you want three hours a day for focused work; that would leave you with twenty-five hours each week for everything else.  If you were to limit the time you were available for meetings to fifteen hours a week, that would leave you with ten hours for all the unexpected demands that inevitably pop up. Would that be sufficient time? Play around with these numbers and see if you can find a happy balance.  With the meeting limit once you have filled the limit for that week, you only offer meeting times for the following week.  As this is your perfect week, you can fix times when you are available and when you are not.  Once you have completed your perfect week, does that look like a week you would be happy living? One adjustment I made to mine was on a Monday. My calls begin early—well, early for me—meaning I need to wake up at 6:15. That's much earlier than usual. I discovered I was not able to work effectively after around 11:00 am. So, I added a ninety-minute nap window from 11:00 am. That worked perfectly for me.  Now, once you have created your perfect week, turn on your other calendars. Where do things align? You will probably find some activities already aligned, but some will be wildly out Your mission now—should you choose to accept it—is to align your real calendar with your perfect week one.  This mission will not happen instantly; aligning things may take several months, but it gives you a purpose and goal.  What happens if, after doing this exercise, you discover there are not enough hours in the week to do everything you want to do?  Most people find this after completing this exercise.  It is worth remembering you do not have to do everything all at once. You could take a course on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and go to your Pilates class on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings. Perhaps you could do your weekly planning on a Saturday morning instead of a Sunday evening. This is about completing a puzzle. How do you fit everything into your 168 hours a week?  You can also consider making things seasonal. In the winter months, you do one activity, and in the summer, you do another type of activity. After all, the weather is generally nicer in the summer, and the days are longer.  You may even wish to use the Spring as the cleaning-up season. I do.  Designing the perfect week calendar is not about locking you into a strict structure every week. Its purpose is to help you become realistic about what you can and cannot do each day. It's from here that you can design the kind of life you want to live. Over the five or six years since I first did the Perfect Week exercise, I have modified it many times. For example, when I did it the first time, I had this rather ambitious idea: I would go to bed at 11:00 pm and wake up at 6:00.  That didn't last very long. Many of my coaching calls happen late at night, and I often don't finish until after midnight. Now, I go to bed at 1:30 am and wake up at 8:30 am (except for Mondays). That has worked for me for over a year now.  I've also learned that while I've always believed that I am a night owl, I am more focused and creative in the mornings. This led to me protecting 9:30 to 11:30 am five days a week for my focused work.  One thing you don't want to do, Megan, is to try and squeeze everything in. That will leave you feeling exhausted. Always remember you are a living, breathing human being, not a machine.  You need breaks, you do need to stop and enjoy nature and the environment you live in. It gives your mind a rest, and it elevates your creativity and fulfilment by giving you something different to look at other than a screen.  While I am very structured, I like it that way—I still keep my afternoons free for activities I want to do in the moment. Taking my dog, Louis for his walk, doing the grocery shopping and reading, for example. Whatever needs my attention, the afternoons are when I can do it. Learning those things was a result of doing the Perfect Week exercise.  David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, often says, “You can do anything, but you cannot do everything”, and I've found that's true. That means the question becomes, what will you do? I would also say that the end of the year is a perfect time to do this exercise. The start of a new year gives you a motivation to try things and develop the kind of week you want to live.  Thank you, Megan, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week. 

This week, why you should not be copying other people's systems.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 347 Hello, and welcome to episode 347 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. There is a lot of advice on managing your to-dos, organising your notes and controlling your calendar. And it can be tempting to copy whatever you have seen, believing if it worked for someone else, it must work for you.  Well, not so fast.  One thing I've learned from coaching hundreds of people is that no individual is the same. We think differently, have different jobs, and have different family lives and interests.  One example is Tiago Forte's PARA method. It's a great way to organise your notes, and many people swear by it. However, it never worked for me. I'm a goal-orientated person. Goals motivate me. I also define Areas of Focus differently from how Tiago defines an area.  This is why I settled on GAPRA (Goals, Areas of Focus, Projects, Resources and Archive.) This does not mean that PARA does not work. It works, for some people. Similarly, I have coaching clients who find GAPRA works better. It all depends on how you think, like to organise things and do your work.  So, what can you do with so much conflicting advice? How can you find the methods for you? Well, before I get to that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Frank. Frank asks, hi Carl. I've been a life-long follower of productivity systems and have struggled to find a system that works for me. How would you advise someone to find a way that works for them? Hi Frank, thank you for your question.  Around 20 years ago, I began my career as an English teacher in Korea.  I had come from working a typical 9 til 5 office job and suddenly I was on the other side of the world, working from 6:30 am to 12:00 pm and 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm. It was tough.  I'm not a natural morning person—never have been—so waking up at 5:00 am was a shock to my system.  It wasn't long before I began taking naps. I would get home at 12:30, and go straight back to bed for two hours.  For the next ten years, that's what I continued to do.  I had learned about the power of taking naps from none other than Winston Churchill. He believed that if you took a solid 90 minute nap every afternoon you would be able to get at least a day and half's worth of work done in a day.  He wasn't wrong. By taking an afternoon nap I found I was full of energy when teaching in the evening and was able to spend an hour preparing for my next day's classes when I got home in the evening.  Yet, I knew Churchill took his naps between 3:30 pm and 5:00 pm. That didn't work for me. So I adapted it to work better for me.  Likewise, back in 2016 or so, I read Robin Sharma's brilliant 5 AM Club book. I was sold. I thought, okay, let's give this a try.  For those of you not familiar with the 5 AM Club, this is where you wake up at 5:00 AM and do twenty minutes of exercise, then 20 minutes planning and finally 20 minutes of learning. It's solid way to begin your day.  Yet, I had a problem. I've never been comfortable exercising in the morning. So, I adapted it. I did twenty minutes journal writing, then ten minutes planning the day and finally studied Korean for thirty minutes.  And it worked. I was consistent for around eighteen months and I loved it.  But then I hit a problem. My coaching business began taking off and I was doing coaching calls late at night—sometimes not finishing until midnight. This meant I was trying to survive on four or five hours of sleep. Not a good thing if you want to be productive. It then occurred to me, the “secret” to the 5 am club is not waking up at 5 am. It's what you do immediately on waking up that matters.  Today, I wake up around 8:00 am, and start my day with a solid set of morning routines that include journal writing, some stretches and learning my email inbox. It works perfect for me. It sets me up for mostly productive days.  And that's the key point. Whatever you learn about productivity, time management and living life doesn't have to be followed exactly as described. We all live different lives and it can be modified to better work for you.  However, there are a few caveats here. The first is you will not be able to break basic principles.  For instance, if you want a solid way to manage your life, you will need to collect stuff into a trusted place and not rely on your head to remember things. You will then need to spend a little time organising what you collected and finally, you need to do the work.  Yet, how you collect things and where you collect them is entirely up to you. You could use a pencil and notebook, or a sophisticated task management system. Both work.  Another principle I see people trying to break is scheduling far more than the number of hours in the day will allow.  You get 24 hours a day. That's not going to change. The only variable you have is what you do in the time you have.  This is not as simple as you may think. Sure, it's easy to schedule seven hours of sleep, an hour for a gym session, four hours for deep work, another three hours for spending with your family and an hour for dealing with your communications and further hour for learning.  All that looks great on a calendar. But what if you didn't sleep well, you woke up with the start of a heavy cold and had a fight with your teenage daughter?  Yep, that's real life hitting you in the face.  Now, hopefully that's not going to happen to you every day, but events will always get in the way of your perfectly planned day.  It's rare to see any kind of time management or productivity system building in buffer time. Yet, buffer time—time you keep free for the unexpected—is critical if you are to avoid becoming overwhelmed.  One way you can approach the day is to treat it as a puzzle: Here are the twenty-four hours you have. That's your constraint. Here's a list of things you need to do or attend in those twenty-fours hours, now how are you going to fit everything in?  Now, it could be that I am weird, but I love solving this puzzle every day. I love it so much I do it the day before.  First, I look at my confirmed appointments—these are the fixed stakes in the ground. They help to give my day a little structure. Then, I look at my tasks for that day. Where can I fit these in?  It's important to know your own natural biorhythms here. When are most likely to be focused? Perhaps you find focusing on deep work in the morning easier than trying to do in the afternoon. If that's the case, then try to protect two hours in the morning for dedicated focused work.  I should say at this point, every productive person I've come across does this. They protect time each day for their most important work. Authors, CEOs, top salespeople, the most successful lawyers and Olympic athletes.  The difference is no matter where they are in the command chain, they are ruthless about protecting time each day for their critical work.  Unproductive, stressed out and exhausted people don't do this. They don't protect time. Instead, they have a false belief that they have to be available all the time for their customers and bosses. Well, good luck with that approach. It doesn't work, never has, and never will.  I remember a sales training session I was on, and the trainer was a former top salesperson—I believe he was formerly the number one car salesperson in the country.  He told us, we could call him at any time if we needed help. But, not before 11 am. He would not answer his phone before 11 am.  When asked why, he explained he needed those two hours in the morning to do his follow ups, and contact his customers who were due to change their car in the next three months and make sure he had appointments scheduled for the rest of the day.  I suspect this was why he was the number one salesperson. He understood how to solve the daily puzzle.  Another area that can disrupt you overall productivity is the tools you use.  There are a lot of fantastic time management and productivity tools available to us today. Many promise the impossible, but ultimately, it will always come down to how you solve the daily puzzle. In that respect, no tool will help you beyond a calendar and a list of tasks that need to be done.  I get questions every day from people asking me if it's possible to do this or that thing. What they are really asking me is “how do I complicate things?”  Let's be clear, all you need to know each day is what appointments you have and when and what your critical must do tasks for the day are.  Once you know this and you know you have sufficient time to complete everything, you're good to go.  The more organising you do, the more lists you create and the more tools you use, the less time you have to get on and do the work.  I mentioned Tiago Forte's PARA method earlier, and I remember the popularity of this when Tiago launched his book on the subject. There was a frenzy and YouTube lit u with people doing videos on how to set up this notes app or that one with the PARA method.  I could see immediately why it was so popular. It was another way to reorganise things. It gave people something to play with. In other words it gave people an excuse not to do their work.  PARA is great, but it's not going to make you more productive or better at managing time. I use Evernote and it's a complete mess. When I need something, I use Evernote's powerful search.  Whether I'm looking for a client note, a reference to an idea I had several years ago or my book notes from a book I've read on Kindle, all I need do is type a keyword, a date range or person's name and in less than a second I have the information in front of me.  I could spend hours each week keeping my notes up to date, summarised and organised, or I can rely on search and give me those hours to get my work done. I know what I choose.  Over the last three or four months, Todoist has introduced a calendar and start and due dates. I use neither. They don't help me get my work done and both of those features just add more complexity to what should be a simple list.  You don't need to use all the features an app has. Use the ones that help you to focus on your work and leave alone the ones that add more organising work.  I hope that has helped, Frank. Thank you for your question.  And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week. 

This week, I have a special episode for you.  A second interview with Dr Kourosh Dini.  In this episode, we talk about rationalisation and how to change our approach to many of the false beliefs that come from it. We also discussed pens and paper and a little more about managing ADHD.   Here's how you can learn more about Dr Dini's work. Newsletter: https://wavesoffocus.com/Your-First-Step-to-Breaking-Free-from-Force-Based%20Work/ Waves of Focus https://wavesoffocus.com/ on SMART goals https://www.kouroshdini.com/lay-off-the-goals-a-bit-would-you/

Is it possible to expand time? Literally, no. But there is a way to find more time if you're willing to use these techniques. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 345 Hello, and welcome to episode 345 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Common phrases you will hear are “I don't have time” or “I wish I had more time”, and yet you already have all the time you need. The problem is not time, the problem is often the amount of things we want to do in the time we have.  Hundreds of thousands of years ago, life was simple. Find food and water, make babies and stay safe. Neglecting either of those three things would result in some serious issues—the biggest of which would be death.  Given that human evolution is slow, we are not best suited to deal with hundreds of emails and messages, requests from bosses, finding child care, commuting to and from work and all the other modern-day accessories we've chosen to add to our lives.  We cannot expand time, yet if we are unwilling to reduce what we want to do, we will feel overwhelmed and that more modern ailment, the fear of missing out, or FOMO.  However, there are a few techniques you can use that will give you enough time for the things you want to do if you are willing to try them. But before I get to how, allow me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Giles. Giles asks, Hi Carl, I've done your “perfect week” exercise and realise that my problem is I want to do too much. There isn't enough time in the day. Do you have any tips on fitting in hobbies and still get enough sleep? Hi Giles, thank you for your question.  The good thing is you've discovered that no matter what you want to do or feel you must do, you will always be limited by the amount of time available.  And, now that you've done the Perfect Week calendar exercise, you can see what you have left after taking care of your work and family obligations.  One of the first realisations about finding time was when I learned of Ian Fleming's writing routine.  Ian Fleming wrote a new book each year from 1952 to his death in 1964. He never missed a year, even in the year he had his first heart attack in 1961.  In the early years, Fleming worked For The Sunday Times as their foreign editor, yet he negotiated a two-month vacation each January and February. During those two months, he would fly off to his Jamaican home, Goldeneye and almost from the first day, would begin writing the next book from 9:30 to 12:30.  After lunch, he would nap, and then the day's socialising would begin.  Around 4 pm, he would go back to his writing desk for an hour to review what he had written that morning, and that would be it.  Four hours a day for six weeks. That produced the first draft of his next book.  For the rest of the year, he worked his regular job in London. Dealt with any rewrites and began marketing the book that was being published that year.  If you were to analyse how Ian Fleming managed his time, he wasn't looking at the day-to-day. He looked at the year as a whole.  He knew he needed six weeks to write a new novel each year, so he made sure those six weeks were blocked out in his diary before the new year began.  That's just six weeks out of fifty-two.  This is similar to blocking time out for your core work. If you know you need ten hours a week to do your core work, hoping you will find the time is not a sustainable strategy. You won't, so it will be more a case of hoping you will find the time.  Those ten hours need to be locked in each week. Ian Fleming would never have written fourteen James Bond novels if he had “hoped” to find the time to do so. He had to find the time and then protect it.  You have 168 hours a week and twenty-four each day. Squeezing everything into those twenty-four hours will be tough—almost impossible. Yet, if you were to schedule for the week, where you have 168 hours, things become possible.  I see many people anxiously trying to find family time every day. It would be nice if you could do that, but you are dealing with other people and your 6 to 9 pm might not be convenient for them.  Instead, you could agree with your family that certain days or evenings are for family time. For instance, my wife and I ensure that Wednesday afternoons and Saturday evenings are protected for family time.  It's lovely because while it is flexible, there's no need for us to be trying to schedule time. It's already protected.  This is all about expanding time. Looking at an individual day is tough; there are a lot of emergencies and unknowns that pop up. However, if you were to establish what you want time for each week (or month), block the time out so you know you have the time to do it, you will always have the flexibility to move things around if things change.  For example, this week, my wife had an exam to do on Wednesday afternoon, so we rescheduled our family day out to Thursday. All I needed to do was to move a few of my other commitments around so I could still get all my work done that week.  You can apply the same principles to your work commitments. If you require ten hours a week to get your core work done—the work you are employed to do, not the work you volunteer to do—you can pre-protect that time on your calendar.  Now, I know many people will object and say they cannot do this because they have to attend meetings.  That's fine. Let me ask you a question. What will do more to get the project completed? Having a meeting about the project or working on the project? If the project objectives have been communicated clearly and roles defined, meetings should not be needed.  One of the best ways to regain time is to become less accessible. Most people's time management problems start by being too accessible. Of course, this will depend on the type of work you do. A salesperson, for instance, should be accessible to their customers. But perhaps not necessarily be as accessible to their admin departments or even their sales manager. If you're producing the results, I can promise you your sales manager will leave you alone.  When I first began teaching time management and productivity, I was available on all social media channels. I was on Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and email. Just to stay on top of all those channels was taking me three hours a day. I don't have three hours a day to manage all those channels.  So, now I push everyone towards email. I have a process for dealing with email. Over the years, I have refined it to a point where I can handle over a hundred emails in less than an hour.  And the final point to make here, Giles, is you don't have to do everything now.  Imagine If there's a period each year when things go a little quiet at work. Perhaps in the summer, it's quieter than at other times of the year. Maybe July and August is a good time for you to do some of the bigger projects. Then, when you enter the busy times of the year, you can work on the smaller projects.  One way you can do this is to use a tool such as Todoist, Asana, or Trello that allows you to create boards. You can then create four columns and spread out the activities you want to do.  For example, in quarter 1, I focus on my biggest projects of the year; I like to kick off the year with a bang. Q2 is focused more on processes and making them more effective and efficient.  Seeing everything I want to accomplish over the year organised in quarters stops me from becoming anxious about all the things I want to do.  This also gives you a plan for the year, which in turn helps you to be more focused.  Again, you can be flexible here. Feel free to move projects around the year so you are working on the right projects at the right time.  Time can be your friend or enemy. If you don't harness it, it will be your enemy. If you take control of it, you will find you do have sufficient time for the things you want to do. Perhaps not this week or next, but when you look at things over a quarter or a year, many things become possible.  I know some of you would like to build an exercise programme into your life. Yet the thought of joining a gym, or yoga class puts you off because you have go to the gym, spend an hour exercising, then shower. After all that it will have eaten up two hours of your time.  You don't have to do all that—certainly not initially. You could do some bodyweight exercises at home or go out for a walk. That won't take up much of your time. I do twenty minutes every day at home.  As your fitness improves, then you may wish to add a few gym sessions. But that's not a requirement of being fit and healthy.  I hope that has helped Giles. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you, too. It just remains for me to wish you a very very productive week.   

