Podcast appearances and mentions of carl pullein

"Think of yourself in a concert hall listening to the strains of the sweetest music when you suddenly remember that you forgot to lock your car. You are anxious about the car, you cannot walk out of the hall, and you cannot enjoy the music. There you have a perfect image of life as it is lived by most human beings." There, Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello reminds us to focus on the magic in front of us. What are you doing to switch off, and if you cannot do so, how can you do it? That's why we're looking at this week.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity 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 | 381 Hello, and welcome to episode 381 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show.  How often do you completely switch yourself off from tasks, projects, emails and messages?  And not just professional emails and messages and tasks, it includes all the WhatsApp messages from friends, strangers and the home projects you promised yourself that you would do this weekend, but never did?  It seems we've found ourselves caught in the to-do trap. Where the only thing on your mind is all the things you've listed somewhere that you think you must do.  It's a horrible existence. As soon as we sit down to relax, our phone reminds us there's more to do. More emails and messages come in, task manager reminders pop up on the screen with a bing telling us we're supposed to call this person or that one.  And given that we now carry our phones around with us everywhere we go, it's as if the phone no longer serves us, but we serve it: jumping to its every whim and beep.  The problem here is that it's not something you suddenly start doing. It's a gradual creep. It begins with waiting for your daughter to text you the time her train arrives at the railway station, to suddenly worrying about whether a customer or your boss sent you last minute Teams message before the end of your work day. You'e got to check right?  And before long, you feel intensely uncomfortable if your phone isn't in your hand or near you. It's then when you have gone beyond experiencing a healthy relationship with your digital devices. It's time to unravel all those now ingrained impulses.  And that's where this week's question comes in. And that means it's time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Maggie. Maggie asks, hi Carl I see all these productivity YouTube videos, and listen to a lot of podcasts, but very few of them ever talk about how to switch off at the end of the day and relax. This is something I am really struggling at the moment with.  Hi Maggie, thank you for your question.  You're right, I rarely see videos or hear podcasts talking about switching off and relaxing. I do sometimes hear people saying to stop and relax, but not how to do it.  As I mentioned a moment a go, this is not something we just stop doing. It creeps up on you. One moment you're a child without any digital devices, being curious, running around, trying new hobbies then falling asleep to suddenly being held hostage by task lists, projects and long lists of thing you think you should do.  Not to mention the anxiety of responding quickly enough to a friend's text message or your boss's email.  If you think about it, while we seem to have adapted well to this new phenomenon, and appear to just accept this as the way of life, it's really a horrible existence.  Last week, I mentioned that I had embarked on a 13 hour autobiographical TV series on Lord Louis Mountbatten.  The series was recorded in and around 1969, so was shot before the dawn of home computers.  What I noticed was how people in those pre-home computer days relaxed. There were family board games, book reading and going out for walks and having picnics by the river.  Because the only way you could be contacted was via a letter, telegram or land line phone, once you left the house you were free. And “free” in a real sense. If you were to take a walk by the river or pond or lake, you could fully engage with your surroundings and the people you were with.  And family meals were important.  The aristocracy in the UK would dress for dinner, and even as we went into the post-war years, there would be a ritual of adults and children washing their hands before sitting down to dinner.  I rarely see that with people today. I should point out that it's still a good practice to do—you know, washing your hands before eating your meals.  Currently, I am reading the enormous series of books by historian Dominic Sandbrook, the co host of the excellent podcast The Rest is History.  Sandbrook begins this series of books in 1950s UK and I am currently up to 1970, having just finished reading his excellent book Mad As Hell: The Crisis of the 1970s and the Rise of The Populist Right, a book about how US culture changed in the 1970s.  The books have chapters on how families lived and the activities they did in their spare time and as I was reading these chapters I felt a sadness that many of these activities seem to have disappeared.  For instance, in the UK, there was in almost every town and village a working mens club. Yes, today that would be considered sexist, but when these clubs started they were established for the men who worked down the mines or in the factories.  One of the clubs I used to go to would have a guest act on every Sunday night. Sometimes the act was a musician other times it might be a comedian. These clubs would be full of husbands and wives having a drink, playing bingo between the act's sessions.  It was a wonderful evening. I remember never once worrying about work, or even talking about work. It was families talking about where they were going on holiday, playing bingo and watching the acts.  I never experienced what we called in the UK “Sunday night blues”—that depressing feeling of knowing you had to go back to work tomorrow.  I only ever experienced that when I stopped going to the club on a Sunday and instead sitting at home watching TV.  Somehow, we've sacrificed human activities—going out with friends and family three or four times a week—to sitting on sofas watching TV or scrolling through endless feeds in social media. Often feeling jealous of the fake lives people put on there.  And certainly not engaging with other human beings in the same room as you.  And the word “Hobby” seems to have become a quaint old-fashioned word. I mean, who's got time for hobbies today?  And that to me is where people need to start. Have a hobby that does not involve a digital tool.  One of my rediscovered hobbies is collecting books. Real books. I've always enjoyed reading. It's been a big part of my life.  I remember before I got an iPad in January 2011, I would spend weeks deciding which book to take with me on the plane when I travelled. It became an annual ritual. A week or two before I was due to fly I would spend a Saturday afternoon at the bookstore in the local shopping centre looking for something I could read while I was on holiday.  After January 2011, I no longer went to a bookstore. I downloaded books from Apple Books or Amazon. Accidentally, something I had found immensely pleasurable—spending an afternoon wandering around a bookstore, to simply hearing about a book, finding it on a digital bookstore and buying it.  The pleasure of aimlessly wandering around a bookstore was ripped away from me for the sake of convenience.  I can fully understand why the sales of vinyl records and record players have exploded in recent years. The lack of convenience and a limited record collection makes listening to music a genuine pleasure.  Those of a certain age may remember creating something called a “Mix tape”. This was where you recorded from a hi-fi system records to a tape cassette that you could play on a cassette walkman or in the car when going on a long journey.  There was was something deeply pleasurable in make those tapes. I used to do this when going on family holidays. It didn't require a lot of brain power. Just looking through your records (and later CDs) for songs and then recording them, in real time, to a cassette.  You had to sit and listen the whole song before pressing pause on the tape and choosing the next song. Completely inconvenient by today's standards, but that wasn't the point. It was relaxing, enjoyable and there was a sense of pride when finished of a job well done.  And that's where I think we should be looking for activities that help us to switch off at the end of the day or at weekends. Activities that take us away from the digital noise. For example, this year, I've made it a habit to spend a minimum of thirty minutes reading a real book after I finish my evening coaching calls.  I close down my office, grab the book I am currently reading, and go through to the living room, settle down on the sofa with the book and read. While I will read for at least thirty minutes, I often find myself still reading after an hour. During that time, it's just me and little Louis lying next to me.  It's quiet and incredibly relaxing.  Another “hobby” I began this spring was to have a bedding box on the terrace outside my office. In this box I've been growing flowers. It needs watering and the occasional weed needs pulling out. This had led me to want to add more flower boxes for next year.  I've been sketching out on paper ideas of where I'll put these boxes and what flowers I could grow in them. I've even considered growing my own vegetables too.  All non-tech hobbies that have brought some real enjoyment with them.  Other activities you may wish to consider are knitting and needlework. I've remember teaching myself to sow buttons onto shirts and jackets—great fun but can be equally frustrating.  Water colour painting. There's an initial cost in paints and paint books, but again great fun when you get going. This is a particularly good hobby if you like to get out into the countryside.  Winston Churchill used painting as a way to destress at weekends and on holidays.  While I'm not a big fan doing digital detoxes or restricting use of digital tools, that's just a waste of time because you end up finding excuses to check your digital devices.  What I have found, though, is if you have a hobby or activity that is non-digital, you lose the temptation to “check” for messages and notifications. You become engrossed in the activity you engaged in.  Perhaps you could have a Saturday or Sunday morning family walk. Give it some added interest by including some bird spotting or trying to find new routes around the park or woods.  When to comes to switching off, look for activities that don't involve phones or computers. Puzzles are good, learning to detail a car (my current hobby) or some gardening—which can large or small.  I hope that has helped, Maggie. Try to use things to switch off that do not involve a screen and you'll find yourself relaxing and rediscover some lost pleasures in life.  Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