Backlogs… A rather bigger part of life that we probably wish wasn't. Did you know that there are three types of backlog, two of which you don't really need to worry too much about? Let me explain. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 344 Hello, and welcome to episode 344 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Let's be honest: somewhere in our carefully organised lives, backlogs will build. It could be email, the ever-increasing list of house repairs, or the daily admin life generates.  With everything going on in our lives, it would be easy to believe that finding the time to stop these backlogs from growing is impossible.  Yet, when you understand the three types of backlogs, you can develop a process that stops the backlog from growing.  The three types are the growing backlog, the stalled backlog and the shrinking one.  You don't need to worry about the shrinking backlog. It's doing what you want it to do—shrinking. That could be getting your receipts together in preparation for doing your taxes. You're gathering and sorting them, so the backlog is shrinking. This generally happens when the tax submission season is almost upon us.  The stalled backlog is also a little less urgent. It's not growing, but you need to watch it carefully because this kind of backlog can start snowballing—house or car repairs, for example, often do this.  The most dangerous backlog is the growing one. This often happens with email and admin tasks and can occur when you try to expand your business too fast without adding resources.  Before we go any further, let me first hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Janice. Janice asks, hi Carl, I'm trying to get my life organised but don't have time because I have so many things to do. My email's a mess, and every weekend, I spend all day cleaning up my home. How do you get on top of things when you are far behind? Hi Janine, thank you for sending in your question.  This is a tough one. It can feel like we are stuck between wanting to get ourselves organised and realising that we have such a big backlog of stuff to do that it would take several months to break even—so to speak. The strategy here is to first determine what kind of backlog you're dealing with. Is it growing, stalled, or shrinking?  If it's shrinking, keep doing what you are already doing. It's shrinking, so it's doing what you want it to do. Don't stop.  The one that needs immediate attention is the growing one.  Imagine that you have over a few thousand emails in your inbox. It's making finding important emails slow and cumbersome, and you want to get it cleared.  The challenge is that more emails appear every day, and that number is not fixed. Some days, you may receive 150+ new emails, while other days, perhaps it's eighty. Either way, until you can achieve a net gain—i.e., processing and clearing more emails than come in—the backlog will continue to grow.  With email, I would first clear out the older emails. There will be a point where you've ignored an email for so long that it would be embarrassing to respond to it now. Where is that point?  For me, that's two weeks. It would be embarrassing for me to respond to any email that's been sitting around for two weeks or more. You may be more tolerant than I am. You may be happy responding to emails older than a month or two. Where is your limit?  Once you know your limit, take any email older than your limit and move it to a new folder in your email program called “Old inbox”. This way, nothing has been lost, and you can go through that list when you have time. That list will no longer be growing. You've put a stop to it.  Now, to prevent the backlog from growing, you will need to clear whatever emails remain in your inbox first, so you start from zero.  Now, here's where you will need to be cautious of FOMO—the fear of missing out. This can paralyse you because you are fearful that you might be deleting something important. Fear not. Always remember with email if you have been sent something there will be a copy of it somewhere.  If for whatever reason you do need something you've deleted, you can reach out to a colleague and get a copy.  One of disadvantages of digitalization is we no longer see things piling up. Back in the day when most of what came across our desks was paper, it was very easy to see backlogs growing. The pile was physical and you could see it. With digital, it's very easy to go into Ostrich mode. (Although ostriches don't really bury their heads in the sand)—this is the out of sight, out of mind theory.  When I was working in a law firm in the late 90s, the majority of communications were through letters. Each day I would get in the region of a hundred to hundred and fifty pieces of mail. That needed processing. The advantage was I could see it all in my physical inbox and my goal was the clear that by the end of the day.  With email, the only way to see it is to open my inbox. That makes it easy to ignore it—which surprise surprise creates backlogs.  Admin is another area where backlogs can grow. Like communications, admin will grow each day if you are not dealing with it consistently.  This can be keeping your receipts organised, maintaining your company's CRM system or, in the medical profession, keeping patient notes up-to-date.  If you are not protecting time for these each day, backlogs will grow. If you've watched the brilliant film, Apollo 13, or read about that incredible story, one thing that will strike you is the astronauts followed checklists and routines to ensure everything was working as it should be.  The cause of the catastrophic explosion on board Apollo 13 was a simple routine task of stirring the oxygen tasks.  Astronauts are highly intelligent people. Yet, they know they cannot rely on remembering to do important routine tasks. They use checklists.  The same goes for pilots, surgeons and the military.  Each have checklists for daily mundane tasks that if not done will result in backlogs or something much worse.  You too can do something similar. Think of a shift at work as having a few key parts to it. Meetings, focused work and then routine work. Your routine work will likely be responding to actionable emails and messages, updating any internal customer management systems and your own admin.  This means estimating how much time you need for each of these activities.  The good thing here is you already have the data. How long, on average does it take you to update your company's internal client relationship management system? How much time do you need to stay on top of your communications? You can only work with averages here, but averages are enough. Some days you will get more than your average, yet other days you will get less.  If you've never measured how long it takes you, give yourself a week to track how much time you need in these areas. Again, you can only work with averages but that will give you an indication of how much time to protect each day for getting your work done.  One area I find people resisting this change is work they perceive as being more important. Meetings for example, seem to have a disproportionate level of importance. Sure, if you have a meeting with an important client, that will likely be more important than staying on top of your admin. But what about all those internal meetings? Are they really important or are you just showing up to show your face?  I cannot imagine a pilot or surgeon skipping their pre-flight or pre-operation checklist because they have an internal meeting. That would be a firing offense. So why do you do it?  We all will be different here, but I find if I spend an hour a day on my communications and thirty minutes on admin, I will, on the whole, end the week with no backlogs—certainly nothing overwhelming. That's just ninety minutes a day. Ninety minutes that prevents stress, anxiety and missing something important.  Now, there will be some days when that will not be possible. Days when I am travelling, for instance, often mean it's difficult to sit down and deal with my communications and admin. However, it's worth working on the principle that one is greater than zero, so spending twenty minutes on communications and perhaps ten minutes on admin helps to keep things from spiralling out of control.  Yet, perhaps the most important thing is to identify where backlogs occur in your life. That would be the first step.  One area I never thought of was household chores. It's easy to ignore that pile of washing in the corner of the bathroom until you find you have no clean underwear. Then it becomes an issue.  Now, on Tuesday's and Saturdays, I do the laundry. It's only fifteen minutes, but ensures I have a supply of clean clothes at all times. Plus, I can do it in between sessions of work. It gets me away from the screen and is far better for my eyes.  And I hate coming into the office and not having a clean coffee mug. Now, before I leave the office for the day, I will ensure the cups and tea pot are washed and ready for the next day. That's less than five minutes a day.  One tip on dealing with the stalled backlog. Because it's stalled you don't have the same sense of urgency. Yet, it still needs to be dealt with. What you may find works is to identify it when you do your weekly planning and allocate a little extra time the following week to deal with it.  For example, if you have a pile of documents that need to be processed from last month, give yourself thirty minutes or so around you lunch time or mid-afternoon to work on it. Depending on how big it is, you will find that within a week or two that backlog has gone.  I hope that has helped Janine.Thank you for your question.  And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

What can you do to simplify your productivity system to keep you focused on what's important each day? That's what we're looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 343 Hello, and welcome to episode 343 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Oh dear, I seem to have opened up a storm with some people with one of my recent YouTube videos on managing a task manager.  That also resulted in a few questions about keeping a system simple.  The question is, what is a time management and productivity system meant to do for you? The answer is easy—to inform you of what needs to be done and ensure you are prepared and in the right place at the right time.  When you strip productivity systems down to their basics, as long as your calendar is accurate and tells you where you need to be and when, and you have a way to see what tasks you should be working on today, you have a system that works. Yet, it can be tempting to want more. A way to organise tasks by your energy levels or to know how many days are left until the deadline is reached, for example. The problem here is that you have no idea what your energy levels will be, and deadlines change… A lot… and for the most part, they are arbitrarily added, which means you know they are not real deadlines—ah, more fiddling. While all these extras are nice, there is a danger of becoming dependent on them. That's when it becomes a slippery slope. They pull you into fiddling with your tools, which prevents you from doing the work you need to do.  Which ultimately means you don't have time for the things you want time for.  So, this week, a very simple question and for that, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Martha. Martha asks, Hi Carl, how would you make productivity simpler? Hi Martha, thank you for your question.  The first place I would start is to clean up and organise my calendar. It's your calendar you refer to when you need to know where to be and what you are committed to doing.  This involves removing conflicts. Conflicts occur when your calendar shows two meetings at the same time or your next meeting begins before a previous meeting ends.  You cannot be in two places at once, so pick one. If you have a meeting start before you are able to get there, inform the meeting organiser so they can either accept your late arrival or move the meeting to a more convenient time.  The sooner you do this, the better it is for everyone concerned. I use a scheduling service for my coaching client appointments. That service will not allow any conflicts to occur and automatically puts in a ten-minute buffer between meetings.  That's always a good practice to follow. Make sure you have buffer time between meetings. Meetings occasionally overrun, and you need to reset yourself before the next meeting.  The next step is hard for many people. Throughout our working lives we've become conditioned to be available at all times for our customers and bosses. And while you should not ignore these people, you are employed to do a specific job.  I know it's become common for companies to create job titles and job descriptions in the vaguest possible ways but underneath that vagueness, there will be a set of core work activities we are expected to do—what was once called “our duties”.  What are your duties? What do you need to ensure is done on time each day or week? That's your core work. What does doing your core work look like at a task level? For example, if you were employed as a construction worker (a vague job title) and were given the responsibility to build the perimeter wall. At a task level, laying bricks would be your core work.  Now within that, they may be other tasks such as ensuring you have a sufficient supply of bricks and cement and that you laid the guide lines to ensure the bricks were laid straight. What do those activities look like at a task level. What do you need to do (and how frequently) to order bricks and cement?  By looking at things from a task level, you put yourself in a better position to estimate how much time you need to complete your work.  For instance, if you find you need to place an order for bricks and cement every Monday morning and it takes you thirty minutes to do that task, you can create a thirty-minute block of time for admin every Monday morning. If you must place the order before 10:00 AM, then you may decide to create a time block every Monday morning called “ordering” and use that time to order any other supplies you may need that week at that time.  What you need to order can then be held in a note you add to throughout the week so you have everything fully complete the task on Monday morning.  That then leaves you free to focus on building the wall.  Taking the time to establish your core work gives you a way to automate prioritising. Core work always takes priority. It's what you will be evaluated on if you are employed, and it's how you earn your living if you are self-employed.  Where your calendar comes in to all this is once you have established your core work, make sure you have time protected for doing that work each week. Core work rarely changes, after all, it's what you are employed to do. The details will change—I don't write the same blog post or make the same YouTube video each week—but the work doesn't change unless your job changes.  And I use the word “protected” deliberately here. If you give up that time for another meeting, or something that's fleetingly urgent, you will still need to catch up somewhere.  To give you a benchmark, through my coaching programme and when I analyze my own core work, in total most people require between fifteen and twenty-hours a week for their core work.  If you are working an average thirty-five hour week, that still leaves you with fifteen to twenty hours for meetings and voluntary work.  There will be other “duties”. Managing your communications and daily admin, for example. If you were to protect ninety-minutes a day for these activities, that still leaves you with seven to fourteen hours a week for all the unknowns.  This is why your calendar is the most powerful tool in your productivity toolbox. What about task lists? These are still helpful. Apple probably called their to-do list the best way—Reminders. Ultimately, if you have established what your core work is, and protected sufficient time on your calendar to get that work done, your task list is there to remind you of the things you want to complete that day.  You tasks will fall into three categories. The must dos. These must be done at some point in the day. If you promised to call a customer back today, then you must do it. You promised.  Then there are the should do tasks. These are the tasks that while don't necessarily need to be done today, getting them done will ease the pressure on the rest of the week. Most tasks fall into this category.  If you were to give yourself twenty must do tasks today, and you are already committed to five hours of meetings, you won't be going to bed tonight. You “must do” those tasks. So when you choose your must dos make sure you limit them to two or three tops.  And finally there are the could do tasks. These are context based tasks. For instance if you have to visit a customer in the east of the city and that's where the pet supermarket is, you could call in after you meeting to buy dog food for your dog. Buying the dog food would be a category three task—it's context based.  Now all this only works if you are consistently doing your daily and weekly planning sessions. Failure to do these will mean you miss opportunities to do your category three tasks and you will be unclear when deadlines are due.  The weekly planning session gives you an opportunity to stop and look at the bigger picture of what's going on in your life. Perhaps you're attending your cousin's wedding next month and you need to buy an outfit. If you're not doing a weekly planning session it would be easy to miss that commitment and that will leave you rushing to buy something a few days before.  The weekly planning session gives you an opportunity to reset and ensure you are doing the right things at the right time.  The daily planning session is simply checking your calendar for your appointments and comparing that with your scheduled tasks for tomorrow. Do you have a doable day? If you have five or six hours of meetings or are scheduled to attend a training session, having twenty to thirty tasks on your task list for the day would mean you have an impossible day.  It's better to learn that when you can do something about it. You could reduce your task list or if you need to do something important, you may need to reschedule a meeting. The person you're meeting will appreciate that and it demonstrates how organised you are. Win win in my view.  And that's it. Focus on making sure your calendar is up to date and accurate—that's the driver of your day. Your core work and appointments Come first, then tasks. If you need time to complete a particularly important or urgent task, make sure you protect the time on your calendar.  And to make sure it all works, do your daily and weekly planning sessions consistently. And on the daily planning, I don't know how anyone could start their day not know what they want to accomplish that day. Knowing gives you energy and a determination to get it done.  I hope that has helped, Martha. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Did you know that your calendar is the only productivity tool that can protect you from burning out and overcommitting yourself and, if used correctly, help you bring balance into your life? No? Well, let me explain in this week's podcast.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 342 Hello, and welcome to episode 342 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. In his book, The Paradox of Choice, Professor Barry Schwartz explains how too many choices can slow us down, create confusion and reduce sales.  You can see this in recent times with the explosion in new productivity apps. Thirty years ago, the only tools you had to manage your time and your work were diaries.  There was a lot of different styles to choose from, but the price point of these diaries helped to make choosing a diary reasonably simple.  Many companies gave away diaries as gifts to customers, some issued all their staff with one, while some people would go out an buy their own—I was one of those. Yet because a diary can only show you the same thing—your twenty-four hours or seven days—people were much more focused on the doing part, and less on collecting and organising. And let's be honest, if all you have is a diary, there not a lot of organising you can do.  While we now have digital calendars, task managers and notes apps, really only two things have changed. The speed at which we can collect information and the increase in the number of potential tools we can use to help our productivity.  Unfortunately, that increase in productivity tools has caused a lot of confusion. Many people confuse events—something that happens at a specific time on a given date—and tasks—something that can be done at any time.  When that happens, the only outcome is going to be overwhelm and a lot of rescheduling. Not a very productive way to go about your day.  This week's question goes to the heart of this issue. So, without further a do, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this weeks' question. This week's question comes from Jeff. Jeff asks, hi Carl, I'm very interested in your ideas around how to use a calendar versus using a to-do list. Could you explain your thinking around this? Hi Jeff, I certainly can.  In Your Time, Your Way, I mentioned when I visit companies I notice that those people who began their careers in the early to mid 1990s are generally more organised than their younger colleagues.  Of course that's not a scientific observation, but I wonder if that's down to how large corporations in the 1990s often sent their staff on time management training courses. You don't hear of those courses much today.  It's also likely that those who began in the 1990s developed solid time management practices and have not changed their approach much over the years. I'm sure they've switched over the a digital calendar, but a lot still carry round note books.  I remember seeing an interview with Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, in around 2015. He was interviewed in his then office, and while there was an iMac on his desk and a MacBook Pro on a table behind him, there was also a notebook and pen. This was after the Apple Pencil had come out, which, in theory, meant he no longer needed to carry a notebook and pen.  Tim Cook will have begun his career in the mid to late 80s, and while at IBM, he will have been sent on a time management course—I do believe, IBM worked with the Franklin Quest organisation back then—which meant he will have gone through his career with a solid knowledge of time management principles.  So, that's a little background. Now, how do we use our calendars today so we are operating at our most productive each day? Well, first we need to know to difference between a task or to-do and an event.  A task or to-do is something you can do at anytime. For example, if you need to respond to a question from a client via email, you could do that at 9:15 am or 2:35 pm. There's no fixed time. Similarly, if you want to finish off a report for your boss, you could do that at 10:00 am or 3:20 pm.  As long as you finish the report today—your plan, it doesn't really matter when in the day you finish the report. And event on the other hand is time specific. If you have a meeting with your boss at 10:00 am in your boss's office. You'd better be there at 10:00 am.  If it takes you thirty-five minutes to get to your office, that means you will need to leave your home around 9:15 am to be sure you will be at your boss's office by 10:00 am.  A wise person would block 9:15 am 10:00 am for travel time as well as the meeting time on their calendar. That's basics. Now, given that your calendar is about specifics, and your task manager is about options, we can better manage all the stuff coming at us.  Your calendar can be used as a very powerful tool if you trust it. By trusting your calendar, I mean that you don't ignore it. That you check it each morning to see what you are committed to and if you cannot do something, you will reschedule it.  One way to get the most out of your calendar is to use a method called time blocking. Time blocking does not mean you block every hour of your day, what it means is if you need two hours to work on that report, you would block the time out on your calendar.  You can become very tactical here too.  One way is to establish when you are at your most focused. Most people will either be early birds or night owls. According to author Daniel Pink, only around 3% of the population are at the most focused in the afternoons.  If say you are more focused in the morning, you can block two-hours out between 9:30 and 11:30 am for “focused work”.  This means, that each morning between 9:30 and 11:30, nobody can schedule appointments with you. Your calendar is blocked for doing your most important tasks.  Knowing that you have this time protected does a lot for your stress levels. You know you have two uninterrupted hours for getting on with your work.  And often, having two uninterrupted hours for doing critical work is all you need to stay on top of your projects.  Unless you are nomadic, it's likely that being able to block the same time each day for focused work will be difficult. There will always be a need for flexibility. Yet, if you were only able to protect two-hours three times a week, you would still have six hours of uninterrupted time each week.  Imagine what you could do in those six hours.  I protect two hours each morning for writing on a Monday and Tuesday, and the four hours is enough for me to get all my writing done for the week. Occasionally, I will need to move things around, but for the most part, those times are fixed and that gives me the confidence that I have sufficient time each week to get my committed writing projects complete.  What all this means is your calendar is the hub for everything you do. It will tell you if you have enough time for doing your work, and where you need to be on any given day.  If you need to collect your daughter from School on Thursday at 4:00 pm, that will be on your calendar. If it takes you thirty minutes to get to your daughter's school, you would block time from 3:30 pm to collect her.  This also means you would be unwise to schedule a meeting after 3:00 pm (meetings have a habit of overrunning). You would not be focused in the meeting, you'll be clock watching and stressed.  Instead, you could use the thirty-minutes to respond to your communications, or even plan the next day.  You calendar should also be the first thing you look at when you plan your day. Whatever's on your calendar is fixed. You're committed to it.  If you see you have six or seven hours of meetings today, how much time will you have for your tasks? Not much.  If you begin the day, with six hours of meetings and a task list of thirty or more tasks, your day's broken before it's begun. You won't be able to do everything on your task list and attend all those meetings.  Either you cancel meetings or your remove some of the tasks, leaving only the critical ones.  Today, for example, I have five hours of meetings and my to-do list has five tasks. It's still going to be a busy day, but it's doable… Just. I suspect already, that one or two of those tasks will be pushed off to another day.  I don't care. The most important parts of my day are the confirmed appointments.  If I find myself with some critical tasks that must be done, then I will have to find time on my calendar to do them. I'm comfortable rescheduling meetings if necessary to complete an important piece of work. You should be too.  Your calendar is never going to lie to you. It only shows the 24 hours you get each day. How you use those hours is largely up to you. If you open up your calendar to everyone, there's no point in complaining you don't have time. You do have time. By allowing other people to schedule meetings with you without first consulting you, you are allowing g them to steal your time.  If you need time for exercise, to be at your son's school concert or to finish any important piece of work, it's on you to protect that time on your calendar.  Your task manager and notes app will not help you here. You can throw a hundred tasks into your task manager and date them for tomorrow And tomorrow you will have a hundred tasks to complete.  You task manager will never tell you that you don't have time to do all those tasks. Only you calendar will do that. So there you go, Jeff. That's how to use a calendar. It's your connection with the real world. It never lies to you and it's a tool you need to be in control of.  Thank you for your question, Jeff, and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you a very very productive week.   

Is there a gulf between what you want and where you are? That's what we are looking at today. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 341 Hello, and welcome to episode 341 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Many time management and pro ductivity problems result from a disconnect between one's goals and what one is prepared to sacrifice to achieve them.  If you want to spend more time with your family yet are not prepared to say no to working beyond your regular working hours, there is a disconnect.  If you want to lose twenty pounds yet are not willing to cut back on sugary treats and exercise a little, there is a disconnect.  And, if you want to be more productive yet are unwilling to protect time on your calendar for doing the work you want to productively do, there is a disconnect.  It is sad to watch people desperately scramble for any excuse for not doing the things they say they want to do. It's easy to find excuses, but much harder to be honest with yourself and accept that whatever you say is important to you is not important at all.  As the saying goes, “If it's important enough, you'll find the time. If it's not, you'll find an excuse”. Worthwhile goals take time. Often, you will need to learn new skills, gain experience and build endurance. There will be setbacks and sacrifices to be made. And, of course, time to be found.  That's all part of what makes achieving goals exciting. If it were easy to achieve your goals, you would feel empty and unfulfilled and likely not bother trying to improve yourself.  It's an interesting topic, so let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Suzie. Suzie asks, Hi Carl, I struggle to find the time to do everything I want to do. I've done your Perfect Week exercise but never seem to be able to fit everything into my week. My Perfect week looks great; my real week is a mess. Is there anything else I can do to fit more into my week? Hi Suzie, Thank you for your question.  This is something I come across a lot in my coaching programme. An ambitious person discovers there are not enough hours in the day to do everything they want to do.  Often, it's someone who works a full-time job from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM, who wants to exercise for an hour every day and start their own side business in the evening.  Now, all of that is possible, but it won't be if you also want to spend time with your family, go out every weekend with your friends and watch episodes of your favourite TV show each evening.  As David Allen says, you can do anything you want, but you cannot do everything.  One of the first things you can do is to begin with the basics. How much time do you need to sleep and eat? Typically, people require between six and eight hours of sleep each day.  If you sacrifice sleeping time, what's going to happen? You'll first become tired and easily distracted; if you continue not getting enough sleep, you will become sick. How will that help you do the things you want to do?  So, get the basics right first. For any human to operate at their optimum level, they need the right amount of sleep, healthy food and some exercise each day.  Lack of sleep, poor-quality food, and sitting around all day will destroy your energy levels, mess with your emotions, and result in you not getting very much done. Get those three things right first.  The next step is to look at your calendar. Where can you protect time for doing what is most important to you? This will depend on what it is you want to do.  For instance, if you want to start building your own business, you may only be able to do this in the evenings after work. Perhaps, if you are more of a morning person, the only time available might be early in the morning. Author John Grisham used to write his books before going to work in the morning. He'd wake up at 4:30 and write for two hours before getting ready for work.  However, it comes down to how much you are willing to sacrifice to pursue your goals. If waking up at 4:30 AM is not something you are willing to do to work on your business dream, that's fine. Nobody will judge you. That's simply a choice you have made.  There's very little I would wake up at 4:30 AM for.  This isn't just about our dreams and goals. Perhaps you want to be a great parent—who doesn't? What does being a great parent look like?  Maybe you decide to have a family meal every evening at 7:00 pm, where you talk with your kids about their day and what they learned is important. Doing this is not impossible.  Yet, if you also value your career and rarely make it home before 7:00 PM, what are you elevating above being a great parent?  These are hard truths we are often afraid to address. Yet, if you want to live the life you want, you need to face them. What is more important, your relationship with your children or your career?  Again, there's no judgment here, and the choices you make are entirely yours to make. But some choices need to be made to have that feeling of fulfilment.  The work vs family dilemma has always been fascinating to me.  Often, when you look deeply at it, it's not really about the work itself; it's the fear of being unpopular at work. Saying no to colleagues asking for help with their work so you can finish a project you're working on risks being unpopular.  We worry about what our colleagues will think of us if we refuse to help them with their work. So we say yes to helping them, which means we need more time to finish our work.  And because time is fixed, that means the extra time we need to finish our work must come from the time we would ordinarily spend with our family. And after all, our family will understand, won't they? Won't they?  Another one is the importance of taking care of your health today to live an active and healthy retirement. When we're in our thirties and forties, most people don't worry about this at all. We prioritise our careers and social life above our long-term health.  Yet, if you were to visit a doctor and they told you that if you don't change your diet and get some exercise, you will be dead in six months, the chances are you will make significant changes. Suddenly, your career and social life become less important than your health.  If you were to think about it for a few minutes, getting a little exercise and being more mindful about your diet is not difficult. It's a choice you can make today.  All of this is why spending some time looking at your areas of focus and deciding what is important to you as a person is critical. Without knowing what is important to you, you will drift from one thing to the next.  This means defining what family and relationships mean to you. How does that fit with your career goals, finances, lifestyle, life experiences, and purpose? These are important questions, and if you were to spend time defining what they mean to you, knowing where to spend your time will naturally follow.  What are you willing to sacrifice to live life on your terms?  Is the risk of upsetting your boss by not responding to her text message immediately worth it to spend undisturbed time with your family? Or is serving your customer professionally worth risking being late to a meeting with your colleagues and becoming unpopular?  When you know what your areas of focus mean to you, these choices are easy to make. You, in effect, make the decisions before they need to be made. The upside to this is you gain respect. Not just respect for you and your values but also for your time.  The real danger is wanting more than you are willing to sacrifice for.  Building a business takes a lot of time and effort - are you willing to sacrifice time with your friends and family to build that business? To stay organized and on top of your work, you have to say no to many people. Are you willing to say no to new things to keep up with the work you are paid to do? To spend more time with your family, you need to reduce your work time. Is that a sacrifice you are willing to make? Being more productive is never about doing more. It's about knowing what is important to you and spending the appropriate time needed there. It means you must be comfortable saying no and not worrying about being unpopular or occasionally upsetting people.  After all, “you can't please all of the people all of the time. You can only please some of the people some of the time.” So, Suzie, before you go back to your “perfect week” calendar, spend some time with your areas of focus and prioritise what is important to you right now. Define what each of those areas means to you. Once you have done that, return to your perfect week calendar and ensure you have enough time for the things you most value in your life.  I promise you that if you do that, you will feel more fulfilled, more focused, and much more productive.  I hope that has helped. Thank you so much for sending in your question and thank you to you too for listening.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

One of the biggest drains on your time (and productivity) is a disorganized workspace. This week, I'm sharing some ideas for getting organised so you can find what you need when you need it.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack  Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 340 Hello, and welcome to episode 340 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. I remember watching videos by David Allen—author of Getting Things Done—where he explains the importance of having an organised workspace.  These videos were recorded before the digital takeover, yet the principles remain the same whether we deal with paper or digital documents.  If your stuff is all over the place, you will waste a lot of time trying to find what you need, and it's surprising how much time you lose.  This week's question caught my attention, as getting and keeping your workspace organised is an overlooked part of the modern productivity movement. It won't matter how clever your digital tools are if you don't know where everything is or how to organise your notes so you can find what you need when you need it in seconds. You'll still waste much time doing stuff you shouldn't need to do.  As I researched this, I could only find advice on keeping desks and physical files, notes, and documents organised. There is little advice on keeping a digital workspace clean and organised. Well, that is apart from some older articles about how an untidy computer desktop slows down your computer and makes finding anything slow and cumbersome.  Now before I go further, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Alice. Alice asks, Hi Carl, How do you keep all your files, notes and other digital things organised? I'm really struggling here and would love some advice. Hi Alice, thank you for your question. One of the first things you will need to do is allocate a single place for your digital documents. Today, most people are comfortable storing all their personal files in a cloud storage system, such as Google Docs, Microsoft OneDrive, or Apple's iCloud.  If you are concerned about security, an external hard drive also works. Now, just as before the 2000s, you will likely have two places: one for work and one for your personal stuff. Your company will probably dictate your work storage system.  The important thing about storing documents and files you may need is accessibility—i.e., how fast you can access the files.  In the past, if we wanted a file for a client named Rogers, we would go to the filing cabinet, locate the letter R, and find the file for Rogers there. If it wasn't there, one of our colleagues probably had it. (And how frustrating was that)  Today, all you need to do is open iCloud, One Drive or Google Drive and type in the name of the client you are looking for. You will then be presented with a list of all the documents related to that client. And perhaps you may already be seeing a problem.  In the past, everything was kept together in a single file folder; today, client notes can be found everywhere. We have CRM systems (Customer Relationship Management software) that track communications with customers and clients. However, these are only as good as those who enter the data.  We receive phone calls, emails, perhaps text messages, and all the documentation generated by orders, invoices, and quotes. If the people entering the data are not timely and perfect, time can be wasted just looking for all that stuff. Those CRM systems may track documents related to that client, which makes things a little easier. But do you trust them?  So, how can you keep your workspace organised and in order?  First, choose your tools. Your calendar and email will likely already be selected for you in your professional environment. Fortunately, you should have freedom over your task manager and notes app.  Rule number one. Use only one.  By this, I mean one task manager, one notes app and one calendar. Now, it is okay to use a separate calendar for your work events; after all, you may only be able to access your work calendar through selected devices. I would always advise you to try to connect your work calendar to your personal one where possible.  By this, I mean that if you use a Google or Apple calendar for your personal life, you can subscribe to your work calendar. Not all companies allow this, but I've found that most do.  This way, you have all your events viewable in one place. (Wasn't life easier when we all carried our own diaries? No interference from outsiders)  Your to-do list and notes, however, are entirely within your realm. Avoid the temptation of using your work's Microsoft To-Do or Trello. You want to have your complete life together, not scattered everywhere.  You may need to call a client early in the morning, and if all the details are separated on your work's system, that call could easily be missed. Similarly, you may need to contact your bank. If that task is on a personal system, unless you look at that system in your lunch break, you're going to miss it.  Now here's a quick tip. Use a daily note.  A daily note is a note you create each day to capture meeting notes, ideas, things to look up, and other useful bits of information. Each note's title is today's date.  As you create a new note each day, you have a reference—the date. If you number each item you add to the daily note, you now have a transferable reference to link to tasks and calendar events.  For example, imagine I captured an idea for a YouTube video, added it to my daily note, and assigned it the number 1.  That means the reference number for that idea is today's date plus 1. I can use that reference for any task or project from that idea. You can go one step further by adding a link to the note for your task, so all you need to do is click the link and boom, you are right where you need to be.  I would also advise you to keep your digital notes separate from work. I once had a client who was a university professor. She used her university's OneNote to organise all her research notes.  She then left that university, and within two or three hours of leaving, the system's organiser deleted all her notes. Seven years of research gone in seconds.  Of course, you should keep confidential information off your personal devices, but a large part of what we keep in notes is not confidential and is usually meeting notes, ideas, and possible solutions to difficult problems.  Once you have your tools and storage places sorted, it comes down to making sure what you need when you need it is quickly accessible.  To do that, learn how to search your computer. On Apple devices, this means learning to use Spotlight. It's a powerful tool that means I can find coaching client feedback simply by typing their name into the search box. I can also find digital copies of my passport, car insurance, residency permits and my address in Korean (I find it's faster to copy/paste than to type in Korean)  Everything I need frequently is instantly to hand.  And that's another reference to the pre-2000s. An optimised workspace meant that you had the files you were working on and anything else you needed quick access to within arms reach of your desk.  Anything you didn't need was stored in filing cabinets a few steps away from you.  There's the famous picture of Rose-Mary Woods, President Nixon's secretary, demonstrating how she accidentally erased 18 minutes of the tape recordings during the Watergate investigation. If you Google the picture, you can see that everything a secretary would need was on her desk or next to it (or rather coincidently, within arms reach) For Windows computers, look up Universal Search. That will explain how you can search for everything on your computer from a single place.  The final part of the puzzle is file naming.  For years, I've used a file name system that includes the date, the file type, and the name. For example, if I had a client named Bill Tanner and wrote a proposal for him, the proposal title would be 2024-09-25-proposal-Bill Tanner.  If I need to amend the proposal, I would change the date. This way, when I search Bill Tanner, I will see all the proposals I have written grouped together.  I've found that adding version numbers to the title doesn't work either, and it's not as easy to get to the latest document. Searching by date puts the very latest version on top every time.  And I do still recommend keeping your desktop clean. A cluttered desktop causes distraction. A clean desktop helps maintain focus.  Now, before I finish, I should mention your phone. This can be a complete mess. I was in the bank the other day, and some twenty-somethings were opening an account. All they had with them was their phones, yet when the bank clerk asked them for different documents, they took ages to find the information on their phones.  Rather amusingly, an elderly gentleman, armed with a plastic wallet of essential documents, completed his business at the bank far faster than those twenty-somethings.  When the clerk asked him for a document, he pulled it out and handed it over instantly. It was a real eye-opener for me. Perhaps paper is faster than digital… Sometimes.  What I've learned is to keep all your frequently used apps on your Home Screen. Learn how to use widgets—they can be a real-time saver when you need them.  Oh, and one more: when flying, use your airline's app. Place it on your Home Screen. It's incredible how often you need that at the airport or in a taxi when they ask you which terminal you need to go to.  And there you go, Alice. I hope that has helped.  It comes down to doing a little cleaning up and getting your important files and apps where you need them. Remember, it's all about accessibility.  Thank you, Alice, for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

Podcast 339 How do you prioritise your tasks and estimate how long something will take to do? That's what we're looking at this week.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Subscribe to my Substack    Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 339 Hello, and welcome to episode 339 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. This week, I have two common questions to answer: The first is how do I prioritise when everything's urgent, and the second is how do you know how long a task will take?  Your areas of focus and core work determine one, and the other is impossible.  Before I answer the question, I'd like to let you know that I am now on Substack. There will be a link in the show notes for you to subscribe. I have a crazy plan to write on Substack every week and, over a year, complete a book. The book will tackle the time management and productivity problems we face today and use subscriber comments and questions to enhance the book. If it's any good at the end of the year, I will publish the book.  So, please help and become a subscriber. You can become part of something very special. Okay, on with the episode. Let me deal with the impossible issue first. How do you determine how long a task will take?  The problem here is you are human and not a machine. This means you are affected by how much sleep you got last night, your mood, and whether you are excited by the task or not.  You will also be affected by things like jet lag, whether a close family member is sick or if you had a fight with your spouse or partner that morning.  This is why I don't recommend task-based productivity systems. They are not sustainable. Sure, some days you can do all your tasks and have oodles of energy left in the evening. On most days, you'll struggle to do two or three of them.  I usually write my blog posts on a Monday morning. I've been doing this for eight years. I write roughly the same length each time—around a thousand words. Yet, some days, I can write the first draft in forty-five minutes; others, it takes me ninety minutes to write 750 words.  I cannot predict what type of day I will have. Yet, what I do know is that if I sit down and start, I'm going to get something done. And that's good enough.  This means I know I have two hours to write, and something will get done as long as I write in those two hours. I want to finish everything, but if I can't, as long as I've got something written when I return to finish later, it will be much easier than if I had not started.  However, that said, sometimes time constraints can help. If you know you have a deadline on Friday, and you also know you still have a lot to do, putting yourself under a bit of pressure to get moving on the project can help tap into your energy reserves. The trouble is that this is not sustainable or productive in the long run.  Doing that means you will neglect other parts of your work. Emails will pile up, your admin will become backlogged, and you will neglect other things you should be doing, meaning you will need to tap into those reserves repeatedly.  And that becomes a vicious circle.  What works is to allocate time for your important work each day. Instead of focusing on how much you have to do, you focus on your available time.  Imagine you are in sales, and you have follow-ups to do each day. If, on average, you need an hour to do your follow-up, that would be the time you protect each day for doing your follow-ups. Some days, you will complete them in less than an hour; others, you won't. But it doesn't matter. As long as you do your follow-ups daily, you will always be on top or thereabouts each week.  And let's be honest: When dealing with phone calls, nobody knows how long they will take. It's just not something you can predict.  Now, on to the question of prioritising your day.  This comes back to knowing what is important to you and your core work—the work you are paid to do (not the work you volunteer to do).  All the classic books on time management start with you thinking about what you want before you dive headfirst into sorting out the mountain of work you think you must do.  You see if you do not know what is important to you, everything that seems remotely urgent will be important to you. And that is not true at all. It could be argued that not knowing what is important is just plain laziness. You're delegating an essential aspect of your life to everyone else because you cannot be bothered to decide. If you don't determine what's critical, then everything becomes critical. That's the easy way out—although the consequences are never pleasant.  I remember when I was a trainee hotel manager. I did two years in night management. When I joined the night team, I inherited three night porters. One of them was aggressive and would speak his mind if he didn't like something or felt it was a waste of time. One was a stickler for doing only what his job description said, and the third one was gentle and willing to do anything asked of him.  As their manager, guess who I got to do the little things that popped up randomly during the shift? The third one.  As a manager, I didn't have time to argue with the two other night porters about whether something needed doing or was part of their job description. So, I dumped everything onto Martin. (Sorry, Martin)  If you don't know what is important to you and what your core work is, you will be dumped on. And that is often the main cause of why you have far too much to do.  To overcome this at work, know what your core work is. Then, prioritise that work. For instance, if you are a photographer, you are paid to take photos. So, taking and processing those photos will be your most important work. Nothing should ever pull you away from doing that work.  Similarly, finding new clients will also be an essential part of your work if you are a freelance photographer. That may involve curating an Instagram account and perhaps some other social media.  Any activity or task involving those parts of your work should always take priority over everything else. Researching new lighting, redesigning your website or helping a family member find a good photographer (assuming you cannot do it yourself) are not your priorities.  What I find helps is to list your core work tasks—the tasks you need to do each day or week and then ensure you protect time in your calendar for doing that work.  Once it's protected, nothing but an emergency will move it.  This work is your core work and, therefore, your priority. It's where your income comes from and what you will be judged on for promotion. Screw this area up by doing low-value stuff for other people may make you liked and popular, but you will be swamped, stressed out and exhausted at the end of the day.  You need to set boundaries.  Setting boundaries does not mean you become unpleasant towards your colleagues. It means there's a time and a place for work and a time and place for socialising. Don't mix the two up.  Here's an exercise you could do. List out your core work—the work you are paid to do. Then, calculate how long you need, on average, to do that work. As this is your core work you should have some data—it's likely to be on your calendar.  If you don't have the data, monitor it for a week or two. That will give you sufficient information to make the calculation.  Remember, you won't necessarily be perfectly accurate. You're human, after all. But all you need is an average.  Let me give you an example. I know if I protect twelve hours each week for doing my core work, I will be able to get it all done. This means if I were working a regular forty-hour week, I would still have twenty-eight hours available for meetings, dealing with emergencies and anything else unexpected. Surely, that's enough time?  You, too, will likely find you don't need much time for your core work. However, until you know what that work is and have calculated how much time, on average, you need to complete the work, you are flying blind. And your brain will tell you you don't have enough time.  Externalise it, write it down, get it into your task manager and calendar and protect the time.  Over the last 100 years or so, many books have been written on time management and productivity. Professors, senior executives, and business titans have studied the subject relentlessly, and in almost all cases, they have come to the same conclusions.  To be on top of your work and live a balanced life, you must know what you want time for. If you don't know that, you will quickly find yourself wasting that precious resource. (And, of course, building huge backlogs of stuff you've neglected) So, there you go. First, you will never be able to accurately calculate how long a task will take. You are not a machine; you're a living, breathing human being susceptible to emotions, low energy, and sickness. Stop trying. Instead, allocate time for your work, get as much done as possible within that time, then take a break and move on.  Getting started is the most critical thing. It's better to do 25% of the task and only have 75% left. At least you've started and will know how to finish.  And secondly, be very clear about the work you are paid to do. That's your prioritised work. The work you volunteer to do should never be prioritised over your core work.  I hope that helps.  Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