"Slow down and enjoy life. It's not only the scenery you miss by going too fast - you also miss the sense of where you are going and why."  Eddie Cantor This week, I'm answering a question about why it's important to slow down and allow your brain to do what it does best and why you do not want to be competing with computers.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity 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 | 380 Hello, and welcome to episode 380 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. It's very easy to get caught up in the hype about AI and what it promises to do or can do for you.  And it is an exciting time. AI promises a lot, and our devices are becoming faster. Does this mean it's all good news? Well, maybe not. You see, while all this technology is becoming faster, our brains are not. Evolution takes time. We can still only process information at the same speed people did hundreds of years ago.  And it's causing us to take shortcuts. Shortcuts that may not necessarily be in our best interests.  Thirty years ago, people would buy a newspaper in the morning and that single newspaper would furnish us with analysis and news throughout the day.  I remember buying my newspaper from the newsagent outside the office I worked at in the morning. I would read that newspaper during my coffee breaks and lunch. I'd begin with the front page, then the sport on the back page and usually in the afternoon, I'd read the opinion pieces.  It was a daily ritual, and felt natural. I'd pay my fifty pence (around 75 cents) each morning and by the end of the day, I would feel I had got my money's worth.  I remember reading full articles, getting to know both sides of the argument and the nuances within each story.  Today, people are in such a rush, they rarely read a full article, and only get a snapshot of what's really going on. There are apps that will summarise documents, articles and important reports for you. But is this really good for you?  This is why over the last two years, I've been intentionally slowing down.  It began with bringing pens and paper back into my system, then going on to wearing an analogue watch instead of an Apple Watch. It's moved on to buying real books, and this year, reacquainting myself with the joys of ironing, cooking and polishing shoes.  And that brings me on to this week's question. So, that means it's time for me now to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Michael. Michael asks, Hi Carl, you've talked a lot about your pen and paper experiment and I was wondering why you are going against technology, when clearly that is the future. Hi Michael, thank you for your question.  I should begin by saying I am not against technology. I love technology. I still use Todoist and Evernote, and I use Anthropic's Claude most days. Technology is still a big part of my life.  However, I began my “analogue experiment”—if you can call it that—because I began to realise that trying to keep up with all the advances in technology meant I was missing out on life.  I had stopped thinking for myself and was looking for confirmation of the opinions I had formed about a subject. And technology does that extremely well. I remember during the last US Presidential election I was curious about what the arguments were about. I watched a few videos on YouTube from Fox News and MSNBC trying to maintain some kind of balance.  That didn't turn out so well. I must have accidentally watched a video or two more from Fox News and suddenly my YouTube feed was full of Greg Gutfeld and Meghan Kelly.  So much for trying to hear both sides of the argument.  It took over a month to get those videos out of my YouTube feed.  From a time management and productivity perspective I've always felt it's important that you decide what is important and what is not.  For most of you, you will have gained a few years experience in the work that you do. That experience is valuable. It gives you an advantage. You have learned what works and what does not work. Not in a theoretical way, but in a practical way.  Sales courses can teach the theory, but to become a great salesperson requires real, hands on experience. Talking with real people, dealing with objections and allowing your personality and charm to come through. You can't learn that from an online course or four hours chatting with an AI bot.  Henry Kissinger was a divisive figure. Some loved him, others hated him. Yet successive presidents both Republican and Democrat sort his advice long after he had left government. Why? Because of his vast personal experience dealing with dictators and uncompromising world leaders.  Now I understand why technology does this. Companies such as Google and the media organisations want my attention. Their algorithms are trained to do just that. And as a human being it's very difficult to resist.  But the biggest problem with this is everything is becoming faster and faster. So fast, that your brain cannot keep up.  Now there are things we should move fast on. An upset customer, a natural disaster in your town or city, A suddenly sick loved one or a burst pipe in your bathroom.  Equally, though, there are a lot of things we shouldn't be moving fast on. Deciding what must be done today, for example, sitting down and talking with your kids, or partner. Talking with your parents, siblings, friends or taking your dog out for a walk.  One work related example would be managing your email. There are two parts to this. Clearing your inbox requires speed. You're filtering out the unimportant from the important. And with experience, you soon become very fast at this.  Then there's the replying to the important emails. That requires you to slow down and think.  Now I know there are AI email apps that promise to do the filtering for you. Yet do you really trust that it got it right? That lack of trust results in you going through the AI filtered emails, “just in case”.  Which in turn slows down the processing. You would have been faster had you done it yourself.  But this goes beyond where AI and technology can help us. It goes to something deeper and more human.  One of the most mentally draining things you can do is sit at a screen all day.  You can respond to messages, write reports, design presentations, edit videos, and read the news all from a single screen. This means that, in theory, except for needing to go to the bathroom, you could spend all day and night without getting up from the chair.  That's not how you work. Your brain cannot stay focused for much more than 90 minutes without the need for a break. Yet, if a break means you stare at another window, perhaps stop writing the report and instead read a news article, your brain is not getting a rest.  Instead, one of the best things you could do, particularly now, with the new flexible ways of working, is to get up and do something manually.  Perhaps take the laundry and do a load of washing. Then return to your computer, work for another hour and then hang the washing up.  Two things happen here. First, your brain gets a rest from deep thinking and does something simple. And secondly, you move. Another thing your brain requires to work at its best.  Repetitive tasks are therapy for your brain. This is why some say that jogging or hiking is therapeutic. The act of putting one foot in front of another is repetitive and your brain can operate on automatic pilot.  Yet, there's something else here.  The other day I had a pile of ironing to do. It wasn't overwhelming, but there was around forty-minutes of work there to do.  At the same time, I was working on an article I was writing. That writing began strongly, but after an hour or so, my writing had slowed considerably. I was struggling. It was at that moment I looked up and saw the pile of ironing.  So, I got up, pulled out the ironing board and iron and spend forty minutes or so clearing the pile.  WOW! What a difference. After hanging up the clothes, I sat back down at my desk and the energy to write returned and I was able to get the article finished in no time at all.  Now what would have happened had I stayed tied to my desk? Probably not very much at all. I would have continued to struggle, perhaps written a bit, but likely would have had to rewrite what I had written.  Instead, I gave my brain a break. I did something manual that was repetitive, ironing. I know it's not exciting, but that's the point. It recharged my brain and I was able to return to my writing refreshed and didn't need to rewrite anything later.  Other activities you can do is to make your own lunch. Going into the kitchen to make a sandwich does not require a lot of brain power. It gets you up from your desk, gives your brain a break from the screen and you're making something.  It was a sense that everything I was doing was done at a screen that was the catalyst for me to return to doing some things manually.  I remember when I decided to start using a pen and notebook for planning out my week. I was shocked how much better I thought.  When I was planning my week digitally, I couldn't wait to get it over. Just to make it feel more worthwhile, I would clean up a folder or clear my desktop of screenshots and PDFs I no longer needed. I noticed I was doing anything but actually plan the week. When I closed my computer, pulled out a notebook and one of my favourite fountain pens, I actually planned and thought about what I wanted to accomplish that week.  My Saturday morning planning sessions have become one of my favourite times of the week. I can stop, slow down and just think slowly and deeply about what I want to accomplish.  And all these little things that have slowed me down have resulted in me getting far more done each week.  Without consciously choosing to do so, my social media time has dropped significantly. I don't watch as many YouTube videos as I used to do, and I feel more fulfilled and accomplished at the end of the day.  A couple of months ago, while my wife was studying for her end of term exams, I would finish in my office, go through into the living room where she was studying, pick up a real book and read.  It was a lovely feeling. My wife, Louis and myself all on the sofa engaged in something meaningful. We were still able to ask each other questions, but for the most part it felt calm, quiet and natural.  Last weekend, during my TV time, I began watching the autobiographical series on the Life and Times of Lord Louis Mountbatten.  Mountbatten was born in 1900 and died in 1979. He lived through two World Wars, was a part of both, was a member of the Royal Family, being the cousin of King George 6th, and was involved in many post war events.  As he was describing his work, I noticed there was no “9 til 5” hours or any of the structures we impose on ourselves today.  For most of Mountbatten's life there was no television. Instead, people wrote letters or read books in their quiet times. Most weekends were spent socialising with family and friends and there was a lot of walking in the countryside.  Yes, Mountbatten lived a privileged life, he was royalty after all, but even if you study the working classes of the time, they went to work—often hard manual labour, and come home where they would either spend the evening talking and playing games with their families or call into the local pub and enjoy time with their friends and neighbours.  They were different times, of course, but the noticeable thing was the everything that needed to be done got done.  Was was most striking about these times was the sense of fulfilment people spoke and wrote about. They were doing hard manual work, yet had a sense of accomplishment each day.  Today, that sense of fulfilment and accomplish can be lost and instead because of the endless lists of to-dos, messages to respond to we feel overwhelmed and swamped.  The most noticeable benefit I've found by returning to a few analogue tools is I no longer feel overwhelmed. I find I am more intentional about what I do and at the end of the day, I feel a sense of accomplishment.  So there you go, Michael. That's why I've brought back some analogue tools into my life. They slowed me down, enabled me to think better and ironically, I am getting a lot more done that I did when I was completely paperless and digital.  I hope that has helped. Thank you for your question. And thank you to you too for listening.  Now I must go and hang up the laundry.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3696: Carl Pullein lays out a powerful framework for beginning each morning with clarity and control by focusing on three simple practices: reflection, prioritization, and intention-setting. By anchoring your day before distractions take over, you create momentum, reduce stress, and make space for meaningful progress. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/how-to-start-the-day-with-intention-and-purpose/6/11/2019 Quotes to ponder: "Before you allow the world to hijack your attention, you want to establish control over your day." "The day hasn't started yet, and you have the peace and quiet to really think about what you want to accomplish." "Think about what outcomes you want from the day and why those outcomes are important." Episode references: Evernote: https://evernote.com/ Todoist: https://todoist.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3696: Carl Pullein lays out a powerful framework for beginning each morning with clarity and control by focusing on three simple practices: reflection, prioritization, and intention-setting. By anchoring your day before distractions take over, you create momentum, reduce stress, and make space for meaningful progress. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/how-to-start-the-day-with-intention-and-purpose/6/11/2019 Quotes to ponder: "Before you allow the world to hijack your attention, you want to establish control over your day." "The day hasn't started yet, and you have the peace and quiet to really think about what you want to accomplish." "Think about what outcomes you want from the day and why those outcomes are important." Episode references: Evernote: https://evernote.com/ Todoist: https://todoist.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3696: Carl Pullein lays out a powerful framework for beginning each morning with clarity and control by focusing on three simple practices: reflection, prioritization, and intention-setting. By anchoring your day before distractions take over, you create momentum, reduce stress, and make space for meaningful progress. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/how-to-start-the-day-with-intention-and-purpose/6/11/2019 Quotes to ponder: "Before you allow the world to hijack your attention, you want to establish control over your day." "The day hasn't started yet, and you have the peace and quiet to really think about what you want to accomplish." "Think about what outcomes you want from the day and why those outcomes are important." Episode references: Evernote: https://evernote.com/ Todoist: https://todoist.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Productivity expert Carl Pullein shares routines for staying on top of all the to-dosSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

“Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential” That quote from Winston Churchill perfectly captures the dilemma we face when it comes to planning.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin The Time-Based Productivity 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 | 379 Hello, and welcome to episode 379 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Planning and organising have their place. Yet, there is a danger of taking them too far and using them as an excuse or as a way to procrastinate.  Ultimately, whatever you are planning to do will eventually need to be done. The goal, therefore, is to get to the doing part as quickly as possible.  One of the dangers of David Allen's Getting Things Done book, is the emphasis on organising and doing the weekly review. It's a procrastinators heaven. An authority in the the productivity space giving you “permission” to spend two to four hours a week planning and reviewing and another large proportion of your time organising and reorganising your lists.  Don't get me wrong. Both planning and organising have their place and as Winston Churchill says, “planning is essential”, but it's a thin line between helpful and unhelpful planning and organising. In today's episode, I will share with you some ideas that you can use to ensure that you are following some sound principles with your planning and reviewing.  So, that means it's time to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Sally. Sally asks, hi Carl, I'm struggling to get myself organised. I have so many things on my desk and on my computer's desktop I don't know where to start. I feel like all I do all day is plan what to do and tidy up my lists. How do you avoid over planning and organising?  Hi Sally, thank you for your question. Firstly, I must admit I have been down this road of over-planning and organising.  I read Getting Things Done in 2009 and loved it. I ditched my Franklin Planner, the “tool” I had been using consistently for over fifteen years, bought myself a nice Quo Vadis notebook (the paper quality was better than Moleskine) and spent a whole weekend setting up the notebook as a GTD tool.  I also printed out the GTD weekly review checklist from David Allen's website and stuck that into the back go my planner and became a GTDer.  It took me seven years to realise that I wasn't getting anything significant done. I had a lot of ideas, plans and goals, yet all I seemed to be doing was reviewing, planning and doing the easy things from my context lists.  Replying to emails was much easier than sitting down to write the first chapter of the book I wanted to write. Spending more time mind mapping the presentation I had to give on Friday seemed more important than opening up Keynote and designing the presentation.  Yet, ironically, it was an end of year review that forced me to face up to reality and see that while I was excellent at planning and reviewing, I had become terrible at doing the work.  And this is one of the most common problem areas I see with many of my coaching clients. The fixation on having everything perfectly organised and planned.  You see, the problem here is not that everything is neatly organised and you have the plans to do whatever it is you want to do. The problem is nothing is being done to do those plans.  While I was working on my recent Time-Based Productivity course, the project note I had for it was a mess. I had a lot of notes, ideas and thoughts. Yet, I maintained a strict next actions list at the top of the project note as well as links to the documents I was working on.  It didn't matter that below those items was a horror show of ill-thought out ideas and random thoughts. They were there in case I got stuck somewhere. What mattered was the important information was clear and at the top of the note.  The note was designed so that the work got done. It was not designed to look pretty.  I've seen clients with thirty page Word documents detailing their department's plans for the year. It's written in some vague management language that leaves a lot to interpretation. It's as Winston Churchill once said of a similar document from the government's treasury department: “This paper, by its very length, defends itself from ever being read.” You can spend hours going through a document like that, and nothing will ever get done.  What matters is knowing what the department's objectives are and what needs to be done to accomplish them.  That does not need thirty pages. That can be summarised on one page, at most.  If you're working in an organisation that loves using management speak to communicate their ill-thought through ideas, one of the best ways to navigate these documents is to establish what the ultimate goal is.  What are the targets, or in management speak “KPI's” (Key Performance Indicators)? Once you know how you or your department will be measured, you can use your own experience and knowledge to put in place a plan to achieve those targets.  Ultimately, your boss, and their boss, are concerned about your targets. How you achieve those targets are less important, although they should always be achieved legally, of course.  In many ways translating these verbose annual planning documents is the role of the departmental managers. This means translating them into actionable items so that everyone in the team clearly understands what they are aiming for. This then reduces the necessity of further planning meetings and everyone can get on and achieve the objectives.  And this is the same for individuals.  When we plan things out we are exploring options, considering best ways to do things and perhaps thinking of potential outcomes.  While these exercises do have their place, they cannot replace doing the work.  The objective, therefore, is to figure out as quickly as possible what you need to do to get the work completed.  My wife bought me a new iron and ironing board for my birthday. I love ironing, I find it relaxing. I've learnt that no matter how big the pile of ironing is, the pile is not going to diminish by more planning and strategising. The only way the pile of ironing will shrink is for me to plug my iron in, set up my ironing board and get started.  Now years of ironing has taught me to begin with the clothes that require a cooler setting and finish with clothes that require a hotter setting such as linen shirts. That's experience, although, I remember being taught that one by my grandmother many many years ago.  The final part of this is choosing when to do the ironing. For me, I find ironing after I've been sat down for a long time works best. I'm stood up and have to move around to hang my shirts up after they're ironed. So, doing the ironing in the afternoon or early evening works best for me.  Given that I generally do the ironing once a week, all I need to decide is when. When will I do it? That's the only planning I need to do with something I routinely do.  When it comes to organising, I'm always surprised how so many people have missed one of the best features of computers and technology. It's not so you can sit and stare at a screen for hours on end. It's the speed at which a computer can organise your files.  You can choose to organise your files by date created, date modified, title, type of document or by size. The only thing you need to do is to put the file into a folder.  If you were to keep things as simple as possible, two folders one for your personal life and one for your professional life would work. (And I know a lot of people who do just that and can find anything they need with the use of a keyboard shortcut or a few typed letters.  While travelling last month, I had all my flight confirmation emails and car hire documents stored in Evernote in its own notebook. Before we set off, I made sure this notebook was downloaded to my phone so that no matter where I was in the world, I was not going to be relying on flakey internet.  This meant, when we finally reached the car hire desk at 11 p.m. At Dublin Airport, all I needed to do was open Evernote, type Europcar in the search and all my details we instantly on my screen ready to show the assistant.  Most notes apps people are using today have incredibly powerful search features built in. Evernote was build on its search features. I'm frequently amazed at how quickly Evernote can find something I vaguely think might be in there.  I remember my wife trying to sort something out for me on a Korean website while we were sitting in cafe. She asked me if I remembered my password for a particular website I had not used for over ten years.  I opened up Evernote and typed in the name of the website and in less than second the login and password details were there. My brain cannot work that fast when trying to recall something from ten years ago.  What this means is you do not need to spend days or months trying to come up with a “perfect” notes organisation system. You could quite easily operate on a simple professional and personal folder system.  You'd still be able to find anything you were looking for, and all you would need to do is to learn how to use the search features.  So, Sally, if you want to get things organised, let your computer do the work for you. Start by creating a simple folder structure of personal and work, and organise your documents there first.  As you're doing this I would add that you ensure the title of the documents and files are clear. Sometimes we download something from the internet and we end up with a jumble of letters and numbers. While your computer will be able to tell you when you downloaded it and what the file type is, it won't be able to tell you what it is. That part of the organising process is on you.  If you wish to have a little more structure than simply personal and professional you can modify things later. The goal here is to begin the cleaning up process.  And don't forget the delete key. It's your best friend when cleaning up.  Once you've tidied everything up and you know where everything is, when it comes to what to do next will naturally follow.  This organising may take you a weekend to do. Yet, that investment in time will be well worth it. You'll feel less anxious, lighter and will have begun developing confidence in your system. That's a very nice place to be.  I hope that has helped, Sally. Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me to wish you a very very productive week.   

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1762: Luke Smith highlights how tailored online training programs can significantly boost business productivity by enabling employees to learn flexibly, sharpen job-specific skills, and minimize costly errors. When aligned with company goals, these programs not only improve individual performance but also strengthen overall team efficiency and morale. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/improving-business-productivity-with-online-training-programmes-for-employees/10/3/2021 Quotes to ponder: "Online training allows employees to learn at their own pace and at a time that suits them best." "Training gives employees the skills and knowledge to be better at their jobs and helps eliminate time-consuming mistakes." "If your training is not aligned with your business's goals and objectives, you're unlikely to see a return on your investment." Episode references: LinkedIn Learning: https://www.linkedin.com/learning Coursera for Business: https://www.coursera.org/business Skillshare Teams: https://www.skillshare.com/teams Udemy Business: https://business.udemy.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1762: Luke Smith highlights how tailored online training programs can significantly boost business productivity by enabling employees to learn flexibly, sharpen job-specific skills, and minimize costly errors. When aligned with company goals, these programs not only improve individual performance but also strengthen overall team efficiency and morale. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/improving-business-productivity-with-online-training-programmes-for-employees/10/3/2021 Quotes to ponder: "Online training allows employees to learn at their own pace and at a time that suits them best." "Training gives employees the skills and knowledge to be better at their jobs and helps eliminate time-consuming mistakes." "If your training is not aligned with your business's goals and objectives, you're unlikely to see a return on your investment." Episode references: LinkedIn Learning: https://www.linkedin.com/learning Coursera for Business: https://www.coursera.org/business Skillshare Teams: https://www.skillshare.com/teams Udemy Business: https://business.udemy.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Word-processing is a normative, standardised tool. Obviously, you can change the page layout and switch fonts, but you cannot invent a form not foreseen by the software. Paper allows much greater graphic freedom: you can write on either side, keep to set margins or not, superimpose lines or distort them. There is nothing to make you follow a set pattern. It has three dimensions too, so it can be folded, cut out, stapled or glued.” That's a quote from Claire Bustarret, a specialist on codex manuscripts at the Maurice Halbwachs research centre in Paris. And is the start of my attempt to explain why you don't want to be abandoning the humble pen and paper just yet. You can subscribe to this podcast on:    Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Time-Based Productivity 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 | 378 Hello, and welcome to episode 378 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. I recently came across a short video from Shawn Blanc of the Sweet Setup website who argued that paper-based planners enable better focus and less distractions that their digital counterparts.  And in my now ten-month experiment with the Franklin Planner I also have discovered that planning on paper gives me greater insights about what is important and what is not, it has allowed me to reduce my to-do list dramatically and improved my ability to think at the next level—the level that really matters if you want to go beyond just the rudimentary basics and create something special.  This week's question is about my “experiment” and what I did it and what I learned. So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Phil. Phil asks, hi Carl, I'm curious about your Franklin Planner experiment. Why did you do it and what have you learned from the experience?  Hi Phil, thank you for your question.  Before I begin, I should give you some background.  My planner journey began on my 18th birthday when my uncle and auntie bought me a black leather Filofax. These were all the rage in the mid to late 1980s. They were a symbol of what we called in the UK the “YUPPIE generation”  A YUPPIE was a young urban professional or young upwardly mobile professional. It was a term used to describe a young, well-educated, and affluent person who worked in a city. It was often associated with a particular lifestyle and consumption patterns.  Filofaxes had a diary—usually a week to view—, an addresses area, and other planning pages such as a goals and notes area and an expenses tracker.  I loved that Filofax. And I remember carrying it around with me everywhere. I was living the YUPPIE lifestyle without having the job, type of car or luxury apartment associated with them. I was pretending hahaha. A few years later, while working in car sales, I was introduced to the Franklin Planner. I think it was around 1992 or 1993, by my general manager, Andrew.  That changed everything for me. No longer was I just carrying around information—really what a Filofax did in those days—and I had a tool that enabled me to establish what was important to me (my “governing values”) and a way to plan the day, and week.  I used that Franklin Planner for fourteen years. It went everywhere with me. I'd take it on holiday with me and often find myself sat on the hotel's balcony late at night writing out how I felt my life was going and what I wanted to change.  It was a tool that kept me accountable to my goals and values and really did change my life for the better.  Then came what I call the digital explosion in 2009. That's when I got my first iPhone and that coincided with my first reading of David Allen's Getting Things Done.  I stopped using the Franklin Planner and began a transition to digital tools.  It was an exciting time and my whole time management system began to change. Often for the better, sometimes for the worse. Yet, on the whole I enjoyed the evolution.  That's the background.  So, why did I decide to go back to using a Franklin Planner.  Well, I had begun to notice that I felt I was rushing everything. Sure, some things needed to be done quickly, but the majority of my work didn't need to be done right now. Those tasks in my task list could wait until another day, yet, I had this feeling I had to complete them today.  It created a sense of anxiety. A sort of low level buzz in my head telling me I should be doing work, checking off my tasks and not taking time to step back and think if what I was about to do was necessary or important.  It was unpleasant. So, I decided to go back and try a Franklin Planner for a few months to see what would happen.  It was a revelation and I was shocked.  The first thing I noticed was I slowed down. Because you have to manually write out your tasks and appointments each day, you had time to contemplate whether they really needed to be done.  With my digital system, I had things like watch this YouTube video, or read this article. Yet, these were not important at all. For some reason the digital task manager elevated their importance because they were on the list and had to be done—which, of course, they didn't. I never wrote those down in the Franklin Planner. I might have written them down in the notes area for later, but they would not be a task.  It was too easy to add stuff to a digital task manager, which meant all sorts of rubbish got added to the list. What that did was to make my task lists bigger and bigger. It got to a point where there were over 600 tasks in my task manager.  I remember looking at that realising that 80% of what was in there was either no longer relevant or would be a waste of time if I did do them.  That never happened with the Franklin Planner. The act of writing down tasks, meant you would carefully consider whether it was worth doing or not.  The result of this transition was instead of having fifteen to twenty tasks on my task list each day, in my Franklin Planner I had less then eight most days and what was there was genuinely important.  Another area that changed almost immediately was I started to think again.  Earlier last year, I had started planning out my projects, YouTube videos and weekly plans in what I called my Planning Book. This was an A4 ring-bound notebook that contained all my plans and initial thoughts about a project or video.  Suddenly, I found I was thinking things through better. When I sat down to plan out something, I was completely engaged. There were no pop-up notifications, or other digital distractions that would stop my thoughts. I could go deep, much deeper than I ever did digitally.  And the results were almost instant. My YouTube video views went from an average of 3 to 4 thousand in a week to over 10,000!  The only change I had made was to plan out my videos on paper instead of an Evernote note.  On analysis, what I noticed was I became a better storyteller—and important part of creating YouTube videos. And that resulted in almost three times more views on YouTube.  I quickly began to see that there was something going on here.  Digital tools are great. They are so convenient, and it's fantastic that you can carry around fifteen years of notes on a simple device like your phone. But, is that really helpful.  99% of my journeys and trips never required me to have to look up some important information.  And on those rare occasions when I did need to look up something, I could have easily explained to the person I was meeting that I would send the information when I got back to my office.  In fact, remembering to do that after writing it down on a piece of paper may have impressed the person I was meeting and would have given me time to think of a memorable way to convey the information.  Returning to the Franklin Planner and bringing some paper-based planning back into my life has been a revelation. It's slowed me down, while at the same time has helped me to become far more productive.  It's done that by getting me to think again.  And that's perhaps where digital tools are failing us.  Technology is all about speeding things up and making things more convenient.  Think about it, the introduction of elevators and escalators has coincided with people becoming less fit and healthy. The convenience of delivery food has created a generation of people who wake up, sit down at a desk all day, then order food and continue to sit while they eat highly processed foods that are slowly killing them.  Walking up stairs and cooking your own food ensures you are moving and likely eating a lot healthier. It also means you more likely to eat with your family and as a consequence maintain that all important communication with the people you love.  Technology has massively increased the speed at which things can be done. And in some areas that's helpful. But, and this is a big but, your brains ability to process all that information has not speeded up.  This means, if you want to feel fulfilled and be more productive, you should become better at filtering out the noise and focus on the things that are genuinely important.  Digital tools make that difficult with their emphasis on speed and monotonous lists.  Paper-based tools enable your brain to slow down, work at a healthy pace and to think deeper. A consequence of which means you think better, make better decisions about what to work on and feel less stressed and overwhelmed.  Will I go back to an all-digital system? No.  I've found a happy balance. My Franklin Planner allows me to make better choices about what I should work on today. My Planning Book gives me a space to think about what I am trying to do and to brainstorm better ways of doing the work.  However, I do see a space for digital tools.  I always scan in my plans to a digital project note. The output of my work is digital. Blog-posts, YouTube videos, online courses and even my coaching programmes are all done digitally. (I use Zoom to talk with my clients who are based all over the world)  I also use Todoist to keep track of the recurring stuff I would likely forget to do. Reminders to water the office plant (every four days), to do my expenses, respond to my actionable emails and to send out regularly recurring invoices are all managed in Todoist.  The conclusion I have come to from this experiment is that the perfect system is a hybrid of digital and analogue tools. Your calendar works best digitally, yet on a daily basis, slowing down and writing out what you will do that day works better in an analogue form. It stops you from overwhelming yourself.  Thank you, Phil, for your question. And thank you to you for listening. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