What is the Eisenhower Matrix and how can you use it to help you focus on the important things in life.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 338 Hello, and welcome to episode 338 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. You may have heard of the Eisenhower Matrix, or as Stephen Covey called it in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the Productivity Matrix. It's a matrix of four squares divided up between Important and urgent (called quadrant 1), Important and not urgent (quadrant 2), urgent and not important (quadrant 3) and not urgent and not important (quadrant 4). It's one of those methods that gets a lot of attention after a book has been launched. Yet, this matrix was first introduced to us by President Eisenhower in the 1950s after President Eisenhower mentioned in an interview that "I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent. This “quote” was first spoken by Dr J Roscoe Miller, president of the North Western University at that time.  So, it's questionable if Eisenhower ever applied this method to his work, but whether he did or he didn't, it is an excellent framework to help you prioritise your work and help you to get focused on your important work and aspects of your life.  This week's question is all about this matrix and how you can apply it to your life so you are not neglecting the important, but not urgent things that so many of us neglect because they are not screaming at us and because they need an element of discipline which so many people find difficult today.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Michele. Michele asks, hi Carl, I recently read your book and saw that you wrote about the Eisenhower Matrix. I've always been fascinated by this matrix but have never been able to use it in my daily life. How do you use it to get things done?  Hi Michele, thank you for your question.  This matrix is one of those things that once you've learned and begin to apply it to your daily life, you soon forget you are using it.  Let me explain. Much of what comes our way is “urgent”, or it is to the person asking us to do something. That could be your boss, a client, your spouse or partner or your kids. Whatever they want, they want it now, and only you can give it to them.  Then, there are quite a few things that are important but not urgent. These include taking care of your health, planning your week and day, sitting down for a family meal at least once a day, and self-development—whether that is through reading books, going to night school, or taking courses.  These are often neglected because the urgent and important drown them out.  Ironically, if you consistently take care of the important and not urgent things, you will spend less time dealing with the urgent and important. Yet, most people cannot get to these quadrant 2 tasks because the quadrant 1 tasks are swamping them.  It becomes a vicious circle.  The bottom part of the matrix—the not important things—is what you want to avoid. these are the urgent and not important and the not important and not urgent things. (What's called quadrants 3 and 4). The urgent and not important things (quadrant 3) are the deceptive things. These are unimportant emails dressed up to look important. Most emails and messages will come under this quadrant.  One of the things I've noticed when I begin working with a new client is the kind of tasks they have in their digital task manager. 80% of the tasks there are not important tasks. It's these tasks that are drowning out the quadrant 1 and 2 tasks (the important ones).  I am starting an experiment to see if using a paper Franklin Planner for three months can still be done in 2024. One thing I've already noticed is because I have to write out the tasks I need to or want to do today, I am much more aware of the kind of tasks I am writing. My daily task list is much shorter than when I do this digitally.  As a consequence, tasks that are not important (urgent or otherwise) rarely get onto my list.  This paper-based task list has reversed the type of tasks on my list—now, 80% are important.  So, what kind of tasks fall into these different categories? Let's begin with the easiest one: Quadrant 4. These are the tasks that are not important and not urgent.  These tasks include watching TV, scrolling social media, reading political news, and anything else that triggers you in some way.  While checking social media or watching TV may be beneficial sometimes, these activities should be undertaken only after you have completed your important work for the day.  What about quadrant 3–the urgent and not important. What kind of tasks are these? Well, quite a few emails are. These could be something you want to buy, but you are not ready to do so yet. However, a last-minute offer might expire at midnight (urgency), so you feel you have to act.  No, you don't.  I don't need to buy my winter sweaters in September—the temperature is 28 degrees outside (around 85 degrees Fahrenheit), and it's still quite humid; I can wait until the end of October. Yet the email is urging me to act now. It's not important.  You'll also find many requests from colleagues that fall into this category. “I need it now!” “I have to have it immediately!” only for you to find a few minutes later that it's unimportant and they don't need it now.  Busy work also falls into this quadrant. When I was teaching at a university, the admin department was always sending reminders to teachers to send the attendance record for that day's class. It was framed as urgent, yet in the grand scheme of things, attendance records were not important to me as a teacher.  As a teacher, ensuring my students learned was important. Not some box ticking exercise to keep the administration team happy.  I was never late in sending my attendance sheets, but I did find it annoying that almost immediately after the class finished, there was a message asking me to send the attendance sheet.  I soon got to ignoring those messages—they were sent out to all professors.  This is the bottom part of the matrix—the place you want to stay away from as much as possible. Likely, you will never be able to remain entirely out of it. After all, there's a new season of Taskmaster starting this week, and your favourite sports team could be heading towards the finals, and every game is on TV.  (Although watching a favourite TV show or sports team could arguably be placed in the quadrant 2 area—after all, it's a form of relaxation—well, perhaps not if you support the Leeds Rhinos rugby team)  Now, the top part of the matrix, the important area, is where you want to spend as much time as possible. You can think of this area as the proactive area.  The urgent and important quadrant—quadrant 1—includes your core work tasks, customer requests, and some requests from your boss and colleagues (the important project/process-driven requests).  These tasks are often deadline-driven—hence their importance.  Then there is quadrant 2—the important but not urgent quadrant. This is possibly the most important quadrant because, as I mentioned, the more time you spend here, the less time you will spend in the urgent areas.  Your areas of focus drive quadrant 2. It also includes planning, thinking and self-development.  For example, exercise, reading, weekly and daily planning are all quadrant 2 tasks. As is spending time with your family, learning and reading.  All healthy pursuits will come here.  The problem is that there's no sense of urgency. These important tasks are often sacrificed for the important and urgent tasks of Quadrant 1. Spend too much time in Quadrant 1, and it will grow and grow.  If you pull yourself away and try to move towards your quadrant 2 area, your quadrant 1 area will shrink—a good thing.  So, how can you implement this matrix into your own life?  Identify what each quadrant looks like in your life. Where do the urgent and not important (Quadrant 3) tasks come from, and why? Ask the same question about Quadrant 1—urgent and important, why are they urgent?  What is the underlying reason these tasks become urgent?  You will likely find that you are not doing something from Quadrant 2. For example, not doing a weekly planning session will always cause things to become urgent because you never get a chance to see the overview of what you have going on.  That's how deadlines creep up on you.  Not giving yourself ten minutes at the end of the day (or first thing in the morning if you are an early bird) to plan the day will leave you at the mercy of events (quadrants 1 and 3).  Creating an Eisenhower Matrix on paper and writing out the different activities you do in each category can help you prioritise. And that's not just related to work. It's a life-changing prioritisation exercise for your whole life.  You can see what you should be doing and what needs to change so you have more time for what you want to do in your life.  It will also show you what needs to be eliminated to find that time. Anything in the bottom half of the matrix should eliminated (although that may not be possible 100% of the time)  I hope that has helped Michele. Thank you for your question, and thank you for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week. 

What are the time-tested principles of better time management and productivity? That's what I'm exploring in this week's episode.    You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links:   Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 337 Hello, and welcome to episode 337 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. If you have read books on time management and productivity, you may have picked up that there are a few basic principles that never seem to change.  Things like writing everything down, not relying on your head to remember things, planning your day and week, and writing out what is important to you.  These are solid principles that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. The tools we use may have changed, but these principles have not and never will.  What is surprising are the attempts to reinvent time management. New apps and systems seem to come out every month claiming to be “game-changing”—I hate that phrase—or more ways to defy the laws of time and physics and somehow create more time in the day than is possible.  Hyrum Smith, the creator of the Franklin Planner, an icon of time management and productivity, always said that time management principles have not changed in over 6,000 years. What has changed is the speed at which we try to do things.  Technology hasn't changed these time management principles; all technology has done is make doing things faster.  Today, I can send an email to the other side of the world, and it will arrive instantly. Two hundred years ago, I would have had to write a letter, go to the post office to purchase a stamp, and send it. It would arrive two or three months later.  Funnily enough, I read a book called The Man With The Golden Typewriter. It's a book of letters Ian Fleming sent to his readers and publisher. He often began his letters with the words “Thank you for your letter of the 14th of February,” yet the date of his reply was in April.  Not only were things slower fifty years ago, people were more patient.  So, with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Lisa. Lisa asks, Hi Carl, I've noticed you've been talking about basic principles of productivity recently. Are there any principles you follow that have not changed? Hi Lisa, thank you for your question. The answer is yes, there are. Yet, it took me a long time to realise the importance of these principles.  The first one, which many people try to avoid, is establishing what is important to you. This is what I call doing the backend work.  You see, if you don't know what is important to you, your days will be driven by the latest urgent thing. That's likely to come from other people and not from you.  Stephen Covey wrote about this in his Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, with his Time Management Matrix, also called the Eisenhower Matrix. This matrix is divided into Important and urgent, important and not urgent, urgent and not important, and not urgent and not important.  The goal of this matrix is to spend as much time as possible in the second quadrant—the important but not urgent. This area includes things like getting enough sleep, planning, exercising, and taking preventative action.  The more time you spend here, the less time you will spend in the urgent and important and urgent and not important areas.  Yet, unless you know what is important to you, the only thing driving your day will be the things that are important to others. That includes your company, your friends and family. They will be making demands on you, and as you have no barriers, their crises will become yours. You, in effect, become part of the problem instead of being part of the solution.  When you have your life together, you can offer calm, considered solutions to those you care about. You also know when to get involved and when to stay well away.  Yet, you can only do that when you know what is important to you.  Many authors and time management specialists refer to establishing what is important to you in different ways; Hyrum Smith calls this establishing your governing values, Stephen Covey calls it knowing your roles, and I call them your areas of focus.  These are just names for essentially the same thing. Get to know what is important to you as an individual. Then, write them down in a place where you can refer back to them regularly so you know that your days, weeks, and months are living according to the principles that are important to you.  It's these that give you the power to say no to things that conflict with your values.  Without knowing what they are, you will say yes to many things you don't enjoy or want to do.  The next principle is to plan your week and day. Again, this is another area so many people avoid. I remember hearing a statistic that less than 5% of Getting Things Done practitioners do any weekly review.  If you've read Getting Things Done by David Allen, you'll know that he stresses the importance of the weekly review in almost every chapter.  People who don't plan are often driven by the fear of what they might learn, such as a forgotten project deadline, an important meeting that needs a lot of preparation, or a lost opportunity.  Yet, these are the results of not planning. If you were to give yourself thirty minutes at the end of the week to plan the next week and five to ten minutes each evening to plan the next day, many of the things you fear will never happen. You will be alerted to the issues well before you need to act.  For me, consistently planning my week and day has been life-changing. This simple activity has ensured I am working on the right things, dealing with the most important things, and ending the week knowing that the right things were completed.  Prior to becoming consistent with my planning, I was all over the place. I spent far too much time on the unimportant and saying yes to many things I didn't want to do. I was also procrastinating A LOT.  A huge benefit of planning is that you get to see data. In other words, you learn very quickly what is possible and what is not. When you begin planning the week, you will be overambitious and try to do too much. The more you plan, the more you learn what can be done.  No, you won't be able to attend six hours of meetings, write a report, reply to 150 emails, go to the gym and spend quality time with your family.  When you know what is important, you will ensure you have time for it because you plan for it (can you see the connection?). You will start to say no to some meetings (and yes, you can say no by offering an alternative day and time for the meeting) and renegotiate report deadlines.  A third principle is to manage your time ruthlessly. By that, I mean being very strict about what goes on your calendar. Never, ever let anyone else schedule meetings or appointments for you.  Your calendar is the one tool you have that gives you control over your day. Allowing other people to control it essentially turns you into a puppet. No, never ever let that happen.  Now, before Google Calendar, Outlook and Apple Calendar, we carried our own diaries around with us. No one else could have control of it. If you were fortunate enough to have a secretary (now called an “executive assistant”), you would meet with her (secretaries were largely female in the 60s, 70s and 80s) each week and explain when you were and were not available.  Your secretary would then gate keep your calendar. The best secretaries were pretty much impossible to get past. They protected their boss's time.  People knew that time was important and for anyone to do their work, they needed undisturbed time. Your calendar was respected.  A person's diary was so important that the courts would accept it as evidence they were in a particular location. I doubt very much they would do that today.  A mistake is to say yes to a time commitment too quickly. This is how we get conflicts in our calendars. You cannot be in two places at the same time—that's another law of physics—so you either say no and offer an alternative date, or you have to waste time renegotiating with someone later.  I am shocked at how often I see conflicts on people's calendars. Clearing these up should be the first thing you do during your weekly planning.  Information you need to know about the day should go in the all-day section of your calendar, not in the timed area. Only committed timed events go in the time area of your calendar.  When your calendar truly reflects your commitments, you can then set about planning a realistic day. If you have six hours of meetings and thirty tasks to complete, you will know instantly that you have an impossible day, and you can either move some of your appointments or reduce your task list.  Ignoring it only diminishes the power of your calendar, leaving you again at the mercy of other people's crises and issues.  This is about being strict about your time. Wake up and go to bed at the same time each day so you have solid bookends to your day. Ensure you protect time for your important work and your family and friends. And never let other people steal your time.  The final principle is the tool you use won't make you more productive or better at time management. Tools come and go. In the 1980s, it was the Filofax. In the 90s, it was the Franklin Planner. Today is the latest fashionable app. It doesn't matter. None of them will ever make you more productive.  What will make you more productive is knowing what is important to you. Having a plan for the day and week so you know what must be accomplished that day, and week. And being in complete control of your calendar.  Get those three things right, and you will feel less stressed, more in control of your life and have a sense of purpose each day. Isn't that what we all want?  I hope that has helped, Lisa. Thank you for your question.  And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

This week, how to process your task manager's inbox quickly and effectively so you can get focused on what needs to be done.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 336 Hello, and welcome to episode 336 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One issue that pops up regularly in my coaching programme is an overwhelming inbox. There are too many unclear items left to fester and fill up space, with no clear pathway to dealing with whatever needs to be done.  Now, it's true that you need to collect things. If you're not collecting your commitments and ideas, you soon find yourself forgetting to do the important things you have committed to. However, collecting is just the first part of a three-part process. You also need to organise what you collect and then do the work.  There are no shortcuts around this. These are the three principles of task management. Collect whatever needs to be collected, organise what you collect and then do the work.  This is something I have learned the hard way. I've collected thousands of items over the years, and in my early days, before I had learned the basic principles, that meant my inbox filled up and just became an overwhelming mess. It was a place I never wanted to visit because it just reminded me of how unproductive and disorganised I was.  I know those basic principles now: I collect stuff, regularly organise what I collect, and then do the work.  Today's podcast is about organising what you collected. I will tell you how to quickly clear your inbox, sort out the important from the unimportant, and, more importantly, get comfortable deleting stuff that is low in importance.  Oh, and before I forget, Friday this week—that's the 6th of September— sees the opening session of my Ultimate Productivity Workshop.  This is your chance to learn the fundamental principles and put them into practice so you can become a master of time management and productivity.  There are just a few places left, so if you want to become better organised, more productive, and in control of your time, join the workshop today. Details for the event are in the show notes and on my website, Carl Pullein.com. Okay, on with the show, which means it's time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Jeff. Jeff asks, “Hi Carl, I am really struggling with my inbox. I put a lot of stuff in there, from ideas to things my wife asks me to do and emails that need a response.  Each day, I feel I am collecting thirty or more things, and then it takes forever to clear the inbox. I hate doing it, so I don't. And, of course, that just makes things worse. What can I do to make keeping my inbox manageable.  Hi Jeff, Thank you for your question.  The good news is there are a few changes you can make that will help to reduce the overwhelm caused by an overloaded inbox.  Let's first deal with the three questions to ask when you process your inbox. These three questions will clarify what you have and help you to determine if you really need to do them or not.  The first question is, “Do I need to do it?” This is designed to clear tasks that have already been done or are no longer relevant because events have moved on.  You will often add a task like “Find out if Margo has all the documents she needs.” Later that day, Margo may ask you a question about the documents. You now know she has them. The task can be deleted or modified if the question requires you to do something.  Or you may have been asked by someone to do something only for them to tell you later that the task no longer needs to be done.  These can all be deleted.  Similarly, you may have added tasks to look up something or find out more about something, only to look at the task later and wonder what you were thinking. You are no longer interested in the idea. Again, delete these.  If the task still needs to be done, then move on to the next question, which is:  What do I need to do? This question concerns properly defining the task. It's not good to have a task that simply says, “Tony script.”  That might have meant something to you when you added it to your inbox, but if you do not need to do the task for a week or two, when the task comes back you'll be unsure what needs to be done. Make it clear.  Rewrite the task as something like, “Send Tony the amended voice-over script.” This makes sense. If you are sending Tony many different scripts, you would add the name of the amended script to send so there is no confusion.  Another type of task to watch out for is the “follow-up” or “chase” task. These are often not tasks. They may be vehicles for completing a task. For example, if you asked Roger for a copy of the script to send to Tony, the task is not really to chase Roger.  The task is to get a copy of the script to send to Tony. Until you have that script in your procession the task is not complete. Adding another task to chase Roger duplicates the original task.  Instead, after asking Roger for the task, make a note that you asked Roger for it, add a date you asked, and then reschedule the task.  Every task in your task manager needs an action verb attached to it, such as call, write, read, review, design, sketch, reply, etc. If a task does not have an action verb, it has not been properly defined.  You will find that adding a verb helps you to estimate how long something will take.  For those tasks that are difficult to estimate the time it will take, you can use the “start, continue, finish” method.  I use this method for a lot of project tasks. For example, when I was writing Your Time Your Way, every Monday to Friday, I had a repeating task that said, “Continue writing book”. This meant I could decide how much time I had available to write the book and not worry about the task itself.  I knew I was never going to finish writing the book in one day, it was the kind of task that jut needed to done little by little. So, I allocated ninety-minutes a day, five days a week and repeated that for six months. That got the book done.  The third question is: When am I going to do it? This is where most other time management and productivity systems go wrong. Establishing whether you need to do the task and defining what needs to be done is pretty universal in the productivity world. Yet, it doesn't matter how well you define a task if you don't have time to do it.  Once you commit yourself to a task, you need to know you have time to do it. That means asking, when are you going to do it?  How do you do that? Open up your calendar and your task manager and have them side by side. Some task managers can show you your calendar at the same time. Todoist, Tick Tick, and in a couple of weeks, Apple Reminders will do that for you.  What you are doing is looking to see where you have gaps in your schedule for doing the work.  Now, the task could be grouped with other similar tasks. Doing your expenses, for instance would be an admin task. Responding to an email would come under your communications.  But, some tasks may be too big and require a few hours to do. The question then becomes will you do in one go or split it up?  Your calendar will guide you. You will be able to see where you have time; if not, you can decide whether something else needs to be rescheduled for you to do the task by the date it's due.  Now, when you start going through your inbox and asking these questions, you will be slow. Remember when you learned to ride a bicycle? You didn't jump on the bike and go. There was a slow process of learning and building muscle memory.  The same will happen when processing your inbox. It will be slow at first as you're building your mental muscle memory.  I've been asking these three questions for years. It takes me very little time now, yet it was a slow process when I first began. The only option you have is to stick with it. As time goes on, you will get faster and faster.  You will also pick up the patterns. The different requests you get will fall into similar groups, which helps you quickly decide what something is and how long it will take.  Be patient and follow the process.  And… Do not be afraid to delete stuff. If it's important, it will come back.  If you are using the Time Sector System, you have a bit of an advantage. With the Time Sector System, the only tasks that matter are the ones you need to do this week. Anything else can be moved to your Next Week, This Month, Next Month or Long-term and on Hold folders. You can decide when you will do those tasks when you next do a weekly planning session.  So there you go, Jeff.  This is a process game. The more you follow the process, the faster you become. You also get comfortable deleting and delegating tasks. The goal is not to accumulate tasks; it's the reverse. The goal is always to eliminate. The less you have to do this week, the more focused you will be and the more flexibility you have for dealing with the unknowns that will inevitably come in.  I hope that has helped answer your question. Thank you so much for sending it.  Don't forget Friday is the start of September's ULTIMATE PRODUCTIVITY WORKSHOP. You can register by going to my website. If you are already registered, I will be sending you the workbook in the next day or two.  Thank you for listening and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

One of the most productive things you could do is to start writing a daily journal. In this week's episode, I answer a question about how to get started journaling. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 335 Hello, and welcome to episode 335 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Possibly the most productive thing I have done over the last ten years is to write a journal. This habit has taught me many things. For one, it has taught me the value of consistency. The act of spending ten to fifteen minutes every morning before I start the day has given me something deliberate—I sit down and write—which has led to me building out a solid set of morning routines that start my day in a way that's healthy (mentally) and productive.  It is productive because it gives me a few minutes to think about the day ahead and review my objective tasks—the things I want to or must complete that day. This is far better than rolling out of bed at the last minute, rushing around to get dressed and out the door only to realise I left something important at home.  Writing a journal every day has also given me a space to analyse where I am doing well and where there is room for improvement. It allows me to write how I am feeling and what I am worrying about and consider future directions.  It's almost as if I have a close friend I can confess all to.  Now, if you search YouTube for journaling, you will find thousands of videos advising how to start. Yet, it can be difficult. What do you write about? Do you use a digital tool like Day One or Apple's Journaling app, or an old-fashioned paper notebook?  There's a lot of questions.  This week, I received a question about starting and what I suggest you use. So, I decided to share all the tips I've learned over the years so you, too, can begin this fantastic habit.  Before I get to the question, there are just under two weeks until the start of September's Ultimate Productivity Workshop.  This workshop will teach you how to build your own productivity and time management system from the ground up.  We begin with your calendar and task manager, and I show you how to connect the two so that they work in harmony. This removes the overwhelm we face when tasks swamp our days.  In the second week, I show you how to do an effective weekly planning session and how to get, and more importantly, stay on top of your communications—those hundreds of emails and messages that must be dealt with daily.  By the end of this workshop, you will have a perfectly balanced system that works for you and your work style. What you will learn will eliminate backlogs, help you identify what is important (and what is not), and establish your core work and areas of focus.  You will learn a lot in this workshop. Plus, your package includes four courses, which gives you lifetime access to the four key elements of maintaining your system.  There are only a limited number of places, so if you haven't registered yet, you can do so with the link in the show notes.  I hope to see you there on the 6th of September.  Let me now hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Naomi. Naomi asks, Hi Carl, I saw your recent video on how to get started with journaling. Could you talk a little more about what to write and your recommendations about the best way to write it? Hi Naomi, thank you for your question.  Let me first deal with digital Vs paper journals.  There are many advantages to writing your journal digitally. For one, you can add a photo each day and set the journal to collect data such as your exercise, the weather, and, if you wish, what you posted on social media automatically.  I spent three years writing my journal in Day One. It was easy. I could write on my phone, my computer or my iPad. I preferred my iPad, but occasionally I would write on my phone.  What stopped me was the realisation that technology was gradually taking over my life. I was no longer doing anything manually and was always on the lookout for more convenience.  Sure, convenience is nice. In theory, anyway, it frees up time for other pursuits. Yet, I found those other pursuits were not productive or healthy. It invariably meant more time on social media and TV watching.  So, back in January, I switched back to handwriting my journals.  I've discovered that handwriting my journal has slowed me down. It's helped me to be more thoughtful and to express myself better in my journal.  It's also rekindled my love of fountain pens and good-quality paper, which can be a very dangerous hobby—fountain pens and notebooks can get very expensive.  Yet the key here was slowing me down.  Why would you want to rush to get the day started? There will likely be plenty of drama—you don't want to rush into all that.  The other reason I stopped journaling digitally was that I realised I was spending far too much time in front of a screen. Giving myself ten to twenty minutes every morning with a good old-fashioned pen and paper felt far better than sitting in front of another screen.  If you decide to go down the pen-and-paper route, my advice is to get yourself a good-quality notebook, preferably hardbound.  A hardbound notebook can travel with you, and if you don't have a table to write on, its binding will give you enough support.  I'd also recommend investing in a nice pen. A fountain pen may not suit you, but that nice pen investment will give you extra pleasure when writing in your journal.  Okay, those are the tools dealt with. Now, what do you write about? If you've never written a journal before, when you start, you may be afraid to share your deeper thoughts and feelings.  I always think of this like when you meet a stranger for the first time. You don't open up and tell them what you feel or what your opinions are about other people. You are reserved and generally stick to topics such as the weather or the traffic conditions.  So start there. Write down what the weather was like and what you did that day (or the day before).  When I started, I wrote down all the important, meaningful tasks I had completed the day before. And, of course, the weather.  You can even write what you ate and how much activity/exercise you did.  You will soon begin opening up and writing about how you feel. Again, this is very much like when you meet a stranger. As you get to know them, you open up.  Now as you progress and develop the habit of writing your journal every day, you may want to create a few recurring areas.  For example, I have five items in my morning routine. After writing the date at the top of the page, I list these five items (make coffee, drink my lemon water, do my stretches, write my journal and clean my email inbox) in the margin and check them off. This tells me how consistent I am with my morning routines.  I also write in the margin what exercise I did that day.  This year, I have a 366-day challenge to do at least ten push-ups each day, so I write down the number of push-ups I've done that day. (So far the year, I've done just over 8,000 push-ups) That gives me a start and some structure to my journal.  After that, I write whatever's on my mind. This morning, for example, I wrote how much better I feel. This week, I've been suffering from a heavy cold, and I felt a lot better this morning. So, that was my opening paragraph.  I also wrote about the weather. It's been hot and sticky over the last two weeks. Last night, we had quite a lot of rain, and that cleared the humidity a little.  So you don't have to write anything too deep.  When starting, your goal should be to get into the habit and let nature take its course. After a few weeks, you will naturally open up and write about more deeply meaningful things.  You'll likely begin writing negatively about your colleagues—we all do that occasionally—don't worry. No one else is going to read your journal. And writing about your feelings about anything is how journaling can be very therapeutic.  And that's the whole point of writing a journal. It's therapy and it helps you to focus on what's important.  I find the act of writing what's on my mind helps me to organise my thoughts, put things into perspective and then focus on the essential things. That could be my relationships, finances, spirituality or how my business is growing.  It also helps me see where I can improve my life. I track my weight each week, and it becomes very clear when my weight is rising, which tells me what needs to be done to get back to where I should be.  And finally, journaling gives you a record of your life. After all, you are documenting your life. And that's a beautiful thing to do. If nothing else, you leave something for your kids and grandchildren.  One of my family's most prized possessions is my great-grandmother's recipe book. It was started in the 1890s and has been handed down from daughter to daughter. It's incredible to look at. It is tatty and torn, and the pages are stained. Yet, the handwriting is still legible; there are pen and pencil marks.  Your journal could potentially become the same thing. A treasured family possession. Who knows how technology will progress in the future? Perhaps the text files you create today won't be accessible in ten or twenty years. But a handwritten journal will always be accessible.  We still have 7,000 pages of Leonardo Da Vinci's notebooks—written 500 years ago. Wouldn't it be nice for your own life to be celebrated in 500 years? So there you go, Naomi. I hope that has helped and motivated you to start writing your life. You'll never regret it.  Thank you for your question and for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very productive week.   

You have an overflowing inbox, you're behind on projects and your calendar for the next ten days is full of meetings and other commitments. What can you do to get things under control and meeting your commitments? That's what we're looking at this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 334 Hello, and welcome to episode 334 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. I know it can be easy for productive people to say all you need to do is this or that, and you, too, will be productive. The reality is it's not that simple.  It's not just about getting organised, reestablishing control of your calendar, and learning to use a to-do list properly; there's also a mindset shift involved.  Many people I work with individually have been told and come to believe that they are disorganised and sloppy with their time management. If you're told this too often and your actions support it, you begin to believe it. Being poor at time management and productivity becomes an identity.  Once you believe you are bad at these things, it becomes a self-fulfilling habit. Every attempt to become better organised and more productive will fail because you will sabotage your successes.  Your brain has an incredible capacity to reorganise and adapt. Just look at how people adapted to the lockdowns in 2020. There was resistance at first, then the adoption of new ways of doing things. Those who enjoyed exercise found ways to adapt their exercise programmes and work from home—something many people believed was impossible for them- but they soon discovered it was possible. Your brain can adapt and remodel itself using “neuroplasticity”. All you need is a stimulus—such as a determination to get organised and be better at managing your time—like muscles in response to exercise.  Sadly, most people don't try. They accept these negative patterns as just who they are. Yet it's not true. Your mindset and habits are not set at birth. You learn them. And that means you can unlearn them and develop better beliefs and habits.  So, with all that said, it's time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Wim. Wim asks, hi Carl, for years, I have tried to get myself organised and failed every time. I don't know what's wrong with me. I've read all the books, watched thousands of YouTube videos, and learned all the tricks. But for some reason, I can never do anything I learn. How would you help someone like me? Hi Wim, Thank you for your question. Part of the problem for people who struggle to get themselves organised is trying to do too much at once.  While we are good at changing things, we are not very good at changing everything. This is why it's often said that moving house is one of the most stressful things a person can do. Moving house is exciting, yet it also involves a lot of change.  That makes it uncomfortable. There's a new home, a new way to get to the supermarket, a different drive to work and new people to get to know in the neighbourhood.  Yet, after a few weeks, our new home becomes normal. We feel comfortable and safe, and the stress of the move disappears.  All change requires an initial period of discomfort. We make mistakes and forget to do something we should have done, and going through the actions feels like a huge effort for a small gain.  But we discovered during the pandemic that we can do it. We can adapt to change and do it quite quickly.  So, where do you begin?  As always, the best place to begin is with the basics. To get organised means learning and implementing the principles of COD—Collect, Organise and do.  When it comes to collecting, how will you gather together all the stuff you either have to do, would like to do or have a passing interest in?  For some, that may mean setting up their phones as their universal collection tool (UCT) or perhaps a pocket notebook.  If you choose to use your phone—possibly the best UCT as we carry these things with us everywhere we go (including the bathroom!) what application will you use?  The application you use for collecting is important because it needs to fulfil two requirements. First, it must be quick and easy to use. Too many buttons to press, and you won't collect everything. Second, you need to trust that what you collect will be saved and not lost.  A lack of either of those functions and it will fail.  Once you have your collection tool set up, the next area to work on is the habit of processing and organising what you collect. Done frequently, and this won't take a lot of time. Done infrequently, and it will take too long, which then means you won't do it.  I generally advise people to clear their inboxes every twenty-four to forty-eight hours. This depends on how much you are collecting. I find people just starting out with a system collect a lot more than seasoned people do.  That's actually a good thing because for the first few weeks, it's about building the habit. The old habit of trying to remember things in your head doesn't work, but it's an ingrained habit—“oh, I won't forget that”.  You will. Write it down.  If you are collecting a lot of stuff, clear your inbox daily. If you're collecting less than ten things a day, you can clear your inbox less frequently. (Although I do advise you to scan your inbox daily to ensure you haven't missed anything important). Now, when it comes to organising what you collected is a little more difficult. This requires some thought.  The goal is to find what you need as quickly as possible when you need it.  One thing that will hinder you here is if you have stuff all over the place. I have a policy of using tools for the purpose they were designed. This means I use one task manager, Todoist, for all my tasks.  This stops me from having to find stuff in multiple different places. When I start the day, I know all my tasks will be in one place.  This also helps with trust. I can trust that what needs to be done today will be on my Todoist Today list. Yet, this didn't happen overnight. It took many months of learning Todoist and building trust.  When I see people announcing on YouTube or social media that they have switched to another app, my eyes roll. I've seen it time and time again. If you constantly switch apps, you never build trust in your system. You're always learning a new tool, and things slip through the cracks.  Let me say this: you will never become better at managing time or more productive if you cannot settle on a set of tools and stick with them.  You are not missing out if a new app appears and promises to fix your productivity woes. That's just marketing. Stop falling for it.  The question is, how will you organise your stuff? I use the Time Sector System to organise my tasks, and my notes are organised using a methodology called GAPRA (Goals, Areas, Projects, Resources and Archive).  I have a lot of resources on these organisation methods on my website, so if you want to learn more about them, head over to Carl Pullein.com.  The final part is to do the work.  This involves getting control of your calendar.  Now, here's the thing. If you do not control your calendar or are ignoring it, you will always have difficulty managing your time. While your calendar is the simplest tool in your productivity toolbox, it's also the most powerful.  We all begin each day with the same amount of time. Yet we have different priorities and things we want time for. However, time is fixed. And that's a good thing. It means you have one constant you can work with.  The number of tasks coming at you is not something you can control. You have no idea what will happen today. You don't know how many emails and messages you will get; you don't know what your customers or boss will ask you to do. That side of the equation is not within your control.  Yet, I see so many people trying to control the uncontrollable. That's often where problems begin.  Instead, take some time and look at the different categories of things you need time for. Communications and admin will be two things. It's also likely you will need time for chores and planning. On top of that will be the work you are employed to do.  A lawyer will need time to read and write contracts, prepare cases for court and talk to clients. All this requires time. The question becomes how much time do you want to allocate to these activities each day?  For example, I know that if I dedicate two hours a day to content creation, an hour to communications, and thirty minutes to admin, I will never have any backlogs or be very far behind on my commitments. That's just three and a half hours a day to get important work done.  That means I have just over twenty hours for everything else each day. Take Louis, my dog, for his walk, eat, do chores, sleep and exercise, and, of course, spend time with my family and friends.  We are all different, and we will all have different priorities. Yet, if you control your calendar and are strict with how you allocate your time, you will find you do have time to get everything done. Perhaps not today or tomorrow, but you will have time over the next few weeks.  Doing what I call the backend work matters. That's deciding your priorities and using those to guide your days. If spending time with your family is important, you need to protect time to spend with your family. Hoping you will find time in the future is not a good strategy.  If you're sick and tired of seeing hundreds if not thousands of unread emails in your inbox, they won't disappear because you hope they will. You have to deliberately set aside time to deal with them and then protect time each day to ensure the backlogs don't reappear.  Similarly, if you have projects that are behind schedule, they will not miraculously get back on schedule if all you are applying is hope. You have to set aside time to do the work intentionally.  It's worth pointing out that no new, brilliant AI-inspired calendar or productivity tool will ever do the work for you either. You do the work. It's your time, and only you know what is critical and what is not.  This all comes back to the basic principles. Know what is important to you—develop your areas of focus. You can download my free Areas of Focus workbook from my website.  Make sure you collect and organise your stuff, set aside time to do the work, and then do the work.  It will take time to develop these habits. But it's not impossible if you really want to do it. Allow yourself that time, and within a few weeks you will begin to see notable improvements in your time management and productivity.  Thank you, Win, for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

What's the difference between a project and a goal? That's what we're exploring this week.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Ultimate Productivity Workshop  Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 333 Hello, and welcome to episode 333 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One of the benefits of becoming more organised is that you begin to analyse what you do and why you do it in a little more detail. You start seeing what is important and what is not, what you need to do, what you can pass off to others, and what you can ignore.  And, most importantly, you understand what your areas of focus mean to you.  However, one area I've seen people struggle with is how to define a project and a goal and what the differences are. This week. I hope to clarify that so you know how to use each one.  Before we get to the question, I just wanted to give you a heads-up that September's Ultimate Productivity Workshop is coming up. Registration is open now, and places, as usual, are going fast.  I know there are no quick fixes or that the road from disorganised to organised is easy and problem-free. But if you follow a few core principles, you can build a system that works for the way you work. That is what you will learn in this workshop.  I'd love to see you there. The dates are September 6th and 13th. Both days start at 8:30 pm Eastern Standard Time (that's 5:30 pm if you are on the West Coast of the US).  Full details can be found on my website or in the show notes below.  Okay, on with the show. Which means handing you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Janine. Janine asks, Hi Carl, would you explain the difference between a goal and a project? I find the distinction very confusing.  Hi Janine, thank you for your question. You are not alone in this question. I get asked it a lot.  Let's start with the basics. A project is a desired outcome that requires time and a series of connected tasks to be completed by a given deadline. A simple example of this would be clearing out your garage. This would be a project in that there will be a number of things that need organising, such as a skip (a British word for a large container that you throw large items away in).  You may need to go to the hardware store to buy cleaning materials and storage containers etc.  For this project, you'd set a date for when you would like to do it—say a weekend—and block your calendar so that's what gets all your attention on the given day.  The project is complete once you have achieved the desired result. Now, a goal also has a desired outcome, and it may also have a timeline in that you want to achieve the desired result by a given date.  However, a goal differs in that once the goal is achieved, you will want to maintain it.  A simple example would be if you set a goal to lose twenty pounds by the end of the year. As I am recording this in August, that would give you four months to lose twenty pounds or five pounds a month.  Once you have achieved your goal, though, you are unlikely to want to put those twenty pounds back on. So, a goal's objective is to take you from where you are today to where you want to be in the future.  I like to think of a goal like acting as a course correction engine burn. If you've seen the film Apollo 13 (a brilliant film if you're interested in project management and dealing with crises).  When a spacecraft goes to the moon, it is dealing with a moving object. The moon travels around the earth. Therefore, you need to anticipate where the moon will be when you arrive at its atmosphere. Get that wrong, and you are in trouble. Too shallow, and you would bounce off into outer space. Too steep, and you would burn up in the moon's atmosphere.  This means, from time to time, you need to adjust your course, and that's where the engine burn comes in. You turn on the engines for a few seconds to push you back on course.  That's how goals work in your life.  If you have established what your areas of focus are—these are the eight areas of life we all share that are important to us. For example, family and relationships, your career, health and fitness and finances. If any of these falls out of balance, you can set a goal to push you back on track.  A simple example would be if, as part of your financial area of focus, you save a minimum of $5,000 per year, and currently, you have only saved $1,000 for the year, you would set a goal to get that back in balance. You could increase the amount you save per month by reducing your spending, or you may decide that this year is proving difficult financially, so you choose to increase the amount you save next year—that would become the goal. In many ways, goals are a series of repetitive tasks you perform in order to achieve a specific outcome that improves your life.  A project is rarely repetitive. For instance, I have a project at the moment to record the audiobook version of Your Time Your Way. Sitting down to record the chapters is repetitive, but the content I record is different each time, and I need to share the recorded files with my publisher each week.  The deadline for the project is the end of September. Once done, that's it. My publisher will fine-tune things and add the audiobook to the list of formats available. I no longer have anything to do. The project is complete.  If we return to the weight loss goal, imagine I achieve my goal of losing those twenty pounds; it's not finished. Now, the goal becomes to maintain my weight and avoid anything that would risk putting those twenty pounds back on. That means changing eating and exercise habits.  Similarly, with the financial goal, once everything is back to where it should be, I need to change or add habits to ensure I don't fall behind again.  That's the real purpose of setting goals. To initiate a change that endures.  A project doesn't do that. Once done, it's finished. Often forgotten about.  A project could be your next vacation. Before you arrive at your vacation destination, you have a series of tasks to complete. Research hotels, flights, and car hire, for example. Then, book your hotel, flights and car rental. Pack your clothes and get to the airport on time.  When you return home. The project is complete. Yes, you will hopefully have some nice memories and pictures, but for all intents and purposes, the project is complete.  Now here's the interesting part of goals and projects. Sometimes, a goal can become a project.  Let me explain.  One of my goals is to spend a week at the Goldeneye Resort in Jamaica. It''s not just a goal for me, it's been a dream since I was a teenager. Goldeneye is where Ian Fleming wrote all the James Bond books. And, if you don't know, Ian Fleming is my writing hero.  Today, though, it's just a goal.  To achieve this goal, I will need to save a lot of money. Goldeneye is not a cheap place to stay, and I'm sure the flights will not be cheap either.  So, if I decide I want to go to Goldeneye in twelve months' time—let's say September 2025, I have twelve months to save the money. I would set a goal to save X amount of dollars per month. That goal may involve reducing my expenditure—no more expensive pens, inks and paper (oh no!) and instead putting that money away.  However, the habit I form here is to become more of a saver than a spender, getting into the habit of saving money each month. Now, once we get to April next year, I would need to book a villa at the resort—that would require a little research. This goal has now become a project. There are a series of tasks involved to ensure my wife and I are on the plane flying to Jamaica in September next year.  In other words, the goal is to save money so I can achieve a dream. Once the money is saved, it becomes a project so we arrive at Goldeneye on the right date.  I can see why understanding the difference between a goal and a project is difficult. Although they have many similarities, their functions are quite different.  Think of a goal as something you use to change a habit. A way to move you towards living to the standards you set for yourself in your Areas of Focus. A project is a tool you use to organise a group of tasks that achieve a specific outcome by a given deadline.  As Tony Robbins says: “The reason we set goals is to give our lives focus and to move us in the direction we would like to go.”  And that is the essence of a goal.  One more distinction here is the number of projects and goals you may have. Often, you won't have any control over the number of projects you have. They could be given to you by your work or family.  Goals are personal. You get to decide what they are. It's also important not to try and accomplish too many goals at once. That dilutes your focus and attention.  By their very nature, goals are hard. You are changing habits and moving outside of your comfort zone. If you have too many goals at once, making that change becomes almost impossible. Be patient. Change one thing at a time.  We are all works In progress.  In 2009, I was an overweight, smoking binge drinker. I chose to change that lifestyle and become a healthy, non-smoking runner by the end of the decade.  That involved numerous changes, but the goal was to end the decade healthier, fitter, and stronger than I began it.  I achieved it. Yet, I didn't quit everything on January 1 2010. I took my time. I began by reducing drinking to almost zero. I also started running again.  By 2014, I had completed two marathons and numerous half-marathons and chose to tackle smoking. By 2016, I had quit smoking, and the final part of the goal was to quit sugar—I managed to do that in 2019.  It took ten years to turn my health and lifestyle around. But it was fun. There were challenges—quitting smoking was the hardest, but as I went through the decade, I developed resilience, a stronger mindset and as I saw the results, I maintained my enthusiasm throughout.  So, there you go, Janine. I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you, too, for listening.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

This week is a very special episode.  Earlier, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dr Kourosh Dini, a clinical psychiatrist who is also very prominent in the productivity world with his Waves of Focus programme and his fantastic weekly Wind Down newsletter (which I highly recommend you subscribe to)  I first encountered Kourosh in 2012 when he spoke at the OmniFocus event at MacWorld. I then began following his work.  In this chat, we discuss focus, ADHD, and much more. There's so much in this episode, so get your pens and paper ready—you're going to need them.    Links Learn more about Kourosh's work: Kourosh's website → Waves of Focus → Kourosh's newsletter → Get a $20.00 trial of Waves of Focus membership →     Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page  