“If you want rest, you have to take it. You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take it seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.”  That's a quote from Alex Pang's book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less. How many of you are taking a holiday (“vacation” for my American friends) this year?  I know that for many—myself included—taking a holiday is not something they find comfortable. They know they need it, yet there's just so much to do and so little time to do it.  Anyway, having just returned from a ten-day holiday, I thought I would share with you some ways you can get some significant rest and still use your holiday time for some useful work.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin   The Time-Based Productivity 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 | 377 Hello, and welcome to episode 377 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. For many people, going on holiday is something they look forward to. It's an opportunity to get away from the daily grind of meetings, deadlines, emails, and messages.  Yet for others, it can be more stressful than when at work. There's a worry that something important will be missed or that an emergency of their making will occur while they're away.  However, there's is something else a holiday offers you, that few people ever take advantage of. In this week's episode I will share with you the things I do while away.  Now, some of what I do may not be for you—I run my own business which means I need to be watching, at the very least, what is happening within the business each day. Yet, many of the things I will suggest may be just the thing for you to help you get on top of your work.  Now, before I get into the ideas, just a quick heads-up. Before I went away, I launched a brand new, ground-shattering course. The Time-Based Productivity course.  It's an evolution of everything I've taught over the last several years.  You have no control over what's coming in each day, yet feel you must finish everything. Trying to decide what's important, what can wait, and what must be done right now causes you to freeze, become anxious, and then spend time reorganising all your tasks.  It's unsustainable and leaves you feeling lost, out of control, and overwhelmed. Enter time-based productivity, where what matters is how much time you allocate to the different types of work you need to do.  It's a method that works, and will transform your relationship with time once and for all.  There's currently an early-bird discount of 20% on the course. So, if you want to become less stressed, more in control of your time, and have the time to do the things you want to do, this course is for you.  Oh, and I should point out that this course also gives you free access to my Areas of Focus and my all-new Time Sector System course.  Okay, now on with the podcast. First up, we have to accept that even though we are on holiday, email and messages are not going to stop coming in. They just don't.  If you're employed, I would strongly advise that you set up an auto-respond email that informs the sender that you are away and will not be checking your email while away or responding to anything when you get back.  Instead, inform them to resend the email on the day AFTER you get back.  This does two things. The first is it allows you, if you wish, to delete anything that came in while you were away. For those of you who are more squeamish, you can archive them instead.  The second is it sorts out the important from the not important automatically for you. If something's important, you will get the email again the day after you return to work.  Why the day after you return? Well, I can promise you on your return to work, there's going to be a lot of catching up to do. You don't want a lot of emails coming in on that day causing you to instantly feel overwhelmed on your first day back.  For those of you, like me, who cannot, or are not willing to, stay away from their email, then setting up a routine can help.  I travelled to Ireland. That's eight hours behind Korea, so my sleep schedule changes. Normally, I am a night owl. I prefer to work late into the evening and start the day around 8:30 am.  When I am in Europe, that changes and I become an early bird. I normally wake up around 4:00 am and go to bed around 8:30 pm.  I use the two hours between 4:30 and 6:30 am to deal with communications and admin tasks that, as a business owner, are my responsibility to deal with.  It's just two hours a day done before the day gets started.  The great thing with this approach is that once I've done it, that's it for the day. I won't return to my email or messages for the rest of the day and I get on and enjoy the holiday.  This is a better approach than to come back to 800+ emails and messages on your first day. If you're going straight into meetings and catching up with what has happened while you were away, you've just created a huge backlog for yourself that will take weeks to get back on top of.  Next. One of the biggest issues I get from my coaching clients is they don't have any time to step back and define what is important to them, reorganise their daily structure or to establish what their core work is.  Holiday time is great for this. There's often a lot of travelling involved, and it's likely to be with your family. This is a wonderful opportunity to talk with your partner about what you want as a family.  My wife and I use flying time to talk about what we want to accomplish as a family over the next year. It's not planned. It's spontaneous. And, it's usually when we are flying back home rather than when we fly out. Yet, we always do it.  I remember when I was employed and suffering from what we called “the holiday blues”. This is where you feel slightly depressed on your return to work for a week or two. You miss the sense of relaxation and have nothing to look forward to except for the daily drudge of work and meetings. Having a talk with your partner and or family on your return journey can give you a multitude of things you can do as a couple or family. Giving you something to look forward to.  If you're taking a summer holiday, this is also a good time to review how you are doing on your goals this year.  When this year started, I was 88 kilograms (about 195 pounds or nearly 14 stone). That's way above my target weight of between 80 and 83 kilograms (175 to 180 pounds or 12 ½ to 13 stone)  So, my number one health and fitness goal for 2025 was to get my weight back to within my normal range. That was achieved, but, while away I ate too much—don't we all when on holiday?—and need to refocus my attention on getting it back.  Fortunately, it's only two or three pounds, so the target it to get it back within acceptable limits by the end of July.  This means, I need to quickly get back into my exercise routine and eat healthily. It's a great way to get yourself refocused on your return.  Another thing you can do while away is to do some digital cleaning up. I love this time.  While you're on holiday there is likely to be pockets of time you can use to clean up your notes, calendar and task manager.  Let's be honest, when we're in the day to day hustle, we throw a lot of useless information into our notes and add tasks into our task manager that we know we will never do.  This is a wonderful time to clear these out.  Last Wednesday, my first day back at work, my notes were organised, my task manger was clean and tight and my calendar was cleared of conflicts. What a wonderful way to restart.  What I noticed was I felt organised, focused and ready for anything. Isn't that what a holiday is meant to do for you.  Yet, if you don't do any cleaning up, you come back to a mess. Nothing has changed and the very things you hate about your work life continue. No control, a messed up list of things to do and a calendar that fills you with dread.  And, something powerful happens when you do this learning up. You learn a lot.  You discover better workflows and processes and you gain a sense of optimism about how the changes you make now will bring you incredible rewards once you return to work.  I often find I cannot wait to get restarted because I'm excited to test out new ways of managing my work day.  And let's be honest, cleaning things up doesn't require a lot of mental energy. It's the kind of thing you can do in the evenings with a laptop on your knees while enjoying a cocktail or two. (Although not too many. You don't want to delete important things)  Now, you may be thinking ‘no way! I'm on holiday I don't want to deal with any work issues'. And I get that.  But, and it's big but, your holiday may only last a week or two, and then you're back at work. Doing all or some of these tips, will last far longer and leave you with less stress and overwhelm.  It gives you optimism, and helps you to refocus on the important things in life. Surely, a few hours out of your holiday time to do some cleaning up is worth it to feel that way?  In the past I've not done any of these things and just found myself in the same mess I was in before my holiday. It's not pleasant and that's when I struggled with the holiday blues.  Now, I do these things and I've never experienced holiday blues and instead am excited to get back to work feeling refreshed and energised.  It's your choice. But I can assure you, if you do all of these or just some of them on your next holiday, you will continue to do it for every holiday in the future.  Thank you for listening and don't forget to check out the brand new Time Based Productivity Course.  It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