Do you feel you never have enough time to do everything on your to-do list? Well, you're not alone. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 331 Hello, and welcome to episode 331 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. How often do you begin the day with a to-do list that you know will be impossible to complete? What does that do to your motivation? If you are like most people, your motivation will sink, and the day becomes another stressful horror show.  Why is that? Why do we find ourselves with a to-do list longer than any reasonable person could complete in a single day? Is it because we are over-ambitious and over-optimistic about our abilities or because we have too much to do?  Well, this week, we will examine some of the causes of this problem and discuss potential solutions. While not necessarily easy to implement, these solutions will give you the necessary breathing room to create realistic, doable days and leave you with enough energy to enjoy your evenings doing what you want.  Now, before I hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, may I ask a favour? If you have been kind enough to buy a copy of my book Your Time, Your Way, could you leave a review? Reviews help other people discover the book, learn better ways to manage their time and their lives and reduce stress, which will ultimately help all of us. Okay, it's time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice, for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Heather. Heather asks, Hi Carl, I have tried for years to use a to-do list, yet after a few days, the list becomes enormous, and I stop looking at it (which makes the list even longer). I've tried all sorts of digital to-do lists and even pen and paper, but nothing works.  How does anyone keep their to-do list manageable so it doesn't become useless? Hi Heather, thank you for sending in your question.  To get to the bottom of this, we need to go back to some basics. That is to understand the relationship between time and activity.  To start, can we all agree that doing anything requires time? Whether taking your dog for a walk, cooking dinner, or meeting up with friends, all activities require some time.  Can we also agree that each day has twenty-four hours?  As long as we accept these two facts—that anything we do requires time and that there are twenty-four hours in a day—we have a solid anchor on which to build a reliable time management system.  When I accepted these two facts, everything changed for the better. It didn't matter how much was on my to-do list if I didn't have the time to complete the tasks.  I remember the days before I accepted this. I used to commute to the university I was teaching at—ninety minutes each way—and then teach for six hours. I had a to-do list with over thirty tasks on it, and I needed to stay two or three hours after my classes to talk with my students.  In effect, my day was doomed the moment I woke up. There was no way I could drive for three hours, teach for six, do two hours of tutorials, and complete thirty tasks. Yet that was what my day looked like each day. That had nothing to do with time management or productivity. It had everything to do with me being unrealistic about what could be done in a single twenty-four-hour period.  And that is where most of our problems start—being unrealistic about what can be done in a single day.  If you are familiar with my Time Sector System—a way to manage your work and time more realistically—you will know about something I call your “core work”. Your core work is the work you are employed to do. It does not include work you have “volunteered” to do—those little favours you do for a colleague or looking something up for your boss. It's just the work you were employed to do. As a university lecturer, I was employed to teach. My core work involved preparing for and delivering my lectures. There was some additional work, such as setting and grading exam papers, but for the most part, my core work was teaching my students.  Sending attendance records and dealing with class time conflicts for my students was not a part of my core work. I did do those tasks, but they were never at the expense of doing my core work.  Establishing what your core work is gives you some advantages. The first is you know what to prioritise each day. As your core work is what you are employed to do, it naturally follows that it will be your top priority for the day.  The second is you learn how long it takes to do your core work. This helps you see what is possible and not possible regarding the work you set for yourself each day.  Let me give you an example. Today, I run a coaching programme. After each coaching call with a client, I write feedback summarising what we discussed and include a little homework for them to do before our next call.  Writing one piece of feedback takes me, on average, twenty minutes. This means I can write around three pieces of feedback per hour. I didn't know this when I first started writing feedback; I only learned this by repeating the same task over and over.  This is an average. Sometimes, it may take me thirty minutes to write one; other times, it may take ten minutes. I am human, and so are you—I hope—which means the time it takes you to do something will vary depending on how much sleep you've had, whether you are stressed or anxious about something. You could be distracted by a colleague, family member, or anything else from a long list of potential factors.  If you try to strictly limit yourself to a precise timeline, you will become stressed out. It's not possible. With your activities, you can only work with averages. Time and the number of tasks you have may be fixed and easily identifiable; however, how long it takes you to do the tasks is not. There are too many variables involved to be able to do that. But averages are fine. Over a week, those things do average out, and you will find that your critical core work is consistently getting done.  However, this goes a step further. Because I know I need one hour a day to write feedback, I can only allow up to three coaching calls a day. If I were to allow four or five calls a day, I would require more time to write the feedback.  Requiring more time to write my feedback would mean I would need to reduce something else. Perhaps I could stop writing my blog posts or newsletters or reduce the number of episodes of this podcast.  Remember, time is fixed—that part of the equation cannot be changed. The only thing that can be changed is the number of tasks you do—i.e. your activity.  Another factor here is that repeating the same task over and over leads to better efficiency, which reduces the time it takes to complete the tasks. If I were to take three of you listeners to a Formula 1 pit lane and we attempted to change the tires on an F1 car as they came in it would take us a long time.  While the tools would be given would be state of the art, and each tyre only has one bolt to undo, our unfamiliarity with the task would slow us down. The pit crews tasked with changing the tyres can do so in less than two seconds. That comes about because they practice. They've done it over a thousand times before.  What you can do is look at your core work and calculate how long it takes you to do that work each week. You may need to monitor this for a week or two, but the exercise will give you some valuable data. Data you can use to plan out your week.  For instance, I discovered that if I dedicated an hour a day to dealing with my actionable emails and messages, I would never have a situation where anyone was waiting longer than 24 hours for a response. There are some days where I cannot reply to all of them, but on the whole, I can stay on top of it all (and that's based on 150 emails on average per day, although not all of them will be actionable). Responding to my actionable email for an hour daily means I have developed the most efficient method possible. I group all my actionable emails in a single folder. When I process my inbox, I can quickly identify anything that needs action and move it to my actionable folder in seconds. I've been following this process for over ten years, and now I can clear around 350 emails from my inbox in less than thirty minutes.  Ten years ago, that would have taken me more than two hours. Repetition is not just the mother of mastery; it's also the secret to getting faster at doing anything. Last week, in one of my newsletters, I wrote that hope is a terrible time management strategy. Hoping you will find time to do your work is never going to work. The only thing that works is to get realistic about what you have to do and how much time you have available.  I've seen so many people tie themselves in knots, trying to perform impossible mental gymnastics to circumvent this fact.  It's only when you stop trying to do the impossible and get real about what you can and cannot do in a day that you start to get control over your time.  So far, I've talked about the constants—your core work—which is known to you. But what about all the unknowns? The agitated client who needs your help urgently or your boss who forgot an important presentation she is due to deliver this afternoon and needs your help to prepare.  One thing you likely will have discovered is that these unknowns are going to happen. Perhaps not every day, but more often than you would like. How do you manage these? This comes back to controlling your calendar. Filling your calendar with appointments and time to do your tasks leaves you vulnerable to all these inevitable unknowns. You will need to create space for these.  Again, this is about being realistic. How many meetings do you have scheduled today? When are they? How much time do you have between them?  Perhaps an additional question is: Do you really have to attend all these meetings? Are there some you could excuse yourself from? Maybe not, but it's worth asking.  I love to ask people if they could guarantee two hours a day where they are undisturbed so they can get on and do their most important work for the day. Would they become more productive? Of course, the answer would be yes.  Why not try that? When you plan the week, find two hours a day for undisturbed, focused work. If you were to look at your calendar next month, could you pre-block those two hours out now? I suspect most of you listening to this could do that. Why not do it now? At least try and see what happens.  There will be days when you cannot do that, and that's fine. If you could do three days out of five where you could, though, you'll soon find yourself becoming more productive.  And that's what it's all about, Heather. Understanding your relationship with time. Time is fixed; you cannot change that. You only have control over what you say yes to and the number of tasks you complete each day. Focus your attention on that part of the equation. Learn what you can realistically complete each day and then get more efficient at doing that work.  I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question, Heather. Thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

This week, is it possible to stay disciplined, or is there a better way to ensure you are consistently doing the things you want to do?   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 330 Hello, and welcome to episode 330 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. When I hear people discussing discipline, I am always interested in hearing about their struggles.  Life is always a struggle. We are often torn between what we want to do and what we must do. I would love to watch my rugby team play live, yet the kick-off time is usually around 2 AM in my time zone, and I know I must be asleep at that time.  I've discussed the importance of daily and weekly planning many times. If you're listening to this podcast, you probably know how valuable a solid weekly planning session is to your overall productivity. The question is, how consistent are you?  It's easy to skip the weekly planning because there's no immediate penalty. You could go through the whole week without any plan and get stuff done. Unfortunately, this approach leads to doing the work of others and never being able to do what you should be doing.  Whether you do or you don't do the right things will always come down to discipline. But is that true? Perhaps not. There is another way, and I will show you that by answering this week's question.  This means it's time now for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Clyde. Clyde asks, hi Carl, I've loved following you and other people who teach time management and productivity skills. I know the concepts and what to do but never do it. I think I am too lazy or lack discipline. Do you have any strategies to help someone like me who lacks discipline?  Great question, Clyde.  Very few people are able to be determinedly disciplined every day. I can think of only one person—David Goggins—who has mastered this. Yet David Goggins was not always like that. If you know his story, it took him many years to develop the resolve and mental strength, and even after all those years, he admits that each day is a struggle.  This means that being consistently disciplined will be an uphill battle for us everyday folk—one we will likely lose.  So, what can we do instead?  I've found that we can develop a set of standards by which to live our lives. This can begin with simple things like going to bed and waking up at a consistent time.  You are likely already doing this; if you are, it will be much easier to set that standard.  The great thing about standards is your mindset changes. Instead of thinking, “I have to wake up at 7:30 every morning”, it becomes something you do. It goes from “I have to wake up at 7:30 to “I wake up at 7:30” because that is who you are.  It took me years to become consistent in writing my journal. During those years, I used to think, “I should write a journal.” The problem with that statement is the word “should.” That single word makes it optional. Remove that word, and now it becomes a standard.  I cannot imagine a day not spending ten minutes writing in my journal after making my coffee. I look forward to sitting down with my favourite pen and journal and writing my thoughts, ideas, and fears on a page. I am a journal writer. It's part of my identity.  Yet I also remember the years of thinking, “I should write a journal”, and never writing one. I began to believe there was a problem with my discipline. The truth was it had nothing to do with my discipline. It was because writing a journal every morning was not a standard I followed. When I was in my final year of high school, my first part-time job was working in a hotel. I was very fortunate because, in the late 1980s, hotels were still focused on quality and personalised service instead of the standardised, automated service most hotels offer today. This meant that everything had to be pristine and in perfect order from the moment a guest walked into reception.  I remember my induction training focused on little things like placing the pencils and notepads on the conference room tables in the exact same way and how the handles of the tea cups should always be placed, with the handle pointing to the right and the teaspoon placed on the left.  Even how the decoration of the plates must always be pointing in the same direction.  I learned those things thirty-five years ago and still follow the same standards today when laying the table for a family meal.  It doesn't feel hard to do that. I have set these standards for myself, and I follow them daily without thought or difficulty. There certainly is no discipline involved.  You may have heard the phrase, “We are creatures of habits”. Well, that's true. We are creatures of habit. If you are not doing a weekly plan, it is because it is your habit not to plan the week. If you are not exercising regularly, it's because you are in the habit of not exercising. It has nothing to do with discipline. But it does have everything to do with the choices we make.  You can choose not to plan the week, or you can choose to plan the week. The question then is, what is your standard? Are you the kind of person who plans the week consistently or not?  Another way I have seen this manifest is through exercise. When I was a teenager, I was a competitive middle-distance runner. I was a sub-four minute 1,500-metre runner at the age of 16.  When I was training, doing a 10-mile run every Sunday was the standard. It didn't matter if it was pouring with rain, snowing, or a gale was howling. It was 10 am Sunday morning, and I'd put my running shoes on and head out the door to begin my ten miler.  I rarely enjoyed it, but it was just something I did. I did it because I saw the benefit every summer when racing on the track.  Today, I am no longer a competitive runner, yet I still do my longer runs on a Sunday. Doing them on any other day seems weird. It breaks my standard.  So, Clyde, it has nothing to do with being lazy. We are all lazy. We inherited that from our ancestors when food was scarce in the winter months, and we needed to conserve energy to survive. The least active people survived the winters. All animals are designed to be lazy.  Yet, because we are naturally lazy, our brains will fight us when we try to change something about the way we live our lives. Change requires a lot of energy and focus; our brain's natural instinct is to stop us from doing that. Routines and habits are safe, and so if you are not currently planning your week or blocking time out for doing your important work, your brain will fight you. And it will continue to fight you until your new habits are embedded.  This is why you will fail if you try and change too much at once. That involves far too much mental energy to remember your new standards. Instead, you pick one thing at a time.  I find changing one thing each quarter works best. This gives you three months to focus your efforts on one thing. That allows you enough time to adjust to your new habit or routine.  At the start of this year, I began a challenge to do at least ten daily push-ups. I knew ten would be easy to do when I was squeezed for time or travelling. I have tracked the number of push-ups I have been doing and noticed that the first week was a struggle. I was doing the minimum.  By the second week, I was doing between twelve and fifteen daily. Six months later, I am consistently doing between fifty and sixty a day, and it doesn't feel any more difficult than when I was doing ten in early January.  Today, doing push-ups before I take my evening shower is something I just do. I don't think about it. I get down on the floor and do them.  So, where would you begin if everything is not working? I suggest weekly planning. It's giving yourself a plan for the week that lays the groundwork for better time management and productivity.  Planning the week gives you time each week to step back and examine your life as a whole, refocusing you on what is important to you. Weekly planning highlights things you may be missing. For instance, you may realise you have not spoken with your brother or sister for a few weeks or have not thought about what you will do for the holidays later in the year.  And it also allows you to look ahead and make sure nothing significant has been missed and, more importantly, to plan out your week so it is balanced between your work and personal lives. You will find that dedicating the same time each week to your weekly planning helps you become consistent. I've found Saturday mornings are usually the best time to do it. The week is still fresh in your mind, and once done, you can enjoy the weekend without worrying about the week ahead.  It's much harder to be consistent and set a standard if you try to do the weekly planning at different times each week. You set the standard that you sit down and plan the week ahead at 8:00 a.m. every Saturday morning. That's your standard.  This helps your family, too, because they know you do your weekly plan each Saturday morning. They will leave you alone and let you get on with it. (Hopefully)  This goes with anything you want to be more consistent with. Learning new things, for example, can be done in the evenings before bed. That hour before I go to bed has become one of my favourite times of the day. I get to sit down with my commonplace book and learn something new. Last week, I learned how to make the “perfect” cup of coffee and how to do a proper double-edged safety razor wet shave.  Learning something new each day has become a standard for me. Going to bed now without learning something feels strange. It doesn't have to be something deep. It can be anything you might be interested in at that moment. The standard you set is about learning something new, not learning something specific.  So there you go, Clyde. Stop trying to be disciplined. That is very hard to do. Instead, set yourself standards. These are things that you just do because that is the person you are. You are the kind of person who clears their actionable email each day. The kind who plans their week and allocates one or two hours a day for doing the important things.  Thank you for your question, Clyde. And thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

What can you do to be productive when you have a chronic illness or a very unpredictable schedule? That's what we're looking at today.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page   Script | 329 Hello, and welcome to episode 329 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. It's a daily challenge to protect our time and stay focused enough to get our work done. It becomes even harder when we don't get enough sleep or are worried about something in our personal life.  Yet, if you are suffering from a chronic illness or recovering from one, this challenge becomes exponentially more difficult. Not only are you trying to get work done, but you will also face unpredictable tiredness, low energy, difficulty consistently doing your work, or even knowing if you can do any work today.  This means planning the week is almost impossible, and you'll find yourself frequently changing events and meetings on your calendar.  The good news is there are things you can do that don't make you even more tired.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Mia. Mia asks, do you have any productivity tips or advice for those with chronic illness? Or just those who have incredibly unpredictable schedules? I'd love to find a way to be more productive that doesn't feel stressful, but obviously, time management is difficult for me.  Hi Mia, thank you for your question.  With illness, the priority is always to avoid making things worse. This means prioritising rest above everything else. Naturally, this can be difficult as an employee because of your company's demands. Hopefully, you have an understanding boss.  It's also tricky if you are self-employed, as your work may be your only source of income.  So, given that you must prioritise rest and recovery, the place to start is with your calendar. Don't start with your task manager—that will never help you. All that will do is remind you that you have a lot of things to do. It will never tell you if you have the time to do it. Only your calendar can do that.  Before opening your calendar, though, ask yourself when you will most likely be focused and have some energy. That could be in the morning if you are a morning person or perhaps in the evening if you are a night owl. It's this time you want to be protecting.  However, there's an important factor to consider. According to recent research, and as Andrew Huberman points out, we focus in ninety-minute cycles.  In other words, we can focus for about ninety minutes before needing a rest. However, that time will reduce if you are ill or recovering from an illness. Depending on the severity of your illness, the amount of time you can focus on before needing a rest could be very short. A couple of years ago, I worked with a client who was suffering from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and her focus time was around twenty minutes before requiring a four-hour rest. Fortunately, she was on long-term sick leave, but being an ambitious person, she wanted to readjust her lifestyle so she could better cope when her condition improved.  When you know your focus time ability, you can better plan a schedule that allows you to get at least some things done.  For instance, if you know you focus better early in the morning, plan your focus block of time then. You want to work with your natural rhythms rather than fighting against them. It's tough when you're not sick to fight your natural rhythms; when you are sick or recovering from an illness, it will work against you and leave you more tired.  When planning the week, try to book meetings and appointments when you are not at your most focused. There's something about human interaction that produces its own natural energy.  This means that if you are a morning person, you would schedule a block of time in the morning for doing your most important work for the day, then give yourself a sufficient break before allowing one or two meetings in the afternoon.  The good thing about this approach is if you feel strong and can go a little longer with your focus time, you have the flexibility to do so. Although, be careful here.  I usually need to wake up early Monday and Tuesday morning for calls. I only get three or four hours of sleep on Sunday and Monday nights. I find that on Tuesday afternoons and evenings, I am exhausted. Knowing this, I don't schedule much work but keep things as free as possible, so I am not trying to push myself too hard.  If I push through on a Tuesday, I am also tired on Wednesday. If I back off a little on a Tuesday afternoon, it will give me time to recover, and I can be back on point on Wednesday. If you schedule this during a weekly planning session, you can protect time for focused work before anyone tries to schedule more meetings with you.  Okay, so that's the weekly planning taken care of. Now, how do you deal with the unpredictability of suffering from a chronic illness? This is where having a weekly objective comes in.  Whether you are suffering from a chronic illness or not, one thing you will likely have discovered is that, being human, your energy and motivation ebbs and flows. Some days, you're on fire and in the zone; others, everything is a struggle. The trouble is, it's impossible to predict when this will happen.  The mistake we all make is thinking tomorrow will be the same as today or better, yet that's not guaranteed. When you set objectives for the week rather than the day, if you do have a bad day or two, you can still recover and get what needs to be done, done. Another thing to work on is establishing your daily non-negotiables. In my case, they are walking Louis, my little Yorkshire Terrier, getting a minimum of twenty minutes of exercise and spending at least thirty minutes responding to my actionable emails and other messages.  What are your daily non-negotiables beyond getting enough sleep and the right nutrition?  Whatever they are, they need scheduling, so you protect time for them.  I would also recommend scheduling your rest times too. Rest and recovery are a big part of your rehabilitation when you are ill. This becomes a hard must-do each day—whether you want to or not. Not getting sufficient rest will delay your recovery, which is never good.  Scheduling your rest time also brings some predictability to your days and week. If you know you will rest between 10:30 am and 2:30 pm, you can better schedule your tasks and appointments in the day. You have a hard block for four hours in the middle of your day, and whether you need the rest or not, at least you know you have it in reserve.  Now, what about the people with unpredictable schedules? I was thinking about what types of work this would be and thought of firefighters and emergency room medical professionals. No day will be the same; some days could be very quiet, others extremely busy and stressful.  In these situations, you will find that this type of work involves shifts. You're either on shift or not. When I was working in hotels, we worked shifts, and there was no way I could expect to do any focused work while I was on shift. It was impossible to predict when things would be chaotic or quiet.  To do focused work, you need protected time. If you are not confident you will get the peace and quiet needed, you will be on edge, waiting for the next interruption. This is not a great place to be mentally when trying to do your most important work.  The only real option is to structure your days so that when you are on shift, you allow yourself the freedom to do light, easy tasks such as admin and communications. These rarely need a lot of focus and can usually be done little by little.  You can save the tasks you need to concentrate on for an hour or two when you are not on shift. Once you structure your weeks in this way, if you are asked to produce a piece of work by a given date, you can check your calendar to ensure you have enough non-shift days to do the work you are asked to do.  It's worth remembering that we are all limited by the hours we get each day. We can leverage this by hiring assistants and other people to do some of our work, but that option is not available for all of us. And you cannot delegate important things such as rest, family time, and working on your health to other people.  When you work shifts, much of the decision-making is taken away from you. You're on shift, and your job is to help people. For those hours you are working your shift, that's what you do. If there is downtime, take advantage by doing the little things that have a bad habit of accumulating, but never schedule something important when you are working. Leave those tasks for when you are off shift.  The key, Mia, is to get very strict with your calendar and trust that it will do its job for you. This does involve you not ignoring your calendar. You can reschedule or delete things but not ignore them. You need to trust something, and your calendar serves you. You can trust it.  I hope that has helped, and thank you for your question, Mia.  Before I go, my book, Your Time Your Way, is now available in Kindle, soft back, and hardback versions. The links are in the description below.  Thank you for listening. It is now my turn to wish you all a very productive week.   

This week, what are the basics of time management?  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get Your Time Your Way | Time Well Managed. Life Well Lived. Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course. Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 327 Hello, and welcome to episode 327 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. A lot has been spoken and written about time management over the years. This has made the whole space of time management confusing when, in reality, time management is simple—or it should be. Today's question concerns all this and, more importantly, how to return to the basics of time management so you can regain control and not feel guilty about not doing things when more important things need doing.  Now, before we get to the question, just a quick reminder that Your Time, Your Way is now out in Kindle, Soft and hardback formats. You can get it right now and start building the foundations to live the life you want to live.  Your Time, Your Way is a book, yet to me, it's much more than that. It'a also a manual to build a resilient time management system that will work in the background for you.  If you have already bought the book, thank you so much. Could you do me a little favour and leave a review? That really helps to get the book in more people's hands, which can only benefit all of us. The more people who operate using these principles, the easier it will be to manage meetings and requests.  Anyway, back to this episode, and that means it's time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Robert. Robert asks, hi Carl, what do you suggest I do when, no matter how hard I try, I just cannot get control of my calendar? I try to block time out for my core work, but then I get so many meeting requests I have to either delete them or reschedule. It's driving me crazy!  Thank you, Robert, for your question. A good place to start is to look back at your calendar for the last two or three weeks and see where your time is going. How many internal meetings did you attend?  There's a difference between internal and external meetings. Hopefully, your external meetings—with customers, for instance—are important. However, you should look more closely at your internal meetings. Were they valuable? Did you really need to attend them?  One important metric to consider is how many hours each week you spend in internal meetings.  Internal meetings are, by their very nature, places where you talk about the work. Work rarely gets done. The biggest waste of time for people is those team update meetings. These benefit no one and just drag people away from doing their work. A good manager sets up systems and processes so that their team maximise their work time and minimises their meeting time.  One thing you can do is set a limit on the number of hours you attend each week. For instance, you may choose to limit your internal meeting time to ten hours per week. Once that time is taken, you accept no more meeting requests that week.  This approach has two benefits. The first is you can confidently create time blocks for your core work around these ten hours. The second benefit is if anyone in authority challenges you about declined meetings, you have evidence to show you are being asked to attend too many meetings.  If your manager objects to this limit, you can increase the limit, but you do so in a way that they are fully aware of the time involved and how that will reduce your available work time.  There is always a conflict within a corporation between the managers, whose job is to fill their calendars with meetings, training sessions, and one-on-ones, and the producers—the people who produce the work—whose goal is to minimise events on their calendars so they can get on and do their work.  However, some compromise is needed here. Managers can only do their jobs if they know what's going on and can give guidance and instruction when necessary. To do that, they need meetings. Equally, producers need to communicate what is being done, where there may be areas of difficulty and to ensure what they are working on is the right work.  One thing that will always destroy any attempts to become better at managing time is to treat everything that comes your way as urgent. That's never likely to be the case. Most things are not urgent and are tasks that are being passed off to buy the sender some time. Here's something you can try when you are asked to do something. Default to doing it next week. This means if you receive a message asking you to do something, you respond with a reply, saying you will do it and get it to them next week. Avoid giving a specific date. Just say I will get it to you next week.  This tests how urgent something really is. The worst that can happen is the receiver replies, telling you it is needed sooner than next week. Okay, now you know it is urgent.  I do this all the time, and I can say that 90% of the time, I get the response thanking me, and that will be fine. The remaining 10% or so usually reply with something along the lines of “Could you do it sooner?”—which still gives me a choice.  Of all the things in the productivity world, the only thing you have that is constant is time. You are not really managing time. Instead, you are managing your activities within that time. This is great because you have at least one constant and that means you can do something with it.  Sadly, the second part of this equation is never fixed and will never stop. That is stuff to do. There will always be something to do. The trouble is because time is fixed; you have to solve a puzzle each day. How to fit in the right pieces of activity into your limited time.  If you do not know what your areas of focus are—the things that are important to you as an individual—and your core work—the work that is important in your job, you never have a reference to decide what should go on your calendar each day. Your areas of focus and core work give you your priorities, which means you can better choose what needs to be done each day. Without knowing them, everything will be important and urgent; in other words, nothing is important and urgent.  This means it's important to step back and think about what is important—a way to pre-decide what will get your attention and what will not. This avoids having to make too many decisions each day—something that will inevitably leave you feeling exhausted and worn out.  That's one of the reasons why I stress the importance of establishing your areas of focus and core work. It might take you a few weeks or months even to work these out, but the time it will save you in the long term makes this essential.  If you really want to get control of your calendar, Robert, then begin with what you want time for and fix it in your calendar when you do your weekly planning. If you would like forty-five minutes a day for exercise, then get it on your calendar and treat it as a non-negotiable part of your day.  Taking Louis out for a walk each day is non-negotiable for me. Not only is it important for Louis to get outside, but it's also important for me as it gets me away from a screen. It also means I am moving—something we humans are designed to do. It's one hour out of 24. It's not much to ask.  Also, be aware of how much time you are spending on the hidden task admin. That's the emails, messages and additional check-ins required when you accept tasks from other people. It's never as simple as preparing a presentation. There are likely to be additional time commitments such as more emails, requests to add things from other people and, of course, the inevitable meetings.  If you've ever been asked to join a committee, you will have discovered that the one or two hours a week you were promised is never one or two hours. You'll be expected to read reports, agendas, and meeting minutes and submit ideas. Those one or two hours very quickly become six or eight hours a week.  A couple of years ago, I agreed to do a series of interviews for an organisation. I thought a one-hour interview every month would be easy. All I would need would be an hour of research and preparation for each interview and the interview itself—two hours a month at most.  Hahaha, that's not what happened. The research often took three or four hours; then there was submitting the proposed questions to the organisation, the back-and-forth trying to set up the interview time, and the requests for changes in the questions I proposed. In total, I found that those expected two hours a month turned into ten hours.  This goes back to one of the most basic laws of time management. Things will always take longer to do than you initially anticipate.  If you really want to master your time, getting control of your calendar is the most important part. This means you have to be strict and ruthless. That said, what you will find if you do is people will start respecting your time much more. If you are tow available, you lose that respect. It'll always be, “Oh, ask Robert; he'll do it for you”, and boom, you have more work to do. Saying no every so often is one of the best ways to get your time back. Sadly, so few people have the courage to do it. Instead of finding solutions, they find excuses as to why they are different and must remain available to everyone. Good luck with that strategy. I've never found anyone who could make that work.  I hope that has helped, Robert. Thank you for your question. And if you have not got your copy of Your Time, Your Way yet, you can get it now. The link is in the show notes.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

Three years ago, I began a journey that came to an end last Saturday. Today, I want to share that journey with you, what I learned and how my journey can help you become better at managing your time and ultimately be more productive.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   Get Your Copy Of Your Time, Your Way: Time Well Managed, Life Well Lived   Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 327 Hello, and welcome to episode 327 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. My book, Your Time, Your Way, Time Well Managed! Life Well Lived!, was published last Saturday. It is the end result of a three-year journey that began with the idea of putting everything I have learned about better managing time together so you have enough time to spend with your loved ones, enjoy the hobbies you have always wanted to participate in, and so much more without feeling drained, overwhelmed, and rushed.  The book is a manual for taking control of your time and making the things you want to do happen without stress or overwhelm. It gives you a complete roadmap for making time work for you instead of working against you. But more on the contents later. From a productivity perspective, when you begin a project like writing a book, there is one critical starting point: getting started. What often happens, and is the reason so few people do any of their personal projects or achieve goals, is that too much time is wasted in the thinking and planning stage.  There's a comfort in dreaming and thinking about landscaping your garden (backyard). That dreaming can be very seductive. It allows you to believe you are doing something about your project—‘I'm doing the planning'—yet nothing is happening. Your garden is not getting landscaped.  This book was two years in the planning stage (I am not immune to being seduced by the dream). I was even telling people, “I'm currently writing a book.” That was a lie. I wasn't “writing” anything. I was dreaming of writing a book. I was stuck in the planning stage.  To get yourself out of that delusion—as that is what too much planning is, a delusion—you need to start doing something. Every project has a beginning. That could be visiting the local hardware store to purchase the tools you will need or, in my case, when writing a book, to write the introduction (this gives me a mini-outline of what I want to write about). Do that first step.  The next critical part of any project, whether professional or personal, is to decide how much time you are willing to give it each week. You are unlikely to be able to estimate how long a big project will take accurately. There are too many unknowns, and if you involve other people, there will inevitably be delays.  The only thing you have control over is your time. You don't control other people's time—even if you are a boss. So, how much time are you willing to or are able to give to the project each week? Once you know how much time you are giving the project each week, schedule it.  Personal projects can be worked on in the evening and at weekends, while professional ones can be done during work hours.  One thing you will eventually learn about time management is hoping you will find the time to do something is not a good strategy. It never works. If you want time to work on something, anything, you need to protect the time. Whether that is going out for a family walk in the evenings, washing your car or writing a letter to your aunt in New Zealand.  Time management works when you are intentional about it. In other words, you must protect time for the things you want to do.  When the early version of Your Time, Your Way went out to a select group of readers, many commented that it took over fifty pages to get to talking about time. That was intentional.  Too often, books on productivity and time management are about showing you how to squeeze in more and more. That is not the purpose of this book. Not only is that approach unsustainable, it's also unhealthy. Instead, my approach is to encourage you to start by thinking about your life as a whole. What do you want out of your life? What is important to you? While we share eight areas—family and relationships, career/business, finances, health and fitness, self-development, lifestyle and life experiences, spirituality, and life's purpose—how we define these are different for each of us. That means what we want out of these areas will also be different.  The order of priority is also different. As we go through life, the priority of these will change. When you are young, career/business and perhaps lifestyle and life experiences will be high on your list. As you age, health and finances may creep up towards the top. Again, we will all be different here.  Knowing what is important to you is the foundation of a well-lived life. It also shows you how to best use your limited resource of time so you spend more of it doing the things you want to do.  It was very tempting to begin the book with lists of tips and tricks for managing time, but I knew that would not help you in the long term. It's a quick-fix approach that quickly leads to slipping back into old habits.  When you begin by identifying what is important to you, you give yourself a self-generating motive for getting out of bed with enthusiasm, and it naturally gives you a purpose each day. You are spending a large portion of your day on the things you know are important to you. But more than that, knowing your areas of focus and what they mean to you gives you clarity that helps you make decisions. If you have identified your family and friends as being important to you and you work in a company that expects you to work late and at weekends, you may wish to consider looking for an alternative job. That could mean you need to change companies or perhaps your career.  Not identifying what is important to you will likely leave you stuck in a job or career that leaves you feeling deflated, unhappy and trapped. Showing you how to do more in less time is not going to help you in that situation. All it will do is leave you feeling more unhappy, trapped and lost.  Your Time, Your Way takes you through the key time management techniques of COD (Collect, Organise and Do) and the Time Sector System. It explains how to choose the right UCT (Universal Collection Tool) for you and how to plan your week and day using the Planning Matrix.  Yet, more than that, it also shows you how to develop a morning routine that will set you up for the day and give you some time for yourself—something often lost when we begin a career and a family and are trying to juggle getting kids ready for school, with ensuring you have saved the presentation file you need today to your OneDrive account.  I've also included a chapter on managing your email. I know so many people struggle to stay on top of emails and other messages. It can be a never-ending struggle. Yet, the process I teach you in the book will give you a framework you can adopt that will ensure you are never behind with your communications, and you will begin to enjoy communicating through email and other messaging services (no, really you will, I promise)  One of the chapters many of the pre-readers say they enjoyed most was the chapter on common pitfalls. This chapter lists the most common issues you will face as you develop your own system and shows you how you can avoid them or, if they are already embedded, how to get out of them so you unblock any problems quickly and effectively.  This chapter draws on my experience working with people from all walks of life and multiple different jobs, from senior executives to stay-at-home parents, all of whom face different challenges as well as some common ones.  Ultimately, though, no matter how much you have to do, you still only have twenty-four hours each day. Understanding that and knowing what you want time for will give you a huge advantage over your peers—well, the ones who don't read this book.  It gives you a framework on which to create a structure that safeguards time for the things you want time for—not just in your personal life—which often gets sacrificed by our work life—but also for the critical things in your professional life, such as career development, having enough time each day to deal with communications, and your all-important core work—the work you were employed to do.  While writing this book, I quickly learned that many productivity best practices are not just best practices but laws. To write a book, you need to write. Wasting time trying out different writing tools does write a book. The only way to write a book is to write. That's the same for anything you want to do. To landscape your garden, you need to get outside and dig, build and plant.  To do that, you will need to protect time. That means blocking out time on your calendar that is dedicated to doing the work.  And, the best law of all—it will always take you longer to do than you imagine. I expected this book to take around twelve to eighteen months. It took nearly forty. I laugh at myself now for being so optimistic. But now the book is available, I can honestly say that the journey has been incredible. Frustrating at times, yes, but that was always going to be part of the journey.  Whatever you want to do, please enjoy the journey. Find the time, protect it and just start. You will discover things about yourself you never knew. You'll learn patience, how to deal with setbacks and frustration and, more importantly, how to overcome those setbacks. Each project, whether it is writing a book, landscaping your backyard or building a career, will teach you things that you can take with you into your next endeavour and give you skills and know-how for the next time you embark on a journey.  All that remains for me to do now is to ask you to buy Your Time Your Way: Time Well Managed! Life Well Lived! Get control of your time so you can live the life you want to live. The link to purchase the book is in the show notes. Thank you for listening, and it just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

This week's question is all about unpredictability and the struggle to find some kind of structure in your day.   You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course. Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 326 Hello, and welcome to episode 326 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. In an ideal world, we would be able to set our calendar for the week and allow it to flow from one event to another while getting all our work done in a timely and relaxed way.  Sadly, that ideal world does not exist and never will. Life is unpredictable, and for the most part, we are dealing with other people who likely do not share our priorities or long-term vision and, in some cases, expect you to drop everything to deal with their crisis or problem.  This week's question goes to the heart of these issues: how do you cope when your carefully laid plans are destroyed by events and the urgencies of the people around you?  So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Max. Hi Carl, I work in a job with competing demands. I can plan most things ahead but occasionally get asked, often at the last minute, to complete tasks that require an immediate or 24-hour turnaround. How do I fit these into my planning schedule so my other work plans are not thrown into chaos? Hi Max, thank you for your question.  When asked what was most likely to blow governments off course, former British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan replied, "Events, dear boy, events."  Well, the truth is, it's not just governments that can be blown off course; we as individuals can also be blown off course by events, too.  Around three years ago, I carefully planned a day to record the update to my Apple Productivity course. I had set up the studio the night before, checked my notes, and went to bed comfortably with the knowledge that nothing could stop me from getting the recording done the next day.  Around 7:00 am, I woke up and noticed our beloved Yorkshire Terrier was looking very sick. He had thrown up his food and was unable to get up off the floor.  He was old and suffered from a heart condition, and I knew something was terribly wrong. My wife was 50 miles up the coast staying with a friend, so I called her immediately, put Barney into the car and set off to pick my wife up before going to the vet.  Barney passed away that day, and for the next two days, I was certainly not in the mood to record anything. The whole day was a nightmare.  Later that day, I looked at my appointments for the next day and cancelled them all. No one objected; everyone understood, and I was able to mourn the passing of my best friend (anyone who has a dog will understand that one) for a couple of days without the worry of work. Whenever you are thrown off course by events, and your plans for the week get destroyed, it's easy to think everything's destroyed. Yet, is it? You see, we always have the power to renegotiate deadlines, put off a few things for a day or two, stop and review what has happened and reschedule a few of the lower-value things.  However, probably the most powerful thing you can do is to build some structure into your day. I learnt this from possibly the most productive and relaxed person I have ever worked with.  Andrew was one of the first bosses I ever had, and he would arrive at work at 8:30 am each day, walk into his office and close the door for 15 minutes. That was his sacred time, and everything could wait until he was finished.  What Andrew was doing was going through his mail (it was paper back then—no email in those days), reviewing his calendar (a beautiful A4 leather folio with a week to view) and writing down the five most important things that needed to be done that day.  He would then open his door, and he was available again.  Andrew would block time out on his calendar each day for doing those five or six tasks. Some would be lengthy, requiring an hour or two; others may be a simple follow-up call with one of his leadership team members.  On the occasions I saw Andrew's diary, I saw that he always had at least thirty minutes between meetings and blocked time. The time blocks were written in pencil, and the meetings were in blue ink. As he completed his tasks, he would cross them out.  Those gaps in his diary were to deal with the unknowns that inevitably came up each day. The chairman may have called and demanded a change to the marketing plan for that week, or there may have been an accident in the workshop that needed dealing with. None of these were predictable and my guess is you also have a few unpredictable tasks and events occurring each day.  The best thing you can do is plan for them.  While you may not know the precise nature of these unknowns, what you do know is that there will always be a few each day. You will likely not know what the crisis will be, but if you work on the principle that there will be a crisis each day, you can at least leave sufficient time to deal with it.  What about the constants in your day? We all have communications to deal with—email, Teams or Slack messages—and admin.  These are what I call my constants, and as such, I know I will need some time each day to deal with them.  As I'm sure you've discovered already, skip responding to your messages for one day, and you have double the amount to do the next day—which means you need double the amount of time as well. If you are already squeezed, how will you find double the amount of time tomorrow? You won't. And that leads to backlogs building up.  If, in an ideal world, you would like an hour a day for managing your communications, but owing to interruptions and emergencies, you only have thirty minutes one day, take it. Thirty minutes is better than nothing. Doing a little each day will keep the mountain from becoming impossible.  The key is consistency. Be consistent with your constants.  In my world, there's always content to create. Blog posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, and newsletters don't create themselves. Content creation is a daily constant, so I set aside two hours each day for it. For the most part, my content creation time is 9:30 to 11:30 am each weekday morning. However, owing to some unknown, there will always be one or two days when that will not be possible. Okay, so All I need do is look for another suitable time that day, and if that's not possible, I will have to look for another day.  Every productive person I have met or learned about does this, and every unproductive, disorganised person I have met or learned about doesn't.  The artist Picasso was available for anyone and everyone until after lunch. Once lunch was over, he'd disappear into his studio and paint for four or more hours without allowing anyone to disturb him. Maya Angelou hid herself away in a local motel bedroom from 7 am until 2 pm. It was only after she emerged from that room that she was available to other people.  You do not have to be that extreme, but the point is if you have work to do, Max, you need to protect time to do it. No one can escape that. Hoping time will miraculously appear is not a great strategy.  The only strategy that works is protecting time and respecting that time.  What I have discovered is that when someone asks you to do something by a certain time, the deadline they give you is based on their estimation of how long the task would take them to complete, given their current workload. It is not based on your current workload or ability to complete the task.  Recently, I was asked to record a two-minute video for a partner. The person asking me had never recorded and edited a video like this before and asked if I could send it over by the end of the week. Given that I was asked to do the task on Thursday evening, I instantly knew it would be a tall order to complete the task. Recording the video would take fifteen to twenty minutes, and the editing would likely take three or four hours.  I accepted the task but asked if I could send the edited video over the next week. The response was, “Great! Thank you so much for doing this for us.” That was an easy negotiation. Yet, unless you try, you will never know.  I could have panicked, removed some of my planned work, and completed the video by the end of the week, but, as so often is the case, the deadline was not really a deadline; it was a guess and an attempt to make me treat the task as urgent.  You owe it to yourself to explore the potential for negotiation on deadlines.  Every one of us will be different. We do different jobs, and we have multiple responsibilities related to family, friends and our work. Just because I think you can do something by tomorrow doesn't mean you can. Only you know if something is possible.  And always remember, if you are given 24 to 48 hours' notice of a deadline, the problem is not yours. It's the person who left it so late to ask you for help. You are always in a stronger negotiating position in these circumstances.  Now this is entirely different to being reminded of an impending deadline that you have known about for several weeks. That's on you and is your mistake.  In these circumstances, that would be an indication that your weekly planning is failing and needs looking at.  Ultimately, Max, if the work you do involves frequent last-minute deadlines when you plan the week, these need to be taken into account. I have a flexible day on a Thursday to catch up. I don't plan any content work on Thursdays. I try to schedule meetings and leave enough free space to catch up on anything that may be behind schedule for the week.  This week, I used that time to send my accountant the VAT receipts she'd asked for and finish this script. Next week? Who knows what I will need the time for?  I hope that has helped, Max. Thank you for your question, and thank you to you too for listening.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