“Every morning in SEAL training, my instructors, who at the time were all Vietnam veterans, would show up in my barracks room and the first thing they'd do is inspect my bed. If you did it right, the corners would be square, the covers would be pulled tight, the pillow centred just under the headboard, and the extra blanket folded neatly at the foot of the rack. It was a simple task, mundane at best. But every morning we were required to make our bed to perfection. It seemed a little ridiculous at the time, particularly in light of the fact that we were aspiring to be real warriors. Tough, battle hardened SEALs. But the wisdom of this simple act has been proven to me many times over. If you make your bed every morning, you will have accomplished the first task of the day. It will give you a small sense of pride and it will encourage you to do another task and another, and another. And by the end of the day, that one task completed will have turned into many tasks completed. Making your bed will also reinforce the fact that the little things in life matter. If you can't do the little things right, you'll never be able to do the big things right. And if by chance you have a miserable day, you will come home to a bed that is made that you made. And a made bed gives you encouragement that tomorrow will be better.” That is an excerpt from Admiral McRaven's Commencement Address at Texas University in 2014. And it's the heart of this week's episode. Simple, mundane tasks that carry far more weight than you may think.  You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Areas of Focus: The Foundation Of All Solid Productivity Systems. Take 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 | 376 Hello, and welcome to episode 376 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. If you were to read the comments on any productivity or time management YouTube video, you'll find many well-meaning commentators talking about this app, or that new method or hack to play with.  The truth is few of them will work and most involve adding more and more layers of complexity which only stops you from doing the work that matters. Real improvements in your time management and productivity comes from the boring and mundane. It's the sitting down to respond to your emails and messages every day. It's taking the laundry to the washing machine and hanging it up after it's been washed. And yes, it's making your bed each morning before you leave to take your kids to school.  Doing the simple, basic tasks each day whether you're in the mood or not, is the secret to massively improved outcomes. It means when you get home after a particularly stressful day, everything is calm, peaceful and ready for you to relax get some rest.  It's how you avoid getting home, stressed out and exhausted only to find your breakfast things are still on your dining table, your bed's unmade and your laundry basket is overflowing with clothes that are beginning to give off a rather unpleasant odour.  And, yes, it means giving yourself five to ten minutes each day to map out your day. To see where your appointments are and what tasks you must get done.  None of this is complicated. It's basic, it's almost laughably unimportant, yet it isn't. These are the critical things each day that ensure you remain on top of everything and know what needs to be done, where you should be and when and leaves you feeling calm, serene even, and ready for the next day.  And with all that said, it's time for me to hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Charlie. Charlie asks, hi Carl, over the last twelve months, I feel everything has spiralled out of control. I get home exhausted and just never seem able to catch up. My Task list is out of control and my calendar seems to fill up with random meetings each day. What can I do to get some control back into my life?  Hi Charlie, thank you for your question.  This is something that can happen from time to time. Things spiralling out of control. It's often because we say “yes” a little too freely, or we stop following some basic principles.  The basic principles of better time management and productivity are planning your days and week. Not in a micro-management way, but more in a what's happening tomorrow or this week way.  It's also understanding that in most cases you can cancel or reschedule a meeting. I've often looked at my diary for tomorrow and seen I was over scheduled and realised I needed to postpone some meetings or rearrange some of the things I had planned to do.  It's never the end of the world if you have to reschedule. It's just a part of life.  For example, if you're scheduled to pick your kids up from school but realise that if you do you'll not be able to finish the proposal that must go out today, you could ask your partner or parents to help you out today.  It's only today. Or, you may decide to ask to be excused from a team meeting so you can finish the proposal.  We always have options. Yet, if you want more options, plan the day the evening before and you will see any potential conflicts with plenty of time to explore all options.  If you don't plan your day, it's likely you will see the problem you have a couple of hours before you have to pick your kids up. You're not leaving yourself with much time to sort out the conflict.  It's the same reason why weekly planning is critical. The weekly planning session gives you the “big picture” view of your week. It your chance to see any potential issues well before they become crises.  This is the number one reason you will find you feel behind, rushed and overwhelmed. You're not giving yourself a moment to pause to look ahead for potential storms so you can plot an alternative route through.  To start getting back in control, do a weekly plan for next week. Open you calendar and first look for any conflicts—these are where you have inadvertently double booked yourself. You cannot be in two places at once, so pick one.  Next, open your task manager. This is probably where the bigger problems lay. When we lose control we start throwing all sorts into our tasks managers. It's easy to put stuff there.  If your sense of control has completely gone, it's possible you may have stopped looking at your task manager altogether. If that's the case, open it.  Now you have a choice. You could declare task management bankruptcy and delete everything. Don't worry, if something's genuinely important, you'll be reminded of it somewhere. You can then add it back later.  The second choice is to go through everything in your task manager one by one. Delete what's no longer relevant, update what is by making sure the task is written in an actionable way. In other words you have an actionable verb in the task so it's clear what you need to do.  Then for anything in your inbox, ask the three processing questions: What is it? What do I need to do? When will I do it.  Then, organise your tasks by stuff you will do this week, next week, next month.  Once done, go back to your this week list and, with your calendar open, put the day you will do the tasks next week.  Now be smart here. If you have six hours of meetings on Wednesday, avoid putting tasks on that day. You won't have time. Not when you remember you will need to spend some time on your email and messages and any other matters that will inevitably pop up once the week gets going.  Anything not in your this week list can be left undated. Hopefully, many of those will sort themselves out. If they don't, you can look at them again when you do you next weekly planning session and decide if they need to be brought forward into the following week.  Just doing these basic weekly planning steps, you'll instantly give yourself a sense of control.  Yet, this is only as good as your ability to say no.  You cannot be in two places at once, and you're not going to be able to complete sixty tasks and attend seven hours of meetings in one day. If that's what your day looks like stop.  You're going to have to say no to something and the sooner you do this the easier it is to do it.  The consequences of not doing these planning sessions are missed deadlines, over booked calendars and a lot of late nights and weekends spent catching up, feeling stressed and blaming your company.  The blame game solves nothing unless you're willing to say “no. This has go to stop”. If you're not willing to do that, don't complain. A bit harsh, I know, but you always have a choice remember.  More basics are giving yourself time each day for your messages and emails. I'm always surprised how unwilling people are to protect time for dealing with these. 99% of the time it's out of control email, Slack and Teams inboxes that people are most stressed about. And I know, if you don't spend sometime on your communications daily, they will backlog quickly.  And when I say quickly I mean it. One day missed will mean you will need double the time tomorrow. And that keeps increasing until you decide to spend a whole day clearing up your email.  If you want to avoid spending days clearing your email inbox, protect time every day for dealing with it. That has to be a non-negotiable.  I believe it was Einstein who said insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results.  Well unless you protect time for managing your communications each day, you'll be spending days clearing your inbox every month. Nothing will change unless you are prepared to change the way you schedule your day.  So there you go, Charlie. The important basics of getting back control and staying in control, is daily and weekly planning and protecting daily time for dealing with communications. Do that, and you'll soon find yourself regaining control.  I know it sounds simple, perhaps too simple but it goes back to what Admiral McCraven said in his commencement address, “if you want to change the world, begin by making your bed.”  Thank you for your question, Charlie, and thank you to you too for listening.  Oh, and just a quick update, this podcast will be on holiday for a couple of weeks. We'll be back in a couple of weeks.  It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1727: Carl Pullein shares six straightforward yet powerful tips to help anyone regain control over their time and boost productivity. With a focus on practicality, his strategies encourage small shifts in daily habits that create long-term impact, making productivity more accessible and less overwhelming. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/6-common-sense-time-management-and-productivity-tips-anyone-can-use/27/11/2019 Quotes to ponder: "One of the most effective ways to become better at managing your time is to start planning your day before the day begins." "You don't need a new app or the latest gadget to be more productive, you need clarity." "If everything is urgent, then nothing is." Episode references: Todoist: https://todoist.com/ Evernote: https://evernote.com/ Things 3: https://culturedcode.com/things/ Trello: https://trello.com/ Getting Things Done: https://gettingthingsdone.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1727: Carl Pullein shares six straightforward yet powerful tips to help anyone regain control over their time and boost productivity. With a focus on practicality, his strategies encourage small shifts in daily habits that create long-term impact, making productivity more accessible and less overwhelming. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/6-common-sense-time-management-and-productivity-tips-anyone-can-use/27/11/2019 Quotes to ponder: "One of the most effective ways to become better at managing your time is to start planning your day before the day begins." "You don't need a new app or the latest gadget to be more productive, you need clarity." "If everything is urgent, then nothing is." Episode references: Todoist: https://todoist.com/ Evernote: https://evernote.com/ Things 3: https://culturedcode.com/things/ Trello: https://trello.com/ Getting Things Done: https://gettingthingsdone.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