This week, it's time to slow down.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course. Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 325 Hello, and welcome to episode 325 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. How often have you rushed to complete a task only to find you did it wrong or misunderstood what was required and wasted several hours doing something that wasn't required? It happens to all of us, yet it can be one of the biggest drags on your overall productivity. But here's the reassuring part: it has an easy fix. A simple change in approach can make a significant difference in your productivity and time management.  One of the advantages of the Time Sector System is it helps you to slow down by asking when you will do something rather than saying “yes” to everything and finding you have no time to do it. This then causes you to rush to complete urgent tasks (which may not be important tasks), leaving behind the important tasks.  Speed kills productivity, which may sound ironic, given that we think of productivity as doing things quickly and efficiently. And that is true, but speed ignores the “efficiency” part. Targeted speed is what you want, but to get fast at something takes practice and following a process. Without that practice and a process to follow, you leave yourself wide open to time-destroying mistakes that will need more time to rectify.  And this is what this week's question is all about.  So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from John. John asks, Hi Carl, I have so many tasks, and whenever I try to get them done, I end up having to redo them because I rushed and misunderstood the task or the request was unclear. How do you overcome these kinds of problems?  Hi John, thank you for your question.  This is a speed issue. Now, this might be part of your work culture, or it could be the expectations of your customers and bosses. The demands of others can create a sense that everything is urgent, and this leads to trying to do something that requires a little thought too fast. The result being mistakes are made or the wrong thing getting done.  One of the most important parts of becoming more productive and better at managing time is slowing down. I know that might sound contrary to what you think improving productivity is all about, but you will only improve your productivity if what you do each day is the right thing and at the highest quality you are capable of.  If Toyota wanted to increase the speed at which they produced a car, they could easily do it. Instead of screwing on the front bumper with twenty turns of the screw, they could reduce that to ten. On one car, that might save one or two seconds, yet over hundreds of thousands of cars, that adds up to hours saved.  Yet, it would be a false economy. Within a few weeks, many of those cars would be returning to their dealerships with hanging-off front bumpers. The impact on their dealership's time and costs would be huge. Plus, it would destroy their reputation for quality. It would be disastrous for them in terms of costs, productivity and reputation.  Yet, so many people fall into this trap every day. They think if they rush and take shortcuts to get more things done, their productivity will improve. It won't. What it will do is create a lot of unnecessary work fixing the mistakes that were made in haste.  So what can you do? The first step is to look at the work you regularly do. Where are the processes? We all get email, Slack and Teams messages. What's your process for handling these?  There are two approaches to your communications. You can react instantly each time a message comes in. We often think this looks good. It shows we are on the ball, quick and efficient. Yet are you? Sure, some messages may require a quick yes or no, but what about those messages asking for your thoughts on something? Do you ever stop and think about your response? And then what happens to your other work? The work that is likely to be much more important? All this stopping to respond to a message and then starting again is slowing you down considerably. Of course, at the moment, you don't notice that slow down. After all, you're rushing from one thing to the next. You're busy, and you're moving fast.  But what's happening to the important work in front of you? It's not moving forward. You stop, respond to a message, then you come back to the work, and you have to refresh yourself—where were you, what were you writing, where are the reference materials? It's so easy to lose an hour or two just getting back to where you were before you allowed yourself to be interrupted.  That is not being productive. It's the reverse.  The biggest gain in productivity in car manufacturing plants was the introduction of robots. Robots don't get interrupted. They do their job without the need to respond to emails, messages and questions from colleagues. They don't need to attend meetings. As soon as you turn on the robot, it does its assigned job at the correct speed and in the correct order.  If you were to disrupt the assembly line by misaligning a chassis or not placing a wheel in the right place, that mistake would be catastrophic. Everything would come to a halt until the mistake was corrected.  For some reason, we rarely see that in ourselves. Stopping in the middle of doing focused work to respond to an email or message is disrupting your flow in the same way. It takes a disproportionate amount of time to recover and get back online.  The alternative approach is to develop a process for managing your communications. One way, for example, is to start your day by clearing your inboxes. Filter out the messages and emails you don't need to respond to, delete the junk, and move your actionable messages to an Action This Day folder.  Then, assign thirty minutes to an hour later in the day to respond to those actionable messages. Fixing that time each day helps your reputation, as your colleagues and clients quickly learn your patterns. That may not always be possible, but each day, having an amount of time for managing your communications takes the pressure off having to respond instantly, and it improves your productivity because you can focus on doing your work to the level of quality expected of you.  This also has the advantage of giving you time to think. Because when you are responding to your actionable emails and messages, you've had time to think and respond in a clear, considered way. That improved communication means you receive fewer messages asking for clarification.  For the most part, our work does not need speed. Whether you reply to an email now or in a couple of hours is not going to create an issue (seriously, it's not!) or responding to your boss's Teams message this second or in twenty minutes.  We may have conditioned ourselves to believe these things need a speedy response, but they don't. You will not lose a client because it took you two hours to respond to their email, and your boss will not fire you because it took you twenty minutes to reply to their message.  One thing that will happen if you slow down, though, is you won't make as many mistakes, and the quality of your work will improve. On top of that, when you remove the sense of urgency, you instantly calm down and feel a lot less stressed.  One thing I urge all my coaching clients to do is set aside an hour or two each day for undisturbed focus work. If you work a typical eight—or nine-hour day, protecting two of those hours still leaves you with six to seven hours when you are available for everyone else. Surely that is more than enough time? Knowing that you have two hours each day without being disturbed relieves a lot of pressure. However, this only works if you take control of your calendar. It means you plan your week—finding two hours a day and protecting them—and then decide what you will do with that time on a daily basis.  And that is a process: weekly planning to ensure you have sufficient time to complete your important work and daily planning to assign work based on the changing priorities that happen to all of us. If you can fix that to the same time each week and day, you will go a long way towards radically improving your productivity.  It doesn't matter if you are an accountant in a busy accountancy firm, a lawyer or a salesperson. Everything you do on a regular basis can be turned into a process. I have CEOs in my coaching programme who begin preparing for their board meetings fourteen days before the meeting. The preparation time is blocked out in their calendar, and it's given an appropriate priority. The steps they take to collect all the information and the document they set it out in are the same each time. They follow a process.  Processes reduce the thinking time required to do a task. This naturally speeds up your work performance without compromising quality. Because you follow the same steps each time, you know where you are with the work. It also helps you to identify areas where improvements can be made.  Whenever I watch Formula 1 racing, I'm amazed at the speed at which the pit crews can change four tyres. Two years ago, the McLaren team broke the record with a time of 1.82 seconds. In the last race in Monaco, almost every team was changing the tyres in under two seconds. That wasn't an accident. That was a process.  The pit crews will have analysed in the minutest of detail how McLaren was able to do 1.82 seconds and changed their processes ever so minutely. That analysis has saved them, on average, three-tenths of a second. A tiny amount, yes, but in Formula 1, every tenth of a second counts.  If you watch the pit crews at work in a race, they are not panicking. Each person knows exactly what to do and in what order. It's fast because it's so smooth, and it's repeated over and over again.  You are not going to be able to turn everything into a process. Many projects you work on are unique. However, if you look at your work as a whole, there will be multiple individual pieces of work you repeat each day. It's that work you should be looking at for the potential to create a process.  In my work, I've turned writing books, blog posts, newsletters and client feedback into processes. I've eliminated unnecessary actions and slimmed everything down so that when I sit down to work on something, I can begin instantly without the need to waste time looking for tools and ideas.  That's the approach you want to be taking, too, John. Begin with your communications—that's something we all have to do. Where can you build a process?  I hope that helps. Thank you, John, for your question and thank you to you, too, for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very, very productive week.   

So, you've decided to get yourself better organised. What would be the best way to start? That's the question I am answering this week. You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course. Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 324 Hello, and welcome to episode 324 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Whenever I begin working with a new coaching client, one of the first places we often need to start is unpicking the old system that is not working and transitioning into a system that does work.  Everyone is different. We have different times when we can focus, and we do different kinds of jobs. I recently watched an interview with J P Morgan Chase bank's CEO Jamie Dimon, who wakes up at 4:30 to 5:00 am each morning so he can read the financial news, exercise and have breakfast before the day begins, which inevitably involves back-to-back meetings.  Waking up at 5:00 am may not work for you. You may prefer working late and waking up around 8:00 am.  But wherever you are in your productivity journey, if you want to develop a system that works for you, it will inevitably mean tweaking your old system at least somewhat. That being the case, where would you start?  And that means it's time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Frank. Frank asks, Hi Carl, I've decided to get myself organised. I've tried everything over the years, and I have bits of all sorts of systems everywhere. If you were to start all over, what would you do first? Hi Frank, thank you for your question.  I approach this by looking at the hierarchy of productivity tools first. There are three tools we can use to help us become more productive: your calendar, task manager, and notes. Of those three, your calendar is the top one. That's the one tool that is never going to deceive you.  It shows you the twenty-four hours you have each day and tells you what you can realistically do given that time.  Your task manager is the most deceptive tool you have. You can load it up with hundreds of tasks, yet it never tells you if you have the time available to do those tasks. It doesn't even tell you which tasks would be the right ones to do at any given time. Perhaps AI will help us in the future there, but I doubt it. I doubt it because while AI could see everything and may know what deadlines you have and where your appointments are, it will not know how you feel. You may be coming down with a cold, might not have slept well, or had a fight with your significant other. Any one of those could derail your effectiveness, and they are things you cannot plan for.  So, when starting out, get your calendar fixed first.  What does that mean?  It means first letting go of all your double-booked times. You cannot be in two places at once, and if you do see a scheduling conflict on your calendar, these need fixing first. This may mean you need to renegotiate a meeting or move something to the all-day section. I've seen people putting their daughter's driving lesson on their calendars. This often leads to seeing an appointment with a client at the same time as the daughter's lesson. If you need to know your daughter has a driving lesson at 3:00 pm, put it in your all-day section of your calendar with the time in brackets—preferably in a different colour. You will find this cleans up your calendar significantly.  The next thing I suggest you do, Frank, is to look at all the tasks you have to do and categorise them. It's likely you will have tasks related to communications—emails, messages and follow-ups, admin, and chores. Beyond that, it will depend on the kind of work you do. A journalist will spend a lot of time writing, a designer will spend time designing, and a lawyer will likely spend a lot of time writing contracts or court documents.  Whether you're writing, designing, or doing something else, you want to group similar tasks together.  In a task manager such as Todoist and Things 3, you can assign labels or tags to a task. You would use these labels or tags to assign a category to your tasks. This way, you can easily group all similar tasks together.  The next step is to look at your calendar and assign blocks of time for these categories. Some may not need specific time blocks, but I encourage people to allocate blocks of time for communications and admin. These will always need doing. The problem is that if you do not have time assigned for them, the next day, instead of requiring forty minutes or so, you will need double that time just to catch up. This is not a good time management strategy.  One question I often get is about dating tasks. I do recommend that you date tasks, but only for tasks you know need to be done this week.  There's a lot that can change between this week and next, and what you may think needs to be done the following Thursday could quite easily change to either need to be on Monday or not at all. If a task does not need to be done this week, place it in your next-week folder and forget about it. You can come back to it when you do your weekly plan.  While we are on the subject of dating tasks, beware of the things that are not tasks that can end up in your task manager. Your bill payment dates, your son's graduation and your next dental appointment are not tasks. These are events and should be on your calendar.  You may need to know day-specific information on a given day. This information should always be on your calendar. I have my wife's exam week dates, when my parents-in-law are staying, and public holidays on my calendar. None of these would qualify as a task unless I needed to do something on them.  Most of these are simple tweaks anyone can make to their system without the need for a complete overhaul.  The biggest challenge I find people struggle with is stepping away from firefighting addiction. This is where a person is hooked on running around panicking about everything they have to do. This just does not work. It leads to only doing easy, so-called urgent tasks and never getting anything meaningful done.  The next thing to look out for is the dilemma of being able to do anything, just not all at the same time. There's something inherently faulty with our brains. We believe we can do a lot more than we actually can. No, you cannot complete fifty tasks and attend seven hours of meetings in a day. Not only is it unrealistic, but it's also a guaranteed way to burn out.  Part of the problem is we like to see twenty, thirty or more tasks on our daily to-do list. It makes us feel important and useful. Yet it's a delusion. You cannot do that number of tasks with a high level of competency.  I find it interesting that people feel ashamed when all they have on their to-do list are three or four tasks. Yet, that is what you want to be trying to get to.  You can accomplish this by moving towards a time-based system and away from a task-based one. This means instead of counting the number of tasks you have to do, you instead allocate blocks of time to specific categories of tasks.  This then allows you to dedicate an hour to responding to your messages, for instance. Then, instead of having a lot of email tasks in your task manager, you have a single task telling you to clear your actionable email folder. Similarly, you can do this with projects. Rather than having fifteen or more tasks related to multiple different projects each day, you have a single task telling you which projects to work on that day.  You will finish more projects faster if you focus on one or two projects each day instead of diluting your effectiveness by trying to work five or six projects each day.  You can then use the third tool in your toolbox, your notes. This is by far the best place to manage your projects. You can keep project and meeting notes, links to documents and emails and checklists of things that may need doing. You then only need to link the project note to the relevant task in your task manager for a single click and in experience.  The advantage here is you avoid the possibility of being distracted by something else. You see a task telling you to work on the next board meeting presentation, and click the link that will take you straight to your project notes, where you will find links to the presentation file, your research and other relevant information.  The alternative is to be clicking around, looking at a long list of tasks which will only demotivate you and waste a considerable amount of time looking for something to do instead of being directed towards the exact task that needs doing next.  Now, what about all your old stuff?  The first thing to know is that the way everything is right now may not be as bad as it first looks. I strongly suggest you consolidate your tools into three—a calendar, task manager, and notes app. If you have multiple different apps, choose one for each and combine everything into one. You do not want to be wasting time trying to remember where everything is.  Then, go through your tasks in your task manager, deleting old tasks that are no longer relevant and cleaning up your calendar.  Your notes are less important. These can be kept as you don't know which ones may be a source of inspiration in the future. You can move old notes to an archive. There, they will be out of the way but still searchable if you ever need them. I hope that has helped, Frank. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

How do you create and maintain your motivation once you have your new productivity system in place? That's what I'm answering this week.  You can subscribe to this podcast on: Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Mastering Your Digital Notes Organisation Course. Take The NEW COD Course The Working With… Weekly Newsletter Carl Pullein Learning Centre Carl's YouTube Channel Carl Pullein Coaching Programmes The Working With… Podcast Previous episodes page Script | 323 Hello, and welcome to episode 323 of the Working With Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One of the positive things about creating your productivity system is the excitement you get once you have your new tools and systems set up. We often cannot wait to get started using these tools and systems.  Then, after a few weeks or months, the “newness” wears off, and we are back where we were before—looking for new tools and systems and convincing ourselves that the tools and systems we currently use no longer work.  And if your tools and systems do work, it can be hard to stay motivated once the monotony of doing the same things at the same time each day beds in.  This week's question goes to the heart of that—staying motivated to do the work we know we should do but just don't want to do.  So, with that little introduction complete, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Keith. Keith asks, HI Carl, I feel like I'm doing something wrong. When it comes to the time of actually doing work allocated on my calendar, I often feel not bothered and I just simply reschedule it for the next time, I find myself doing that a lot, with both routine and areas of focus tasks and I find it strange that I am able to reschedule it all so easily… do you have any tips on what to do here?  Hi Keith, thank you for your question.  There are two distinct parts here. Your areas of focus should be self-motivating. These are tasks you have identified as important to you and for the life you want to live.  The second, routines, are less important—these are the tasks that just need to be done to maintain life. Things like taking the garbage out, washing the car, doing the laundry or, mowing the lawn, etc.  The more concerning part here is a lack of motivation in your areas of focus. Doing these tasks should be the things you look forward to doing the most. Well, mostly. I know it can be hard to head out for a 10-mile run when it's pouring down outside and blowing a gale. (Although the way you feel when you get back is fantastic!)  Let's step back a little first.  When you find yourself rescheduling calendar blocks, that's not necessarily a bad sign. That's just life. Emergencies happen, plans are changed, and occasionally, we get sick.  That said, having structure does help you to be consistent. For instance, I recommend you protect time each day for dealing with your actionable emails and messages. Rather than going in and out of your email every few minutes—which is disastrous for your cognitive ability to focus—having time set aside for dealing with these gives you the time and space to get on with your important work.  Similarly, you will likely find that if you can set aside an hour for admin and chores each day, the only thing you then need to decide is what admin tasks and chores you do in that time. Becoming consistent with this results in you rarely needing the full hour.  You may find that if you move these blocks around every day, consistency will be difficult to achieve. The goal of setting aside a little time each day for focused work, communications, and admin is to get them fixed in your calendar.  This is a using a little neuroscience to get your brain working for you. You are using neuroscience when you go to bed at the same time each day. It's why you begin to feel sleepy at the same time each day. This is the same for meal times. Consistent meal times informs your brain when to tell you that you are hungry.  As an aside, if you take up intermittent fasting, you will find skipping breakfast early in the morning difficult at first. Yet if your eating window is between 11:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m., after a few weeks, your brain learns when to tell you to eat. You will no longer be hungry in the morning.  Let's examine the motivational aspect of this, beginning with your areas of focus.  These activities should be self-motivating. Your areas of focus are the things that are important to you. If you lack motivation here, it's likely that the way you have defined what each one means to you is not quite right and needs a little refining.  Health and fitness can often be difficult if you find any form of exercise unpleasant. What may be happening if you skip exercise is you are trying to do too much. I have found if you set a minimum—a level you can do very easily will keep you motivated here. For example, you could set a minimum of 5,000 steps per day or 10 push-ups and 10 air squats. Doing that set would count as an exercise session.  Once you've completed your 5000 steps, you are likely to do a few more to exceed your minimum. Likewise, with pushups and squats, you are likely to do more than ten just to exceed your minimum.  You will probably have found that starting is the hardest part. Once you have started, you end up doing more, which is where another trick can be deployed. I mentioned setting aside time each day for communications is a good habit to have. If you know at 4:00pm, you will spend an hour dealing with your actionable messages but are really not in the mood to do it, you can tell yourself I will just respond to the five oldest messages today.  In most cases, once you've done those five, you are going to continue for the full hour. And if you don't continue, you've done five. Five is better than none. After all, one is always greater than zero.  Going back to the principle of blocking time out. Try not to be too specific here. Your time blocks should be for specific types of work. For instance, if you are a lawyer who is required to write contracts frequently, you could block two or three hours each week for “Writing”. This then gives you greater freedom on what you will write in that time. Perhaps one day, you need to write a will or an affidavit. By keeping the time block general, you have greater freedom about what you will work on.  This helps with motivation, as you have a greater choice of what to work on. If there is time pressure on a particular part of your work, you can choose to do the most time-sensitive part—which is usually the best motivator. Or, if there is no time pressure, you can choose something you feel like doing.  Another area to look at is timing. For most people, the late afternoon is not a great time to do focused work. You're likely to get tired and possibly feel frazzled by all the stuff being thrown at you all day. That's not a motivation issue; that's just being tired—tired of looking at a screen all day, tired of dealing with other people's problems, and tired of making decisions. It all adds up.  What I've discovered is that doing deeper, focused work in the morning is much easier than trying to do it in the afternoon. You're fresher and will find it easier to focus. This does not work for everyone. Some people focus better in the afternoons. But as Daniel Pink found when writing his bestselling book When, the number of people who can focus better in the afternoons is less than 2%. The majority of us are either morning or night people.  If it's possible, try to do your more meaningful work in your natural biorhythm rather than fighting it. Nobody wins the fight against nature.  Finally, look at your processes. Processes are a human form of automation. This is why when you begin your day with a consistent “you” focused morning routine, no matter what is thrown at you, on the whole, you get through the day without too much trouble.  If you wake up late, skip your morning routines, and run out the door to get to work on time, everything seems to go wrong.  Processes ensure that once you begin a piece of work, it's almost automatic. My favourite routine is email management. You clear your inbox in the morning. This part of the process is all about speed—clearing it as fast as you can. You can add a little incentive here and time yourself to see how fast you can clear fifty or a hundred emails. The second part of the process is about slowing down and clearing your action this day folder.  Because the second part of the process is about slowing down and thinking about your responses, you can begin the process by making yourself a nice cup of tea, putting on some relaxing music and begin.  Rather than focusing on numbers, set yourself a time limit. For instance, if you give yourself forty-five minutes, start with the oldest email in your action this day folder and start. Because you are not focused on how many emails you respond to, you can see the “end of the tunnel” it's forty-five minutes later.  Again, if you are consistent with this, you won't lack motivation, particularly with email management. If you skip just one day, you've doubled the amount of time you will need tomorrow. Now, that would be demotivating.  I hope that helps, Keith. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening.  It just remains for now to wish you all a very, very productive week.