”But the fact remains, with all the changes that have happened in our lifetime—whether we're “boomers,” “Gen Xers,” “Millennials,” “Gen Zers” or whatever comes next—one thing has never changed nor will it ever change, and that is the amount of time we all have.”  That's a quote from Hyrum Smith's book, The 3 Gaps: Are You Making A Difference You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Areas of Focus: The Foundation Of All Solid Productivity Systems. Take 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 | 375 Hello, and welcome to episode 375 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. One thing you may have noticed is that there are many things we have to or want to do, yet there never seems to be enough time to do them. You are not alone. Everyone feels this either all the time or at least some of the time. The reason is that it's true. There will always be more to do than time available to do it.  This means we should approach the problem from a different angle.  Traditionally, people have spent extra hours trying to catch up. Working late or even working the weekend. Yet, is throwing more time at the issue the best solution?  I don't think so.  We live one life. Our work is just one part of that life. If you work an average forty-hour week, your work only accounts for around 25% of your time. Yet, for many people, their work causes 80% or more of their stress.  This week, I want to share some ideas and a paradigm shift in how you think about the tasks you have to do and the time you have available. It's a simple shift, but one that will reframe your relationship with time and ultimately give you more time for the things you want time for.  So, without further ado, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question. This week's question comes from Marcos. Marcos asks, Hi Carl, I struggle to keep up with all the tasks in my task manager. Most days feel like I am adding more tasks than I complete, and my inbox is now full. Todoist won't allow me to add any more. How do you cope with an ever-growing list of things to do? Hi Marcos, thank you for your question.  There could be a number of reasons for this. One of the most common ones is moving any email you need to respond to into your task manager's inbox.  You don't need to do that. Instead, you can create a folder in your email system and call it “Action This Day”. Then, any email you need to act on—reply, read, forward, etc. You place it there.  Then, add a recurring task in your task manager that tells you to “clear my Action This Day folder”.  That will remove many tasks from your task manager. It will also begin the process of changing the way you think about things to do and the time you have available to do them.  It's no longer about how many emails you must reply to; it's about when you will work on your emails.  Other things that can clog up a task manager are articles and newsletters to read, YouTube videos to watch and books to buy.  All good stuff, but since so many of these are non-urgent, you would be better putting them in a dedicated note in your notes app.  That way, when you do have time to read or watch these, you can open up your notes app and choose something.  I covered this recently in one of my YouTube videos. There is information we like to collect—articles, YouTube videos, etc., often the easiest thing to do is to add this information to your task manager's inbox. After all, reading or watching them is something to do. Yet, the worst place to collect these items is your task manager. There's no urgency to read or watch these. We can do it anytime. Perhaps we're waiting at the doctor's office, or, in my case, for my wife somewhere.  In these situations, I can open my notes app and, depending on my mood, choose between reading or watching something—my notes are always on my phone.  So, Marcos, one of the first things you can do is to remove all these non-urgent informational items from your task manager and move them to your notes app. I would add that a great place to read articles is something like Instapaper or Read. Both of these apps are designed to collect newsletters and articles.  Using tools like these gives you a central place to read your saved articles. It's like having your personalised curated news feed.  The only addition is finding a regular time to read what you collect. The problem with keeping these in your task manager is that you're not reading them. Moving them out of your task manager and into a read-later app is just shuffling things around if you are not committing to a daily reading time.  When I commuted to work each day, I read these articles on bus and train journeys. This prevented me from getting sucked into the negative news cycle and clickbait headlines.  My news feed was free of junk and algorithmically generated stuff I was no longer interested in.  And there is another tip for managing the things we have to do. Having a set time each day for doing the things we want to do.  The challenge we all face today is that everything is so convenient; we can pretty much do anything at any time. You can set up a bank account, apply for a credit card, and even buy a car online today.  You don't have to leave the comfort of your own home.  In the past, if we wanted to open a bank account or buy a new car, we would have to go to a specific place. Going to these places meant we needed to schedule time to go.  I remember when I was in car sales and couples would come in either in the evening or at weekends. During the weekday, things were relatively quiet for us. Time spent with a customer would typically be around an hour or two.  So the customer had to go to a showroom intentionally, talk to a human being and in most cases test drive a car.  Now, if you can do almost anything at any time from anywhere, the challenge becomes, what do you do now?  If you are task counting, you're putting yourself into an impossible situation. The number of tasks you have to do is not within your control.  You do not have control over what your boss or customers will ask you to do today. You don't have much control over what your partner or family members may ask you to do. You also don't know when they will ask you to do something.  By focusing on what you have to do, you're setting yourself up for overwhelm.  Instead, you will find focusing on when you will do something a much more realistic approach. Not only do you put yourself back in control, you will also be working within a realistic system.  This system is called time-based productivity, and it's been around for a very long time.  I've tracked it back to 1918 with the Ivy Lee Method. That's where you wrote down the six things you want to get done the next day, and when the day began, you started with the first item and worked your way down the list until the end of your work day.  Anything you did not get done would be moved to the list for tomorrow. It's simple and based on a realistic evaluation of how much you could get done in a day.  From there, it advanced throughout the century to when we began using things like the Franklin Planner.  Something went wrong in the early 2000s. Somewhere along the line, we stopped calculating how much time we had available to do things and began focusing on the things themselves.  Well, that's an impossible situation. You'll always have stuff to do. If you focus on all that stuff, you're going to feel anxiety, stress and overwhelm.  If you want to stop the struggle Marcos, then returning to a time-based system will do that for you.  The first step is to look at all the tasks you have to do and categorise them. You will have admin and communication tasks—we all do. Then there will be tasks related to your specific work. If you work with clients, then there will be client work to do. If you work in management, there will be management duties you will need to perform.  Once you know what your categories are, you can then allocate specific time for doing those categories of work.  Let me give you an example of this with email. Imagine you get 150 emails a day. Of those, around thirty require you to take action. When you process your email, you move those actionable emails into your action this day folder, and either delete or archive the rest.  This leaves you with thirty emails that require some action from you.  If you were to allocate an hour each day for dealing with your actionable emails, you will always have time to respond to your email. Sure, some days you may not be able to clear them all. However, if you consistently spend an hour a day on these, you will never develop a significant backlog.  Most days you will be ahead; other days you might be slightly behind. But you won't feel it's out of control.  You can also apply this to your admin tasks. Admin tasks have a habit of building up over time because they are generally low in urgency and importance.  If you were to give yourself thirty minutes or so each day for admin tasks, you would find that no backlog is building up, and you are, for the most part, on top of things.  You can do the same for your client work. If part of your responsibilities is to send out proposals to customers, then allocating some time each day for doing this means all you need to do is refer to a list of proposals to write, and for that allocated time, you do as many as you can.  That list may be in a CRM system or a simple note in your notes app. Your calendar will tell you that it's time to write proposals. You then go to your list of proposals to write, and start.  This way, you won't need to use your task manager. I do this with my coaching clients. Every day, I allocate an hour to writing feedback for each client. The list of feedback to write is in Evernote. Some days, there will be six or seven pieces of feedback to write, and other days, perhaps only two or three.  I know I can write around three pieces of feedback in an hour. This means if I do this every day, nobody is likely to be waiting more than 48 hours for their feedback.  I'm not focused on how many pieces of feedback I have to write. All I am focused on is writing the feedback in the hour I have to write it. I will write as many as I can. No pressure. Just begin with the oldest and carry on down the list.  And that, in a nutshell, is what time-based productivity is all about. It's not about how much you have to do. It's about how much time you have available to do the work you have to do.  If you have enormous backlogs now, you may need to increase the time you allocate to specific work periods for a little while. That actually helps because it means you are learning new habits and processes for getting the work done, which ultimately speeds you up over time.  So there you go, Marcos. I hope that has helped. Take a look at your task manager. Remove individual emails and stuff to read or watch.  Then in Todoist, use the labels to categorise your work and use those categories to protect time in your calendar to do the work.  Be consistent with this and you will soon find that the overwhelm and struggle diminish.  Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to. Alice: I don't much care where. The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go. Alice: ...So long as I get somewhere. The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you're sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.” That is the famous dialogue between Alice and the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carrol. And it's a great illustration of what happens when you don't know what is important to you and where you want to go. You're going to go get somewhere and that somewhere is probably going to be a place you never wanted to go to.  This week, I'll share with you why developing your Areas of Focus is so important.    You can subscribe to this podcast on:  Podbean | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Spotify | TUNEIN   Links: Email Me | Twitter | Facebook | Website | Linkedin Areas of Focus: The Foundation Of All Solid Productivity Systems. Take 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 | 374 Hello, and welcome to episode 374 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. So, why are your Areas of Focus important? Well, in a nutshell, they give you direction. They help you to prioritise your days and weeks and give you purpose.  Without them, you'll end up helping someone else achieve their goals, more often than not, in exchange for money, only to discover you're health is shot to pieces and you've spent your forty years of working life miserably giving away five days a week to something you hated doing.   A bit harsh, I know, but if you've read the book The Top five Regrets of The Dying by Bronnie Ware, you'll know that the number one reason given was “I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”  It's your areas of focus that will allow you to live a life true to yourself because by developing your areas of focus, you'll learn what is important to you and what is not.  And the second reason? I wish I hadn't worked so hard.  When you don't know what is important and what is not, you will work too hard. Everything becomes important, and that means you work long hours and at weekends, missing out on your children growing up and enjoying the best years of your life doing the things you want to do.  I'm pretty sure that's not how you want your life to work out.  So with all that said, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Julie. Julie asks, hi Carl, I hear you mention knowing what's important to you a lot, yet I really don't know what's important. I'm under pressure at work and I have two teenagers at home. I feel my life is being pushed and pulled by everyone but myself. What can I do to create some boundaries in my life?  Hi Julie, thank you for your question.  It's when we feel lost and out of sorts that our Areas of Focus can help to bring back some peace to our lives.  Our areas of focus are focused on our needs and wants. And because of that, people feel it's an indulgence to even consider spending time on developing them. That's particularly the case when we have a young family and we've allowed our work to dominate our lives.  The first book I ever read on time management and productivity was Hyrum Smith's Ten natural Laws and time and Life Management, and around the first quarter of that book is spent on developing what Hyrum Smith calls your governing values.  Your governing values are the values by which you live your life by. With these, we will all be different. For some, being a good mother or father will be their most important value, for others, it might be building a successful business. Now, when I read that book I was around eighteen or nineteen and that part of the book washed over me. I was young, I believed I was immortal and I could do anything I wanted to do. I didn't have time to think about my “governing values”.  Yet, with age, came wisdom and around my late twenties I began to see the importance of having a set of values to guide me.  That's when I gave myself a couple of weekends to write out my governing values. Funnily enough, as I look through my old Franklin Planners from that era, I can see that the values I wrote down then are not far away from how I define my Areas of Focus today.  it's these areas that give you a direction and a purpose. They help you with prioritising your days and weeks and give you a solid foundation on which to build your goals.  For example, I used to be a smoker. Throughout my twenties and thirties I's smoke around twenty cigarettes a day. I found it relaxing, a great way to step away from my work and to think. Yet, I knew that by continuing to smoke I was violating my area of health and fitness.  I was going to the gym and running, I was eating healthily, but i was destroying all that by continuing the smoke. As I got older, the pressure inside me to quit something I enjoyed doing grew stronger. it eventually reached a point where I had to quit.  Every time I reviewed my areas of focus, I had that niggling voice reminding me that the vision I had for my later life—being able to travel the world running marathons, exploring places like Mount Kilimanjaro and the Rocky Mountains would be just a pipe dream because I would be spending my later life in and out of hospital.  And so, I set the goal to quit smoking. Now for anyone who has gone through the process of quitting smoking, you'll know it's one of the toughest things to do. It took me two years to finally quit. Yet, the effort was worth it.  Quitting gave me a sense of accomplishment, a realisation that I could do anything if I put my mind to it and it was compatible with what I felt was important.  Yet without a set of principles—something your areas of focus will give you—things like stopping something that is slowly killing you or staying in a career that is draining you and leaving your feeling depressed and unhappy—will never occur to you. They will be placed on what Brian Tracey calls, “Someday Island”, a place where nothing happens because you're waiting for “someday”.  another illustration of this was when i joined a law firm. I had spent six years training to be a lawyer. I worked hard, to get my legal qualifications, yet when I began working in a law firm, I quickly realised I'd made a huge mistake.  I hated being stuck behind a desk eight or none hours a day.  Prior to working in an office, all my jobs had involved a lot of moving around. I began my career in hotel management, where I spent all day running around a large building dealing with all sorts of issues. I'd sometimes be on reception helping to check people out, then I's be in the restaurant serving lunch. It was fun, physically exhausting, yet incredibly fulfilling.  Then I went into car sales. And again, my days were largely spent running around a showroom and forecourt talking with customers.  Suddenly, I'm chained to a desk and within six months I'd gained 20 pounds in weight, I was unhappy, and felt trapped. It was as if I had been sent to open prison where I was expected to be in one place for eight to nine hours a day Monday to Friday. it was horrible.  So, I quit and came to Korea. a decision that turned out to be the best decision I've ever made. Yet, when i told my friends and family I was quitting the law firm and going to teach English in Korea, they thought I was mad. Why was I quitting a potentially lucrative career to go and do something I knew nothing about?  Yet, it was my areas of focus that told me what I needed to do. staying in that legal job violated my career and business area. I was trapped in an industry that held firm to a tried and tested career path. I didn't want that constraint. I wanted a lot more freedom to help people and perhaps change their lives for the better. Being a lawyer would never give me that freedom.  The benefit of having a set of established areas of focus is they give you a blueprint for the life you want to live. By writing them down, and reading through them every six months or so, you get the chance to realign yourself with the way you want to live your life.  Now, for those of you who have not looked at your areas of focus before, there are eight areas we all share. These are: Family and relationships, health and fitness, Finances, Business / career Lifestyle and life experiences Self development Spirituality life's purpose  Each one of those mean something to us. However, how we define them will be different of each of us, snd in what order of importance will change as we go through life.  For example, as you get older, your health and fitness and finances will likely move up the list and your career and business will drop down.  When or if you start a family, your family and relationships will rapidly climb the list.  You may even find that over time you redefine one or more of your areas. This is perfectly normal.  however, at their core, these areas define who you are and what's important to you.  This means, Julie, when it comes to juggling your career with your family, you will be able to see by how you prioritise your areas whether you should attend your daughter's netball finals or that important meeting at work.  If family and relationships is above your career, then it's an easy choice to make. However, if you have prioritised finances above family and relationships, you'll need to decide if the risk of missing out on a promotion, is worth it to see your daughter play in the netball finals.  The problem most of face is there are too many competing demands on our time. Time is fixed. We get twenty-four hours a day; that's it. The good news is, no matter what work you do, you always have control over how you spend those twenty-four hours.  I know many people will say they don't have control over their time. But you do. You can decide not to attend a meeting you've been invited to. You get to choose whether to tap the accept, decline or maybe button when it appears on your calendar.  Whether you accept a meeting request or not, will depend on what you prioritise.  Given a choice between a meeting with an important person on a Saturday evening or spending that time with my wife, I already know the answer. my wife will have priority. Family and relationships is much higher than my career/business area.  I can renegotiate the meeting with the important person. Saturday nights are my family's protected time. It's one night a week, and I won't sacrifice it for anything.  This also translates to my work week. My exercise time is 5:00 pm. At that time, I stop what I am doing and either head out for a run or go upstairs to the loft and lift weights. I never schedule meetings at 5 pm. That's my exercise time and right now, my health and fitness area is higher than my career/business area.  All this comes down to knowing what's your areas of focus mean to you and how you prioritise them. There we will all be different, but it's your areas of focus that will give you a blueprint for how you want to live your life, what is important to you and where you want to spend your time.  Not knowing what your areas of focus are will be like being Alice in Alice in Wonderland. you'll feel the need to go somewhere, but will have no idea where and then you will end up following someone else, and that someone else will not always have your best interests at heart.  I hope that has helped, Julie. My advice is to spend some time working on your areas of focus. Determine what's they mean to you and pull out any activities that you can do consistently and add them to your task manager or calendar. That way you will stay on course. And, if you find you are not happy with the direction you are going, redefine your areas and adjust course.  Thank you for your question and thank you to you too for listening. It just remains for me now to wish you all a very very productive week.   

“Whoever runs your schedule is the most important person in your world as Leader. You need time to think, time to study and time to get the things done you came to leadership to do. Lose control of the schedule and you will fail.” That is a quote from former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair. And it strikes at the heart of mastering time management. Today's episode explores why your calendar is your most important productivity tool.  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 | 373 Hello, and welcome to episode 373 of the Your Time, Your Way Podcast. A podcast to answer all your questions about productivity, time management, self-development, and goal planning. My name is Carl Pullein, and I am your host of this show. Whoever controls your calendar controls you. They can (and often will) destroy your plans for the day, prevent you from doing your most important work and be the reason you fail in your career goals.  If you are a leader, you will likely have plans for your team. In order to implement those plans and move them to completion, you will need time. It's up to you to find that time.  Top leaders understand this. They are very strict with their calendars. Nobody but themselves has control of it. And, probably the most important factor of all, they have the confidence to cancel appointments if those appointments do not align with their weekly or daily strategic plan.  And yes, it's a confidence thing. Nobody, not even your boss, really has control over your time. You always have the option to negotiate an appointment or say no.  In this week's episode, I will share some ideas you can use to get control of your calendar and have the confidence to negotiate appointments and/or say no. So, let me hand you over to the Mystery Podcast Voice for this week's question.  This week's question comes from Karen. Karen asks, Hi Carl, I lead a team of sixteen people and am struggling to get my work done because my boss and team are always demanding meetings with me. Do you have any tips on protecting time for important work when you don't have control of your calendar? Hi Karen, thank you for your question.  This can appear to be a difficult change to make. Particularly if your team and bosses have become conditioned to you being available whenever they need you.  One of most powerful lessons I learned in my early career was from the so—called “my office door is always open” concept. For those of you not familiar with this concept, it began in the late 80s or early 90s (possibly earlier). This was where bosses used to tell their employees my office door is always open. You can come and talk to me at anytime.  Nice concept. It gave the impression that your boss was approachable. Yet in reality, it was not really a practical way to operate.  It meant that bosses were constantly being interrupted—well, those that we not scary, anyway, The two most productive bosses I had in my early career did follow this policy, yet with one addition. That was to tell us that when their door was closed they were not to be disturbed.  One of those bosses, would close his door every day around 2 pm. He would then use that time to get his most important work done. David, had a secretary, who would hold his calls too. If you needed David between two and four, you had to go through his secretary, Michaela and Michaela protected David's time ruthlessly.  Yet, for the other times in the day, David was available. He'd walk around the office from time to time asking if we were okay. He made himself available.  What happened, was if we needed David for anything, we knew we had to catch him before 2 pm or wait until after 4 pm.  I don't recall anyone complaining. The Managing Partner of the firm respected it. And so did David's clients—he was a partner in the law firm I worked at.  The key to this working was David's consistency. His team, bosses and clients all knew that David would not be available between two and four.  Since then, every productive person I have met, has operated something very similar. They have periods of time in the day where they are not accessible. In that time they are doing their most important work. That period of time is generally at the same time each day.  I remember, once being on a training course and the instructor, told us she would be available at any time after 11:00 am if we had any questions.  That's it. A simple sentence. “Available at anytime after 11:00 am”. I don't recall any one of us on that training course ever trying to contact her before 11:00 am.  Now, it might not be possible for you to cut yourself off from the outside world at the same time each day—although we all do this when we are sleeping and the world doesn't end, does it?  A lot of this depends on the job you do. I've mentioned before in this podcast the best salesperson I've ever worked with, Claire.  Claire would never be available between 9:00 and 10:30 am. It was during this time she was on the phones prospecting and following up customers. That one strategy was the difference between her and every other salesperson in that company. She outsold her nearest colleague two to one most months.  We worked a nine hour day in that sales job, and Claire was unavailable for just ninety minutes. She was in charge of her diary. That still left her with seven-and-a-half hours where she was available.  So, Karen, the place to begin is to ask yourself how much time do you need each day to stay on top of your work?  Given that a managerial role is largely about communicating with a team and bosses, you will likely need to be available most of your working day. Yet, you will still have some individual work to do. So, how much time do you need to complete that work each week?  You will only be able to work with averages. You will not be able to be specific about how much time you need each week. You're human. Sometimes we are on fire and can plough through a lot of work. Other days, we're tired and anything we do is sluggish and slow.  By working with averages, you're still getting work done and when you are on fire you can catch up.  For instance, on average, I need around 14 hours a week to create my content. This means each day I protect two hours for content creation where nobody can interrupt me. I then have an extra hour or so in the afternoons I keep flexible for finishing off any work.  I allow no more than twenty one hours of meetings each week. 90% of the time that is more than enough for the meetings and coaching sessions I have each week.  I know if I allow more than 21 hours, the additional admin cost and lost time for critical work will mean I have to work late nights and Saturday just to catch up. Not something I am prepared to do.  Earlier, I alluded to “negotiating” appointments.  Imagine you're in the market to buy a Rolls Royce car. (I said imagine). If you call the Rolls Royce dealership, you're going to have to negotiate a day and time. The “sales process” for buying a Rolls Royce is not your typical process. It's an experience.  You're not just buying a typical car. These days, you're buying a unique bespoke car. The salesperson you talk with will need time to go through all the panelling options, Exterior colours and interior seat fabrics, and even the type of material you want your dashboard made from.  The person you speak with when making your appointment, will negotiate a time to visit the showroom. That's part of the experience.  Now if you were in the market to buy a Ford, Toyota, Hyundai or VW, and call to make an appointment, you can name your day and time. The salespeople will very likely accept your first day and time.  Now which experience would leave you feeling special?  If you think about your readiness to accept any appointment at any time, what does that say about you?  Negotiating your appointments elevates your status in the mind of the person wishing to make an appointment with you. The harder it is to get an appointment with you, the more likely you will have a favourable outcome. It's the “you must be important if it's difficult to make an appointment with you”. Try getting an appointment with Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai or Satya Nadala. It's not that they don't do appointments, it's just they restrict the number of meetings they are available for each day and the meetings they do attend must count.  So, if you protect 9:30 to 11:00 am each morning, if someone wants to have a meeting with you during that time, you would say could we meet at 11:30 am instead? 9 times out of 10 your suggested time will be accepted. If not, the person wanting to meet you will likely suggest an alternative time.  If you cannot find a suitable time, then you will have to use your protected time. But with this strategy, it will be very rare that you need to do that.  I promise you, if you do this a few times, your confidence will rapidly improve and you will find that your focus time blocks will be protected.  The challenge we all face today is we feel we must be available at all times for whoever wants to communicate with us. If it's not Teams or Zooms calls, it's instant messages and email. The trick is to become less available.  Be like the Rolls Royce salesperson. Make getting an appointment with you part of the experience. If it's a little harder to get an appointment with you, the person you're meeting is going to be much more open to finding a solution with you there and then, instead of scheduling another meeting with you to “sort the details out”.  Ask yourself, what the worst that could happen if you “negotiate” with the person wanting to meet with you? The worst is they refuse your suggested time and insist you meet them at their preferred time. At that point you can accept.  Yet, I can promise you, the majority of people you negotiate times with will accept your time. The time they chose was completely random anyway. No matter who they are, your boss, your most important customer or whatever, they will thank you for taking the initiative and suggesting a time.  I will end with a recent example of this. I am in the process of changing my car as the lease on my current one is expiring in September. We called the dealership to arrange a test drive in a car I was interested in, and the sales manager informed us that this week they were fully booked up, but they had an opening on Thursday or Friday afternoon next week.  I was both impressed and relieved. Impressed because he did not jump at the chance and suggest we come down that afternoon or tomorrow. I had a sense of scarcity. Relieved because he took the decision for making the appointment out of our hands.  We arranged 1pm the following Thursday and when we arrived, the car was on the forecourt ready and waiting for us. A very impressive experience.  So, there you go, Karen. Don't be afraid to negotiate your appointments and meetings. Build confidence in negotiating interruptions from your team and protect sufficient time for getting your core work done.  Thank you for your question and and thank you to you too. It just remains for me to wish you all a very very productive week.   

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1707: Carl Pullein breaks down how a structured weekly planning session can significantly boost your productivity and reduce stress. By aligning your tasks with clear goals and blocking time for focused work, you can regain control of your week and prevent overwhelm before it starts. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/how-to-do-a-weekly-planning-session/18/11/2020-1 Quotes to ponder: "A weekly planning session gives you the opportunity to take back control of your life." "You are not planning tasks, you are planning time." "When you know what needs doing and when you are going to do it, stress and overwhelm disappear." Episode references: Evernote: https://evernote.com/ Google Calendar: https://calendar.google.com/ Todoist: https://todoist.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1707: Carl Pullein breaks down how a structured weekly planning session can significantly boost your productivity and reduce stress. By aligning your tasks with clear goals and blocking time for focused work, you can regain control of your week and prevent overwhelm before it starts. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/how-to-do-a-weekly-planning-session/18/11/2020-1 Quotes to ponder: "A weekly planning session gives you the opportunity to take back control of your life." "You are not planning tasks, you are planning time." "When you know what needs doing and when you are going to do it, stress and overwhelm disappear." Episode references: Evernote: https://evernote.com/ Google Calendar: https://calendar.google.com/ Todoist: https://todoist.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.   

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1687: Carl Pullein challenges the traditional notion of prioritizing tasks based solely on perceived importance. Instead, he argues that consistency and completion build momentum, showing how treating all tasks with equal commitment leads to greater productivity and reduced overwhelm. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/all-tasks-are-created-equal/15/11/2016 Quotes to ponder: “All tasks are created equal. A task is a task and it needs to be done.” “When you start selecting which tasks are ‘important' and which ones are ‘not important', you are on a slippery slope to chaos and missed deadlines.” “Completing tasks consistently every day creates momentum. Momentum creates motivation.” Episode references: The 2-Minute Rule - James Clear: https://jamesclear.com/how-to-stop-procrastinating Getting Things Done: https://gettingthingsdone.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1687: Carl Pullein challenges the traditional notion of prioritizing tasks based solely on perceived importance. Instead, he argues that consistency and completion build momentum, showing how treating all tasks with equal commitment leads to greater productivity and reduced overwhelm. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/all-tasks-are-created-equal/15/11/2016 Quotes to ponder: “All tasks are created equal. A task is a task and it needs to be done.” “When you start selecting which tasks are ‘important' and which ones are ‘not important', you are on a slippery slope to chaos and missed deadlines.” “Completing tasks consistently every day creates momentum. Momentum creates motivation.” Episode references: The 2-Minute Rule - James Clear: https://jamesclear.com/how-to-stop-procrastinating Getting Things Done: https://gettingthingsdone.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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. 

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1654: Carl Pullein breaks down how to turn your calendar into a tool for achieving your biggest goals, not just managing daily tasks. By focusing on time-blocking for meaningful work and aligning your schedule with long-term objectives, he reveals a system that promotes intentional action over reactive busyness. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/how-to-use-your-calendar-to-achieve-the-big-things/6/12/2017 Quotes to ponder: "Your calendar tells you where you are supposed to be at any given time of the day." "If you want to accomplish anything of significance, then you need to make time for it." "Time blocking works because it forces you to focus on one thing at a time." Episode references: Getting Things Done by David Allen: https://gettingthingsdone.com/ Deep Work by Cal Newport: https://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1654: Carl Pullein breaks down how to turn your calendar into a tool for achieving your biggest goals, not just managing daily tasks. By focusing on time-blocking for meaningful work and aligning your schedule with long-term objectives, he reveals a system that promotes intentional action over reactive busyness. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/how-to-use-your-calendar-to-achieve-the-big-things/6/12/2017 Quotes to ponder: "Your calendar tells you where you are supposed to be at any given time of the day." "If you want to accomplish anything of significance, then you need to make time for it." "Time blocking works because it forces you to focus on one thing at a time." Episode references: Getting Things Done by David Allen: https://gettingthingsdone.com/ Deep Work by Cal Newport: https://www.calnewport.com/books/deep-work/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.   

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 1622: Carl Pullein breaks down the concept of core work, the essential tasks that drive real progress in your career and personal goals. He explains how distractions and busywork often masquerade as productivity, preventing meaningful achievement. By identifying and focusing on your core work, you can maximize efficiency, reduce being overwhelmed, and create lasting impact. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/what-doing-your-core-work-actually-means/4/11/2020 Quotes to ponder: "This is the work that drives you forward, that contributes to your long-term goals and objectives." "When you work on your core work, you feel energised and alive because you are doing work that really matters to you." "If you allow yourself to be distracted by other people's emergencies, emails, and meetings, you will never have time to do your core work." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.   

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.   

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3470: Carl Pullein challenges the traditional approach to productivity, arguing that doing more doesn't necessarily mean achieving more. To-do lists often create unnecessary busyness, prioritizing low-value tasks over meaningful progress. By shifting focus from activities to desired outcomes, you can eliminate distractions, work more efficiently, and accomplish more in less time. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/do-you-have-productivity-the-wrong-way-round/7/4/2021 Quotes to ponder: "To-do lists also change the way you think about your work. You get caught up in activities and not the outcomes you are trying to achieve." "If you want to achieve more in less time, stop thinking activity and start thinking objectives." "Instead of adding all your actionable emails individually into your to-do list, create a folder to hold actionable emails and have one task in your to-do list called 'Clear my actionable email folder.'" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3470: Carl Pullein challenges the traditional approach to productivity, arguing that doing more doesn't necessarily mean achieving more. To-do lists often create unnecessary busyness, prioritizing low-value tasks over meaningful progress. By shifting focus from activities to desired outcomes, you can eliminate distractions, work more efficiently, and accomplish more in less time. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/do-you-have-productivity-the-wrong-way-round/7/4/2021 Quotes to ponder: "To-do lists also change the way you think about your work. You get caught up in activities and not the outcomes you are trying to achieve." "If you want to achieve more in less time, stop thinking activity and start thinking objectives." "Instead of adding all your actionable emails individually into your to-do list, create a folder to hold actionable emails and have one task in your to-do list called 'Clear my actionable email folder.'" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3470: Carl Pullein challenges the traditional approach to productivity, arguing that doing more doesn't necessarily mean achieving more. To-do lists often create unnecessary busyness, prioritizing low-value tasks over meaningful progress. By shifting focus from activities to desired outcomes, you can eliminate distractions, work more efficiently, and accomplish more in less time. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/do-you-have-productivity-the-wrong-way-round/7/4/2021 Quotes to ponder: "To-do lists also change the way you think about your work. You get caught up in activities and not the outcomes you are trying to achieve." "If you want to achieve more in less time, stop thinking activity and start thinking objectives." "Instead of adding all your actionable emails individually into your to-do list, create a folder to hold actionable emails and have one task in your to-do list called 'Clear my actionable email folder.'" Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.  

Discover all of the podcasts in our network, search for specific episodes, get the Optimal Living Daily workbook, and learn more at: OLDPodcast.com. Episode 3312: Carl Pullein highlights the difference between simply being busy and truly accomplishing meaningful goals. He emphasizes the importance of transforming your daily to-do list by incorporating tasks that align with your long-term aspirations, ensuring that each day contributes to your personal and professional growth. By identifying what truly matters and focusing on small, impactful actions, you can move closer to achieving your life goals. Read along with the original article(s) here: https://www.carlpullein.com/blog/activity-is-not-accomplishment/7/2/2017 Quotes to ponder: "Great todo lists help you to move your life forward in achieving your life goals, help you feel in complete control of what is important in your life, and give you an overall sense of real accomplishment." "Not knowing what you want out of life is like embarking on a journey not knowing where you want to go." "Too often we confuse ticking off a lot of tasks on a to-do list with accomplishment." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices